A microscope that 'sees' individual atoms using quantum tunnelling won a Nobel
In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM's Zurich lab built a microscope that drags a needle one atom wide over a surface and measures the faint electric current that quantum-tunnels across the gap. That current changes with the height of every atom underneath, letting the device image individual atoms directly. It won them half the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics and helped launch the field of nanotechnology.