Crain's Chicago Business
February 11, 1985
U of C Prof, Chicago Tool Firms Find Focus in New Microscope
by H. Lee Murphy
This is a story about microscopes, but forget the humdrum tabletop Zeiss
models through which generations of high school students have caught sight
of their first amoebas. We're talking about a whole different species of
instrument here.
University of Chicago Professor Albert Crewe has started construction
on the world's most powerful microscope. When completed at the university,
the microscope will be 12 feet long, weigh two tons and substitute magnetic
fields and computerized screens for old-fashioned glass lenses and manual
cranks. It also will provide the most intimate look yet the rarefied world
of atomic particles.
Mr. Crewe's research has received money from the National Science Foundation
and IBM Corp. But some of the most important help is coming from right here
in Chicago. Members of the Park Ridge-based Tool and Die Institute, representing
some 1,300 Chicago-area firms, are donating free component parts for the
microscope.
The institute's involvement is significant for a couple of reasons.
For one, the instrument is made up of hundreds of ultra-precise pieces
with mandated manufacturing tolerances of 50-millionths of an inch and less.
Chicago tool-and-die makers, anxious to shake the gritty, low-tech image
that has dogged their industry in recent years, have proved themselves by
meeting or exceeding all of Mr. Crewe's demands.
And then, there is the prestige of working with the world-renowned physicist.
"All I had to know before I volunteered my company's services was that
the University of Chicago was involved," says Gregg Panek, owner of
Panek Precision Products Inc. On the city's North Side.
Indeed, the 57-year-old professor's distinguished career reads like a
Nobel Prize roadmap, except it's more likely that the researchers who use
his ground-breaking instruments will be rewarded with such an honor.
Mr. Crewe came to the University of Chicago in 1955, directed Argonne
National Laboratory from 1961 to 1967 and became a dean of the physical
sciences division a few years later. He currently holds the title of William
E. Wrather Distinguished Service Professor in the department of physics
at the university's Enrico Fermi Institute.
Mr. Crewe built his first mega-microscope two decades ago, introducing
something called a scanning transmission electron instrument, which improved
the resolution of conventional microscopes by scanning a subject the way
a television camera does, to produce magnifications of unprecedented contrast
and clarity.
Mr. Crewe, after subsequent improvements, won wide fame by taking the
first pictures of single atoms in 1971. Within a few years, he was taking
time-lapse pictures of moving atoms and also filming in color.
That pioneering instrument still is in use at the university, though
it has been partly upstaged by a more powerful Japanese model in operation
at the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Crewe's old microscope
generates 30,000 volts of electricity and will resolve images of just 2.4
angstroms (an angstrom is equal to four-billionths of an inch!); the Berkeley
instrument is 30 feet tall, generates a millions volts of electricity and
resolves to 1.6 angstroms.
But Mr. Crewe's new microscope will represent a quantum leap forward,
focusing to half-angstrom, or two-billionths of an inch. That should allow
scientists for the first time to peer inside dense clusters of atoms whose
composition, until now, has remained a mystery.
"This will clearly be the most powerful microscope in the world,"
Mr. Crewe says. "In fact, it'll be at least three times as powerful
as the one at Berkeley."
All of this was made possible by Mr. Crewe's development in 1981 of a
device that will correct the spherical aberrations that naturally occur
in high-magnification instruments. A single magnetic field, or magnet, focused
images on the first microscope; the new one will have eight magnets. Mr.
Crewe is "90% sure" his design will prove successful, and visiting
physicists from as far away as the People's Republic of China have endorsed
his calculations.
In the first academic tradition the professor is noncommittal in predicting
the practical benefits of his invention. The microscope should be assembled
by the end of the year, but research could be delayed for months while a
$1-million IBM computer is programmed to actually operate the microscope.
After that, Mr. Crewe doesn't know what researchers might uncover. "Do
you think Galileo knew what he'd see when he built the first telescope?"
the professor muses. "If he had, he wouldn't have bothered building
it all.
"We had a professor who wanted to look at the hemoglobin of an earthworm,
which nobody had done before. We succeeded in getting a picture of that
and, who knows, it could have enormous importance someday."
More immediately, Mr. Crewe speculates, the stronger microscope might
give researchers with the big automakers a better understanding of how a
catalytic converter functions in a car's exhaust system. "We know that
carbon and platinum atoms combine to make the catalyst work, but nobody
knows why," the professor says.
For its part, the Tool and Die Institute needed few promises before joining
the project.
Mr. Crewe, faced with a total budget of more then $3 million and no corporate
money except for IBM, was resigned at first to manufacturing his microscope
parts at the university's limited metalworking shop. It appeared that would
take a couple of years.</p>
But the tool and die executive happened to run into the professor at
a cocktail party, heard about the project and, before long, assembled a
list of volunteers. More than 40 companies are producing odd-shaped valve
caps and vacuum inserts and leaf springs, and some are paying employees
hefty overtime wages to work on weekends.
At least a few firms will donate $15,000 worth of labor and machining;
the institute pegs members' total contributions at more than $500,000.
Nobody's complaining about the costs, or the hardships, though Mr. Crewe's
blueprints call for such exotic materials as pure platinum, beryllium copper
and consumet iron. Toolmakers have had to discard their usual ceramic and
carbide cutting blades in favor of high -speed hardened steel.
"We were afraid we wouldn't be able to produce some of these parts
but that hasn't been the case." Says Mr. Panek , the executive. "Ninety
percent of the metalworking shops in Illinois couldn't have done this, but
we have a lot of specialists in Chicago who can. I don't think you could
go to any other major city in the U.S. and find the same expertise and diversity
of skill."
Much of the most exacting work has been performed by Surface Finishes, a small Addison firm with 25 employees and a national reputation for
low-tolerance machining.
Surface Finishes regularly churns out air bearings for semiconductor
wafer manufacturing and laser mirrors for aircraft reconnaissance systems
accurate to within two-millionths of an inch. For the microscope, the firm
will donate more than 350 hours of labor, at $45 an hour, to produce magnetic
lens housings.
"When the professor first came to us with his drawings, he didn't
think we could reach even 50-millionths of an inch accuracy," recalls
Mark Drzewiecki, Surface Finishes' president and co-owner. "When I
told him we could reach 20-millionths with no problem, he was surprised
and delighted. We're probably one of a half-dozen job shops in the entire
country that can accomplish that."
Concedes James Karones, an assistant designer at the university: "these
are ungodly tolerances. The technical assistance provided by the institute
and its members is the best I've seen from any organization."
Such plaudits clearly please the industry, which suffered through all
manner of demeaning dismissals during the recession, when many plants in
Chicago ran at less than 60% of capacity.
With machining orders picking up, most of these same plants are back
to at least 85% of capacity again. Mr. Drzewiecki's shop is working overtime.
Meantime, Chicago is solidifying its ranking as the machine tool capital
of the nation. Inexplicably, a microscope doesn't garner the same notoriety
as a Cal Tech telescope or a Fermilab atom smasher but the institute appreciates
any attention just the same.
The muscular sculpture the group built at State and Washington two years
ago only served to reinforce toolmakers; rough-hewn image.
"With all the talk about high-tech, people forget that virtually
every product, including high-tech, starts with us," observes Bruce
Braker, executive vice-president of the Tool and Die Institute. "We
need more exposure to prove to the public that we're not just a dirty, smokestack
industry anymore. The microscope is a nice way to prove what we can do."
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