Annales de la Fondation

Electron optics was born in 1927, when Hans Busch showed that the elementary lens equation is applicable to electron image formation. Interest was soon awakened in France and a book on the subject by Louis de Broglie appeared in 1950. We draw attention to the highlights of electron optics and microscopy over the decades, with particular reference to aberration correction, and to some little known French contributions to the story of the scanning electron microscope and to Fourier optics. The natural starting-point for this occasion is the book Optique électronique et corpusculaire by Louis de Broglie, published in 1950 and based on lectures delivered in the Institut Henri Poincaré during the academic years 1946–47 and 1947–48. This is a remarkably complete work, all the more impressive in that de Broglie had not contributed to geometrical electron optics and, according to his preface, had not had access to any recent books on electron optics and electron microscopy; the only works on electron optics cited are the early text of Brüche and Scherzer (1934) and the dissertation of Paul Chanson (1947). He appears not to have been aware of the important collection of articles published in book form by Busch and Brüche in 1937 (which had first appeared in the Zeitschrift für Technische Physik) nor of the book by von Ardenne (1940), which was reasonably widely available and is among the references in Chanson's thesis. It is less surprising that de Broglie had not seen the excellent book published in England in 1939 by Myers (though this too is listed by Chanson) but surely copies of Zworykin et al. (1945) would have reached post-war France. We know from the bibliography of Grivet's lecture at the Réunions d'Etudes (1946) that he had seen