James Hillier

Canadian American physicist

• Born: August 22, 1915
• Birthplace: Brantford, Ontario, Canada
• Died: January 15, 2007
• Place of death: Princeton, New Jersey

Hillier was a prolific research physicist who, with Albert Prebus, designed and built the first successful high-resolution electron microscope in the Western Hemisphere in 1938.

Primary fields: Electronics and electrical engineering; medicine and medical technology; physics

Primary invention: Electron microscope

Early Life

James Hillier was born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, to James and Ethel (Cooke) Hillier. His father was a mechanical engineer, a fact that may have played a role in the boy’s interest in building and designing scientific equipment. As a child, he was interested in ham radio and spotting aircraft in the area. His father bought him a telescope so he could read the numbers on the planes as they flew overhead, and Hillier eventually converted the eyepiece into his first microscope. He expressed an early interest in art, music, and photography and also participated in swimming and boating. He attended high school at the Brantford Collegiate Institute, then completed his education at the University of Toronto, where he received three successive degrees in physics: a B.A. in 1937, an M.A. in 1938, and finally a Ph.D. in 1941.

In 1938, then graduate student Hillier and fellow student Albert Prebus developed a prototype of the electron microscope by adapting the existing work of German scientists. This prototype later became the first commercially successful high-resolution electron microscope. In 1939, Hillier was made a research assistant at the Banting Institute of the University of Toronto Medical School in order to continue the development of the electron microscope. Hillier moved to the United States in 1940, where he was employed by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) at its electronics research laboratory in Camden, New Jersey. In 1945, he became a U.S. citizen.

Hillier was married on October 24, 1936, to Florence Marjory Bell, daughter of William Wynship Bell in Erindale, Ontario. The couple had two sons: James Robert Hillier and William Wynship Hillier.

Life’s Work

During the 1930’s, medical science was struggling to understand the role of microbes in human and animal health. Many disease-causing organisms such as bacteria and viruses were too small to be viewed with traditional microscopes, as were human and animal cells. Medical advances were largely dependent on the sophistication of existing and emerging technology. After developing the electron microscope, Hillier took it to RCA, where he continued to make improvements to the device. Within a short time, he had the electron microscope operating near its theoretical limit of efficiency.

In 1940, Hillier designed the first commercial electron microscope to be made available in the United States, and he worked within the medical and biological sciences to develop useful applications of the electron microscope in those fields. Hillier eventually held more than forty patents for devices and processes for improving the fields of electron microscopy, electron diffraction, electron microanalysis, ultrathin sectioning, and virology and bacteriology. Among the most important patents he obtained were those for the electron microscope, the electron microanalyzer, the electron probe analysis employing X-ray spectrography, the method of and means for correcting for distortion in electron lens systems, the method of operating electron guns, the correction device for electron lenses, and the method and apparatus for electronically determining particle size distribution.

In 1942, Hillier was transferred to the RCA Laboratories at the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked for the majority of his career, barring two brief periods: 1953 to 1954, when he was employed by another firm, and 1955 to 1956, when he was employed as the chief engineer of RCA Industrial Electronics Products in Camden. Having developed the electronmicroscope in its practical form, Hillier sought to introduce the electron microscope into general use as a new and powerful research tool, particularly for the biological and medical sciences as well as for metallurgical research studies. Hillier developed the electron microscope by pursuing engineering improvements in the instrument and developing new techniques for the preparation of biological specimens. During this exploratory and developmental phase, he invented the electron microprobe. In addition to his work on the electron microscope, Hillier also supervised the development of RCA’s VideoDisc, a precursor to the digital video disc (DVD).

In 1945, Hillier coauthored Electron Optics and the Electron Microscope. During his career, he contributed numerous chapters and articles to scholarly texts, including the Encyclopedia Britannica, and more than 150 technical articles published in various professional journals.

In 1960, Hillier was corecipient, with Ernst Ruska of the Technical University in Berlin, of a Lasker Award, conferred jointly by the American Public Health Association for their separate work on the design, construction, and perfection of the electron microscope as an essential tool of modern medical research. In 1967, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Hillier eventually rose to wield corporate responsibility for all of RCA’s research, development, and engineering programs. In 1980, Hillier was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his development of the electron microscope. On April 17, 1997, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for this invention.

In keeping with his scientific and academic contributions, Hillier was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was a member of the Electron Microscope Society of America (president, 1945), the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Management Association. He died on January 15, 2007, in Princeton.

Impact

Hillier and Prebus created the first practical electron microscope in North America based on the previous work of German researchers, who had been able to magnify objects by only four hundred times. Unfortunately, this magnification was within the range of traditional optical microscopes at that time. Hillier and Prebus’s electron microscope managed to magnify objects seven thousand times their size by sending a stream of electrons through magnetic coils. This magnification was three times that of optical microscopes.

Hillier dedicated his research to producing a compact microscope that would be both more affordable and more effective for biomedical research than the bulky and expensive prototype. Early efforts at using the electron microscope for medical applications (such as microorganism and blood cell analysis) resulted in the destruction of the specimens by the powerful electron beam. With the help of others, Hillier developed successful methods using protective colloid film to prepare samples, thus allowing bacteria and cells to be viewed and analyzed, and eventually leading to the use of electron microscopy in biopsies.

Later in his career, Hillier helped correct the problem of astigmatism in the lenses used in the electron microscopes, and he worked on the development of a scanning electron microscope that was capable of producing even higher resolution images. Hillier’s work on the refinement and application of the electron microscope has had a dramatic effect on the growth of many of the biomedical sciences, including virology, biology, immunology, cytology, and genetics, as well as the geological sciences.

Bibliography

Goldstein, Joseph, et al. Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-Ray Microanalysis. New York: Plenum Press, 2003. Academic text that provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray microanalysis. The reader will find a thorough description of the science and methods behind electron microscopy. Index, bibliography, graphs.

Goodhew, Peter J., John Humphreys, and Richard Beanland. Electron Microscopy and Analysis. 3d ed. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001. Introductory academic text on the use and analysis of electron microscopy. Illustrates the sophisticated techniques used for magnifying images of very small objects by large amounts within a physical science context. Index, bibliography, graphs, illustrations.

Hillier, James. “Some Reflections on the Early Development of Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis.” In Metallography: Past, Present, and Future, edited by G. F. Vander Voort, F. J. Warmuth, S. M. Purdy, and A. Szirmae. Philadelphia: American Society for Testing and Materials, 1993. Scholarly article describing the early successes and failures of developing the electron microscope, including the role of chance and timing in scientific discovery.

Rochow, Theodore George, and Paul Arthur Tucker. Introduction to Microscopy by Means of Light, Electrons, X-Rays, or Acoustics. 2d ed. New York: Springer, 1994. Excellent academic text covering the basics of microscopy from its origins to more current applications. Hillier’s work on the electron microscope and its later developments are discussed in detail. Charts, figures, index.