| This dissertation is an historical and ethnographic examination of the invention, replication, and routinization of scanning probe microscopy, a family of ultrahigh resolution surface characterization techniques found today in surface science, materials science, electrochemistry, biophysics, and nanotechnology, as well as in industrial reliability and quality control laboratories, in semiconductor manufacturing, in high school science fair projects, and even on the surface of Mars. The dissertation begins with the less-than-successful story of the Topografiner, a precursor of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at the US National Bureau of Standards at the end of the '60s that failed to prove the concept of probe microscopy or win managerial approval. The STM itself originated at the IBM Research lab in Zurich. Its inventors committed themselves to a naive experimental practice that allowed them to push past certain obstacles and to forge much-needed collaborations, particularly with surface scientists. Surface scientists were the first to bring the STM to the big North American corporate laboratories at IBM and Bell Labs. There, tunneling microscopy became a locus for training young researchers as well as for generating new surface scientific knowledge. Simultaneously, the STM was adopted by a handful of academic groups in California, who cultivated a more freewheeling way of integrating pedagogy and microscope-building. By 1990, building an STM had become easy enough that many people joined the community; this influx provoked a number of internal frictions, finally erupting in a controversy about whether the STM could atomically resolve DNA. This debate was resolved partly through the intervention of microscope manufacturers associated with the California academic groups. As these manufacturers grew, they faced the problem of keeping themselves distinct from, yet close to, the experimental cultures of their customers. The probe microscopy community changed radically after it became possible to buy instruments from these manufacturers. Some of these changes have led probe microscopists to begin leading their community into the larger field of nanotechnology. This accords well with some nanotechnologists' vision of probe microscopy, but integrating the two cultures has proven difficult. |
