Sterling Newberry
Sterling Price Newberry (born August 10, 1915) is an American inventor and microscopist, born in Springfield, Missouri.
Newberry invented the shadow X-ray microscope and is one of the founders of the Microscopy Society of America.
The first X-ray microscopes had used grazing off lenses at a very low angle to focus X-ray images. However, the images were blurry from diffraction. While working on an alternate approach for General Electric, a technician came to him with a badge. The technician didn't believe there were X-Rays in the machine, he had taken his warning badge, with X-ray film, and placed a bit of screen wire on it. He pulled the badge out, and saw the exposed screen wire pattern on it. But he also saw another screen wire pattern, far smaller and finer. Newberry recognized that the fine pattern was the screen wire mounting for the specimen, but that it was 400-to-the-inch wire and that it had been magnified by expansion of the shadow.
This gave him the insight he needed to create a working commercial microscope, placing the specimen very close to a point source of X-rays and then farther back a photographic plate. The "shadow" of the specimen would be under-exposed, that is X-ray dark, on the plate. This process is similar to medical X-rays, except that the microscope uses a point source for clarity whereas a medical x-ray tends to use a much larger x-ray source to avoid distortion.