Why a Brewster angle microscope?

The advent of the Brewster angle microscope has allowed for detailed studies of monolayers at air–water interfaces. We describe the history of and some recent developments in Brewster angle microscopy. A new generation Brewster angle microscope was developed in our laboratory that allows one to obtain images of a large area of the surface with a good spatial resolution, thus avoiding the drawbacks of ‘classical’ Brewster angle microscopes which use optical elements that are tilted under the Brewster angle.