Super-Eye

Last summer the skilled hands of RCA-Victor Co.'s Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin fashioned the closest known approximation of the human eye (TIME, July 10). Designed for television, the device was called the iconoscope. On 20 square inches of mica were 3,000,000 dots of photosensitive material. Light falling on the mica set up an electromagnetic tension which was discharged by an electron beam. The changing pattern of this discharge could be transmitted by radio. At the receiving end the image was reproduced on a fluorescent screen by a reversal of the iconoscope's operating principle.

Last week plump-cheeked Dr. Zworykin announced that his iconoscope was ready for use as the "eye" of a powerful ultramicroscope. Its field of operation extends on both sides of the visible light spectrum --up to 10,000 angstrom units on the infra-red range, down to 1,000 on the ultra-violet.* This point on the ultraviolet side is 2,000 units lower than in other ultramicroscopes. If organisms never seen by human eye do exist in the filtrable viruses of common colds and infantile paralysis, they might be detected by light of such short wavelength. Light of longer wavelength they escape as minnows escape a loose-meshed net.

*i uns;strom=.000,000,01 centimetres.

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