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The earliest historical contribution to the idea of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) was probably made by H. Stintzing in 1927 in a German patent application (Stintzing, 1927). In his patent he proposed irradiating a sample with a narrowly collimated beam (light, X-ray, corpuscles) and moving the sample transversely to the beam. The magnitude of interaction between beam and sample was to be measured by a sufficiently sensitive recording device, to be amplified and then displayed on an electron tube. This idea aimed to determine the size of small particles not accessible to light microscopy. However, the method proposed was unable to generate a magnified image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]