James Hillier | Microscope developer, 91

James Hillier, 91, the inventor who helped develop and market the first commercially successful electron microscope in this country and then found uses for it in medical research, died Jan. 15.

Mr. Hillier, who lived in Princeton, died after suffering a stroke, according to his family.

He was a native of Brantford, Ontario. While a University of Toronto graduate student in 1938, he worked with a fellow researcher to advance the work of German scientists to produce a viable electron microscope. In 1940, he pitched his prototype to Radio Corp. of America in Camden.

His device magnified objects three times more than existing optical microscopes, producing an image 7,000 times that of the object being studied by sending a stream of electrons through magnetic coils.

By the end of the 1940s, the magnification power of the device had jumped to 200,000 times. Mr. Hillier continued working on refinements, and RCA sold about 2,000 electron microscopes between 1940 and the 1960s.

He became director of RCA's Princeton research labs in 1958, became an executive vice president for research and engineering, and was a senior scientist when he retired in 1977. - AP