Manfred von Ardenne

Manfred von Ardenne (1907-1997) was a German applied physicist and inventor who made major contributions to electron microscopy and television technology. He is credited as one of the principal inventors of television and developed the scanning electron microscope and the scanning transmission electron microscope. He held roughly six hundred patents across electron microscopy, medical technology, nuclear technology, plasma physics, and radio and television technology, and after the Second World War he contributed to the Soviet atomic bomb project before returning to East Germany to continue his research.