Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer co-invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a non-optical instrument that allows the observation of individual atoms in three dimensions, with Gerd Binnig. The achievement garnered the pair half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. The fact that the STM was a mere five years old when Binnig and Rohrer won the Nobel Prize (Ruska had invented his device back in the 1930s) is testament to the groundbreaking nature of the invention and the scientific community's understanding of its tremendous import.