The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was invented in 1981 and resulted in a Nobel Prize for Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer of IBM in 1986, That must be some sort of record, usually Nobel prize winners have to survive many decades to be recognized. It uses vacuum tunneling of electrons from a sharp metal tip to a surface and can obtain precision to the level of single atoms When they first submitted their paper it was refused as being preposterous, they had glued together pieces of thick cardboard which they had cut out after tracing single scans on them and then taken a Polaroid picture of the resulting 3D surface,
I was at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal in 1988 and they had a guest speaker from one of the IBM research labs involved in STM development. He showed astounding video of real-time scans of cleaved graphite surfaces, identified lattice defects, and even demonstrated perturbations caused by single gas atoms when the vacuum was broken. At the end of his talk he said 'I have brought a few microscopes along to show you' and picked up a shoe box that had left on the counter! He pulled out little blocks of teflon with stacked piezoelectric devices glued to them and a metal probe tip with wires hanging off. I had been envisioning room-sized ultra-hightech equipment... How many more simple but powerful inventions are out there to discover?
For a wonderful ( comprehensive) perspective on history of the heady days of STM and AFM ( atomic force microscopy - ie nanomechanical imaging verus STM's quantum electronic imaging ) even more generally scanning probe microscopy, you can read a superb history of the field here in long form dissertation by Cyrus Mody who was the first to dive deeper into the dynamics and folks behind the numerous scanning probe microscope innovations www.owlnet.rice.edu/~Cyrus.Mody/MyPubs/crafting.pdf and for the shorter version of mostly the same by Mody again is www.uni-bi.de/%28en%29/ZIF/FG/2006Application/PDF/Mody_essay.pdf Amongst Mitel Bromont staff, I confess I had a near front seat to aspects of SPM development, starting with an early look and use of STM at UT Austin Physics prof Alex deLozanne's lab in '86 where he ran a UHV STM system, derived ( possibly 2 ) where one was a kit from IBM ( based on IBM PC with IBM branded PGA professional graphics adapter / or the Matrox PGA clone ) sent out to some few tunneling physics community members. In '86 @ UT Austin we scanned a ?mundane series of Motorola samples of SOG spin on glass dielectric ( with angstrom flash gold for charge dissipation ) to help determine if SOG anneal protocols were changing SOG porosity.
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