Erwin W. Mueller (1911–1977)

Erwin W. Mueller was a gifted experimentalist whose inventions were crucial to the birth of nanotechnology. Born in Berlin in 1911, Mueller was educated at the Technical University of Berlin under the tutelage of Nobel Prize in Physics recipient Gustav Hertz. In 1936, while working at the Siemens Research Laboratory, Mueller’s research group was in competition with fellow Siemens scientist Ernst Ruska’s group to make the microscope with the most precision. This friendly feud spurred Mueller to invent the field emission microscope; meanwhile Ruska invented the electron microscope. In 1951, while working at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Mueller built the first field ion microscope.

In 1952 economic and political hard times forced Mueller to move his family from Germany to the United States, where he continued his work on the cutting edge of high-resolution microscopy at the Pennsylvania State University. Mueller continued to refine the field ion microscope, and, in 1955, along with his doctoral student Kanwar Bahadur, he obtained the first view of the atomic structure of a metal atom. In essence Mueller was involved in developing all the major high-resolution microscopes used in nanotechnology today: in the late 1960s Mueller’s former student Russell Young invented the topografiner, which was the precursor to the scanning tunneling microscope.

Mueller’s achievements were recognized by numerous awards, including the Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society and the C. F. Gauss Medal from the Scientific Society of Braunschweig in Germany. He received the National Medal of Science in 1977.