My dad recalls working with the first electron microscope to show up at Kansas State University. (Somehow he B.S.ed his way into a graduate level course because

My dad recalls working with the first electron microscope to show up at Kansas State University. (Somehow he B.S.ed his way into a graduate level course because he wanted to learn to use the microscope.) He says you had to break a glass blank to get a good cutting edge. He apparently was often given the task of breaking the glass because he seemed to get better knives. I believe he said the mechanism that was used to advance the sample into the knife to cut the sample/slice involved a long metal bar where heat was dialed up to make the bar expand in length — that amount of expansion being the thickness of the slice they were after.