Bodo von Borries

Bodo von Borries ( May 22nd, 1905 in Herford, † July 17, 1956 in Aachen ) was a German electrical engineer and co-inventor of the electron microscope.

Life and work

Borries was born as the son of the chief administrative officer Franz von Borries in the Westphalian. In 1924, he studied engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. Here he joined the Corps Saxonia. Starting in the winter semester 1926/1927 he studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Gdansk, then by the end of 1928 in Munich. As of April 1929, he worked at the high voltage laboratory of TH Berlin and received his doctorate there in 1932. Afterwards he spent a year as assistant to Max Knoll, who in 1931 invented the electron microscope by Ernst Ruska. At Ruska a long friendship and a lively scientific exchange of ideas developed in these years.

1933 Borries went into industry, where he worked as an engineer at RWE in Essen, 1934-1937 as Laboriumsleiter for the development of surge protection devices in the Siemens - Schuckert in Berlin. Through his initiative was created in 1937 to develop site for Electron Microscopy at the Siemens & Halske AG in Berlin, which was conducted jointly by him and Ruska. 1937 married Hedwig Borries Ruska, sister of Ernst Ruska. 1938, was a first prototype of the Siemens electron microscope, a year later, the first production model.

After the war he founded in 1948 the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for About microscopy in Dusseldorf, 1949, he was involved in the founding of the German Society for Electron Microscopy. At the same time he was appointed the Medical Academy of Dusseldorf, today's University of Dusseldorf, to their honorary professor. In 1953 he became a full professor at the Technische Hochschule Aachen appointed and commissioned the construction of a Chair for Electron Optics and Precision Engineering, where he worked until his sudden death in 1956. Two years before he was even elected President of the International Federation of Electron Microscopes Societies.

For his services Bodo von Borries received the 1941 silver Leibniz Medal of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Works

• Inter alia raisonné of digitized publications with Ernst Ruska
• B. v. Borries: The About Microscopy - Introduction, study of their boundaries and demolition of their results. Berlin 1949
• Lin Qing: the early history of the electron microscope. GNT -Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 978-3-928186-02-5.