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—— ON THIS DAY ——
NOVEMBER 8, 1895
Würzburg, Germany
131 years ago
The discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen at the University of Würzburg on November 8, 1895, which gave medicine its first way of seeing inside the living body.
On the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was working in a darkened laboratory at the University of Würzburg with a Crookes tube, a glass vessel in which an electric current is passed through a near vacuum. He had covered the tube in black cardboard to block any visible light. Across the room, a screen coated in a fluorescent compound began to glow. Something was passing through the cardboard, and through the air, that nobody had identified.
Röntgen spent the next several weeks investigating almost without pause, reportedly eating and sleeping in the laboratory. He established that the unknown radiation travelled in straight lines, was not deflected by magnets, and passed through many materials in proportion to their density. He called it X-radiation, using X in the sense of an unknown quantity, a placeholder name that was never replaced in English.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Medical imaging, the field that began with Röntgen's discovery and now includes computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound.
The image that made the discovery famous was taken on December 22, 1895, of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, showing the bones and her wedding ring with the flesh as a faint shadow. She is said to have reacted with horror, remarking that she had seen her own death. Röntgen submitted his first paper on December 28, and news spread across the world within days of its publication in January 1896. Within weeks, physicians in Europe and North America were using the technique to locate bullets and set fractures.
Röntgen refused to seek a patent, taking the position that the discovery belonged to humanity. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 and donated the prize money to his university. He declined an offer of nobility and largely avoided the celebrity the discovery brought him. He died in 1923, his savings destroyed by the German hyperinflation.
The speed of adoption came at a cost. Nobody understood the dangers, and early operators tested equipment on their own hands, ran long exposures, and sold X-ray machines as novelties. Shoe shops in the United States and Britain installed fluoroscopes to display children's feet inside shoes, a practice that persisted into the 1970s in some places. Many early radiologists and technicians developed burns, lost fingers and hands, and died of cancers. A monument in Hamburg lists the names of more than three hundred who died from their work with radiation. Shielding, dose limits and film badges came later, and the field of radiation protection grew directly from that toll.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It gave medicine its first view inside the living body. Before 1895, the interior of a patient could be examined only by surgery or autopsy. Within months of Röntgen's paper, doctors were locating bullets and setting fractures by image, and the whole field of diagnostic imaging followed.
It opened a new area of physics. X-rays became the tool that revealed atomic and molecular structure through crystallography, work that later made it possible to determine the structure of DNA and of countless proteins and minerals.
Its uncontrolled early use is a lasting lesson in unknown risk. Hundreds of early workers died from exposure before anyone understood the danger, and the radiation protection standards now applied worldwide were built out of that experience.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Röntgen saw a screen glowing on November 8, 1895, in a room where nothing should have been glowing. Seven weeks later he published, and doctors were using X-rays within days of reading him. He refused to patent it. Hundreds of the people who worked with the new rays in those first years died of it.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“I have seen my death.”
— Anna Bertha Röntgen, on seeing the X-ray image of her own hand, December 1895
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Röntgen's discovery of X-rays, the famous image of his wife's hand, his refusal to patent it, and the cost paid by early radiation workers?
