Physicist Russell D. Young, together with John Ward and Fredric Scire, develops at the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS) the "topografiner", a non-contact instrument that scans an extremely sharp tip very close to a metal sample's surface to measure its microtopography. The topografiner contains the essential elements of what would later become a scanning tunneling microscope — a sharpened tip, piezoelectric positioning, feedback to maintain a constant distance — but operates in field-emission mode (not quantum vacuum tunneling), limiting its resolution. Although Young and his team did measure tunneling currents when bringing the tip close enough, vibrations and lack of isolation prevented reaching atomic resolution; the project was canceled by NBS management in 1971. The instrument remained practically unknown until Binnig and Rohrer, already in advanced development of their own tunneling microscope, discovered Young's work and cited it in their 1982 foundational paper.