Ultramicroscopes

I wish I had what's his names paper on the ultramicroscopes of the 1930s, 1940s. There were half a dozen of them, or so. One at Harvard, one at the RCA labs, one at Bell. They used ultra-violet light sources and, because one of the biggest sources of blur/irresolution is vibration, they were massive, tons, and situated in basements of these institutions. They used darkfield. They had resolutions around 50 to a 100Å (nanometers? Å oops, it's a factor of 10 between them)

The ultramicroscopes were used to develop undersea cables, for instance (and a tiny bit of biological work, no doubt, but I don't know).

These things were massive investments, like formula one racing cars, it took a team, so, in the 1950s when the electron microscope was invented, it replaced them.

Then there is Rife's ultramicroscope, see Lyons', and Naissans' somatoscope.

The exsistance of the ultramicroscopes, and their primacy in their day, is arcane, but niot controversial. Rife and Naissan's did the same sorts of resolution in cleverer ways. However, they are controversial.

Tim Richardson designs and manufactures UV measuring instruments (all the English speaking nations use his instruments to record the "UV index" we keep hearing) and this is what got him interested in the UV ultramicroscopes. ...

Ordinary visible light microscopy images in the range 400 to 700 nanometers. UV images range from 200 to 400. (But darkfield further enhances resolution.)

Other high end microscopes were at Zeiss, SIMS, Polaroid and Bausch.