James Hillier, a physicist and inventor who helped develop an early and commercially successful electron microscope for RCA and then found ways to apply it for medical research, died last Monday in Princeton, N.J. He was 91.
James Hillier
The cause was a stroke, his family said.
In 1938, while he was still a graduate student at the University of Toronto, Dr. Hillier and a fellow researcher, Albert Prebus, adapted the work of German scientists and others to develop a prototype that would later become a widely used electron microscope.
The device sent a stream of electrons through magnetic coils to produce an image 7,000 times the size of the object being studied, a magnification three times more powerful than contemporary optical microscopes.
Dr. Hillier took the prototype to the Radio Corporation of America in Camden, N.J., in 1940, and set out to produce a compact microscope that would be cheaper and more effective for biological research.
He quickly saw “the real name of the game was to find out how to put significant things” like blood cells and bacteria into the microscope without “burning them to a crisp” in the potent electron beam. Dr. Hillier and others developed methods of preparing samples using protective colloid film, which allowed them to view bacteria. RCA’s microscopes were used in 1949 at the Sloan-Kettering Institute to view cancer cells taken from animal tumors.
By that time, the microscope’s magnification had increased to 200,000 times, a landmark on the route to today’s magnifying power of two million.
In subsequent refinements, Dr. Hillier helped correct the problem of astigmatism in the lenses and worked on a scanning electron microscope that produced images of even higher resolution. From 1940 to the 1960s, when RCA ended its production, the company sold about 2,000 electron microscopes.
The technology could easily have gone to General Electric, which had recruited Dr. Hillier after his early research, but he said he preferred the emphasis on practical innovation and application he found at RCA.
James Hillier was born in Brantford, Ontario. He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Toronto in 1941.
In 1958, Dr. Hillier became director of RCA’s research laboratories in Princeton and later oversaw the company’s projects involving transistors, lasers and liquid crystal display. He was named an executive vice president for research and engineering and a senior scientist before retiring in 1977.
Dr. Hillier was an officer of the Order of Canada and became an American citizen in 1945. He received an Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1960.
Dr. Hillier’s wife, the former Florence Bell, died in 1992. The couple resided in Princeton.
He is survived by a son, J. Robert Hillier, an architect, of New Hope, Pa.; two sisters, Mary Hillier of Brantford and Thelma Henshaw of Naples, Fla.; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
