Heinrich Rohrer

About

Scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 with partner Gerd Binning for designing the scanning tunneling microscope. He was an IBM Fellow and led their physics department and research lab.

Before Fame

His Ph.D. experiments were interrupted occasionally by basic training in the Swiss military.

Trivia

His scanning and tunneling microscope was barely three years old when he received the Nobel Prize.

Family Life

He was born a half hour after his twin sister and grew up in Zurich.

Associated With

While he and Gerd Binning had to share half of Nobel, Ernst Ruska took the other half himself for his electron microscope.