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I love a good comeback story of technological innovation, struggle, failure, and redemption. The invention of the scanning capacitance microscope has all of that.
In 1981, RCA filed a patent for the SCM on behalf of company researcher James R. Matey. The microscope was an unintentional by-product of the VideoDisc technology the company had been struggling to bring to market since the mid-1960s. RCA expected the VideoDisc to capture half of the home video market, but instead it lost out in a big way to…
