In the Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens has his character Sam exclaim that he needed “a pair o’ patent double million magnifyin’ gas microscopes of hextra power” Now the general wisdom is that improvements to microscopy are bounded by the laws of optics which tell us that resolution is a function of the wavelength of the radiation used for imaging and inversely proportional to the refractive index of the medium and lens. We have discussed in this space various ways which can and have been used to “circumvent” mother nature, by such tricks as not using lenses and employing scanning techniques instead in order to obtain images.

It turns out that there may yet be other useful “loopholes” in natural laws. Lefs for example consider the fact that the refractive index of a material is a measure of the interaction of photons with the matter they traverse. In that sense refraction is related to absorption, which occurs when materials interact so strongly with photons that the latter never emerge.

Pittcon ‘93 marked the 10th anniversary of the introduction of a microscope attachment designed specifically for Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy. The first commercial microscope developed for FT-IR spectroscopy was designed by Spectra-Tech, Inc., under the direction of then-owner D. W. Sting, in fulfillment of a contract with C. T. Foskett of the Digilab Division of BioRad. Digilab recognized a growing interest in the market for an FT-IR microscope and contracted with Spectra-Tech to design and build a microscope accessory for Digilab's FT-IR spectrometers. This microscope was introduced at the 1983 Pittsburgh Conference.

Linking microscopy with Fourier transform spectroscopy was a very significant event, but the foundation of infrared microspectroscopy can be traced back to 1949. The explosive growth in the use of infrared-absorption spectroscopy following World War II led researchers R. Gore (in the U.S.A.), and R. Barer, A. R. Cole, and H. W. Thompson (in England), to investigate (in 1949) the possibility of recording infrared spectra of microscopic samples.

People who have faced imminent death and survived report visions of their entire lives passing before their eyes. My experience at the recent 50th anniversary meeting of the Electron Microscopy Society of America was similar. In a matter of hours I saw a vision of the entire half-century history of electron microscopy. It was exhilarating.

I was an invited guest among the handful of surviving charter members. Attention was lavished on us and we were treated with TLC (the nursing profession's abbreviation for tender loving care). We recounted our experiences and had an opportunity to meet old friends and colleagues whom we had not seen in years. Most significant, however, were the formal presentations that showed the enormous growth of the field, both in depth and breadth.