AP Features, January 22nd, 2007
Inventor James Hillier, who helped develop and market the first commercially successful electron microscope in the United States and found uses for it in medical research, has died at age 91.
Hillier died Jan. 15 at a Princeton hospital after suffering a stroke, according to his family.
A native of Canada, Hillier was a University of Toronto graduate student in 1938 when he worked with a fellow researcher to advance the work of German scientists to produce a viable electron microscope. He pitched his prototype to Radio Corp. of America.
Hillier's device magnified objects three times more than existing optical microscopes, producing an image 7,000 times that of the object being studied by sending a stream of electrons through magnetic coils.
Once he and other scientists found ways to protect samples from burning up by slicing specimens thin enough that electrons could pass through without heating them, the devices could be used to view cancer cells and bacteria.
By the end of the 1940s, the device's magnification power had jumped to 200,000 times.
Hillier became director of RCA's Princeton research laboratories in 1958 and was a senior scientist when he retired in 1977. Among the projects he shepherded were lasers, transistors, liquid crystal displays and a forerunner of the DVD.
In 1960, Hillier received an Albert Lasker Award for basic medical research, and in 1997 he was decorated with the Order of Canada, among that country's highest honors. He became an American citizen in 1945.
His wife of 56 years, Florence Bell Hillier, died in 1992, and a son died in 2002. Survivors include a son, two sisters, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren.
