Movie New Eye of Microscope in War of Germs (part 1)
Popular Science (June, 1931)
By H. H. DUNN
On a six-by-eight-foot screen in a darkened room appeared a spherical object. It resembled a gray indoor baseball, crisscrossed in all directions by fine threads of silk. Slowly and aimlessly it rotated.
“The spore of the bacterium that causes lockjaw”, came a voice from the loudspeaker of the motion picture apparatus. “Watch it!”
A dozen physicians and laboratory workers leaned forward. The sphere swelled. When it had become six inches or more in diameter on the screen, a dark line appeared across its middle. It parted. From it emerged a black bar, nearly as long as the diameter of the spore, spinning on its long axis—the cylinder-shaped germ of tetanus, or lockjaw. For what was probably the first time, a movie had shown the lockjaw spore hatching.
We were in the laboratory of R. R. Rife at San Diego, Calif. He is a pioneer in the art of making motion pictures of microscopically small. Once he took care of half a dozen automobiles for their wealthy owner, a widely known physician. Encouraged by the man of medicine, Rife becan building his own microscopes in a laboratory fitted up in a room over the garage. In this little room, he has today more than $50.000 worth of microscopes and cameras. Most of them he has built himself.
For ten years he has worked to capture in motion pictures what the eye sees through the most powerful microscopes. He has succeeded and his work has won recognition from the medical profession. Now doctors may sit at ease in comfortable chairs and watch bacteria in their native surroundings on a motion picture screen. There they may compare their own observations of disease germs taken from patients with the life history of these microbes, preserved on motion picture film. It is estimated that the time required to diagnose certain diseases may be cut from days to hours by the use of the films.
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