This
was the very first x-ray ever taken, in 1895. It shows the hand of
Bertha Roentgen, the wife of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, inventor of the
x-ray. The image helped him win a Nobel Prize in 1901. It had to have
been very weird to see the inside of her hand, the long, thin, bones,
the skin barely visible, and her wedding ring. The x-ray was a side
effect of research Roentgen had been doing with Crookes tubes, which
later evolved into cathode ray tubes. He had tried diverting the
electrons with aluminim foil.
In early November, he
repeated the experiment in the dark in his lab at the University of
Würzburg in Germany. But then he noticed something happening far away
from the Crookes tube. A screen coated in barium platinocyanide, the
fluorescent material that was used on photographic plates, was sitting
on a chair near the experiment, and every time Wilhelm turned on the
electricity, the screen glowed. Not quite believing what he was seeing,
he dedicated his time to rigorously testing and documenting the
strange rays, which he called “X.” He put objects made from different
materials on photographic plates and exposed them to X-rays, and found
that the mysterious rays passed through some but not others.
Eventually, a few days before Christmas, he asked his wife to help him
in the lab. Anna held her left hand on a photographic plate for 15
minutes while Wilhelm beamed X-rays at it. According to legend, she said, “I have seen my death!” and never set foot in his lab again.
Read more about
the development of x-rays and how it became quite the rage at Atlas Obscura.
No comments:
Post a Comment