## From VideoDisc Disaster to Microscopic Triumph: the Story of the Scanning Capacitance Microscope
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 rather it lost out in a big way to VHS.
RCA’s James. R.Matey invented the scanning capacitance microscope,which used sensors cannibalized from the company’s VideoDisc players.
Despite the VideoDisc’s struggles, the underlying technology held a gem: The exquisitely sensitive capacitance sensors used in the VideoDisc players were capable of measuring capacitance differences on the scale of attofarads (1 × 10-18 fingers).
But before engineers and scientists could trust Matey’s idea, thay wanted an independent evaluation to confirm the accuracy of the new microscope. Researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology obliged. Starting in the early 1990s,they too cannibalized capacitance sensors from old VideoDisc players and custom-built a series of scms,such as the one pictured at top.After NIST’s validation, microscope manufacturers commercialized the SCM, chipmakers adopted them to study integrated circuits, thus opening the door to the next generation of semiconductors.
## why the RCA videodisc Failed
But no story about the scanning capacitance microscope’s triumph would be complete without some discussion of the VideoDisc’s failure. In theory, it should have thrived: It was a thoroughly researched product that anticipated an crucial consumer market.Its playback fidelity was superior to over-the-air programming and to magnetic tape. And yet it bombed. Why?
The VideoDisc effort had begun in the early 1960s, when RCA asked itself, “What comes after color TV? What will be the next major consumer electronics system?” The company decided that the answer was some type of system to play prerecorded movies and TV shows through your television. RCA was far from alone in pursuing this idea. All of the home video systems under growth included a storage medium-film, magnetic tape, nonmagnetic tape, and vinyl discs of various size and composition-and a device to play back the audio and video in high resolution.In addition to magnetic methods, facts could be stored using electromechanical, photographic, electron-beam, or optical technologies.black and white photo of a smiling man in a business suit holding a shiny flat disc and inserting a flat square object into a machine.# The Unexpected Legacy of RCA’s Failed VideoDisc
RCA’s 1981 launch of the VideoDisc, a laser-based format for playing movies, is often remembered as a spectacular failure in the home video market. It lost decisively to VHS, despite offering superior picture quality. but the story doesn’t end with a consumer electronics flop. The technological challenges overcome in developing the VideoDisc led to a breakthrough in microscopy that continues to impact scientific research today.
The idea behind the videodisc was simple: encode audio and video signals as microscopic bumps and depressions on a disc,then read them with a laser. This approach offered a clearer picture than the analog signals used by VHS tapes. However, several factors contributed to its downfall.One key issue was content. RCA needed Hollywood’s cooperation to release films on the VideoDisc format, but studios were hesitant. They feared that if consumers could buy movies on disc, it would hurt their theatrical revenues and the burgeoning videotape rental market. Ultimately, only a limited number of titles were ever released on VideoDisc.
Another problem was running time. In 1977, VideoDiscs could hold only about 30 minutes of material per side. That rose to an hour per side by the time of product launch, but that still meant that any movie over 120 minutes would have to be spread over multiple discs. The first VHS tapes could hold 120 minutes of video (double that of its main tape competitor, Betamax). And VHS kept extending that lead: By the 1980s, VHS had long play (four hours) and extended play (six hours) versions, albeit with noticeable drops in resolution quality.
RCA forecasters also badly misread the economics of VideoDisc players. Their 1977 price estimate for a VideoDisc player was $500 (about $2,800 in today’s dollars). The first VHS players were much more expensive, ranging from $1,000 to $1,400, but by the mid-1980s, their price had dropped to $200 to $400. VHS tapes of major Hollywood films cost about $80-much more than VideoDiscs’ $10 to $18 price tag-but only diehard fans actually paid the modern equivalent of about $440 to buy a movie on videotape. For everyone else, the hollywood studios licensed titles to third-party rental companies. Seemingly overnight, independent video shops, supermarkets, and national chains like Blockbuster were renting movies for a small fee. For a brief period, RCA VideoDiscs shared the shelves with videotapes, but usually only at independent shops and never with as many titles available.
Meanwhile, RCA struggled to sell its VideoDisc players. The company had forecast eventual annual sales of five to six million players; its first-year goal was a more modest 200,000, and yet it sold only half that number. By 1984, RCA realized the VideoDisc would never come close to 50 percent market penetration, let alone profitability, and pulled the plug.
## Birth of the Scanning Capacitance Microscope
Normally that would be the end of the story, another failed venture in consumer electronics. But back when RCA scientists first began researching the VideoDisc, there were no microscopes capable of identifying the tiny variations in the disc that encoded the audio/video signal. The bumps and depressions were less than a tenth the size of the groove itself; even the most advanced microscopes of the day couldn’t detect features that small.