The fiftieth anniversary of the first applications of the scanning electron microscope in materials research

The paper summarises the early attempts during the 1930s in Berlin and New York to build scanning electron microscopes (SEMs), and the revival of the subject in 1948 by Charles Oatley at the Engineering Department in Cambridge University in England. The first Cambridge SEM was working in 1951 and after further development was shown in 1956 to be capable of imaging specimens that could not be examined in a conventional transmission electron microscope (TEM). Five of these applications are described. After several more years, the advantages of the SEM for imaging surfaces were finally accepted by most electron microscopists and the first SEM was marketed by the Cambridge Instrument Company in 1965. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.