14 Apr
2001
14 Apr
'01
2:26 p.m.
I was snooping on eBay and found a rebuilt Hitachi electron microscope and
you're right they have'nt reduced in size much (although the one I saw in my
teens filled a good sized office space at (I think) Argonne Labs near
Chicago.
If I had 5 grand lying around for experimental toying I'd probably have the
Hitachi unit on a truck by now. I don't pay that much for the vehicles I own
(yet). As with anything with a real purpose it's gonna hold a real value. It
is awe-inspiring as well the way you can get way down and dirty with that
stuff and see things that even a standard optical scope can't get. You have
the whole world around you as well to be able to examine and photograph and
I've even seen hardcopy prints at museums and science exhibits selling for
quite a large sum and people going on waiting lists for more - whether for
display or for actual art use. One was of salt crystals that was going for
$40 and they sold all 20 copies in a standard poster-type frame within the
first 30 mins. Helps pay back soem of your investment I guess.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org
[mailto:owner-classiccmp@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Dave McGuire
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 1:03 PM
To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: RE: My Collection
On April 14, Russ Blakeman wrote:
You and I both Sellam - this is like looking at
stuff when we
were in grade
school - like the fly that looked like a monster.
Is this
machine one the
large heavy ones I've seen in older books or
have they brought the
electromicrograph machines to a reasonable size? I'd hate to
even ask what
one surplus would set a person back.
They're all large and heavy. Because semiconductor and computer
technology shrinks constantly, there's a natural assumption that
everything else does too, and thus anything that's large is ancient.
There's really no way to shrink the vacuum valves, pumps, high-voltage
power supplies, and stuff like that...what does shrink is the control
electronics, but that's really all. Generally speaking, there have
been NO applicable significant advances in the major technologies that
make SEMs work in the past 30 years...electron beam generation,
acceleration, and steering, vacuum chamber control, phosphorescent
electron->photon conversion, and high-speed scintillation detection.
Until fairly recently, all new SEMs had huge panels of lights,
switches, and knobs. Nowadays manufacturers are shipping SEMs with a
power switch and a PeeCee running Windows that does everything between
crashes. The average scientist hasn't really embraced this approach,
so there's a huge business building around maintaining older-style
manual-control SEMs. My SEM does happen to be pretty old, but not too
old as SEMs go. It was made in 1981. I have been in contact with the
guy who had maintained it under a service contract at its previous
installation. He is a former employee of the company that
manufactured the unit. He runs a fairly tidy business maintaining
only this make and model of SEM within driving distance (he's north of
me in Southern PA), he maintains fifty or sixty of them...indicating
that a significant number of these 20-year-old instruments are still
in service.
For your SEM hunting information, count on about a ten-to-one age
ratio compared to computer hardware...a 20-year-old SEM would be
approximately comparable to a 2-year-old computer.
Maybe Dave can get a photo of his stuff in place
and put it in the image
library as well for use to take a look at.
I did that yesterday. Have a look at http://www.neurotica.com/sem.
-Dave McGuire