Sterling Newberry, Date of Birth, Date of Death

    

Sterling Newberry

American inventor

Date of Birth: 10-Aug-1915

Date of Death: 28-Jan-2017

Profession: engineer, inventor

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Leo


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About Sterling Newberry

  • Sterling Price Newberry (August 10, 1915 – January 28, 2017) was an American inventor and microscopist.
  • He was born in Springfield, Missouri.
  • Newberry invented the shadow X-ray microscope and was one of the founders of the Microscopy Society of America.
  • He turned 100 in August 2015 and died in January 2017 at the age of 101.The first X-ray microscopes had used grazing off lenses at a very low angle to focus X-ray images.
  • The images, however, were blurry from diffraction.
  • While working on an alternate approach for General Electric, a technician came to him with a badge.
  • The technician did not 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.
  • He also saw another screen wire pattern, however, 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.

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