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Have you ever been a kid who broke their ankle and the X-ray tech was twisting your broken limb into a painful position to get just the right picture and you revealed just how much profanity a thirteen-year-old knew? Just me? Anyway, getting X-rays can suck, but they were a massive leap forward in medicine.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 8, 1895
This high-energy electromagnetic shit that can see your bones is called Röntgen radiation, because German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen discovered it by accident.
You could say Nikola Tesla accidentally discovered X-rays a year before Röntgen did, except Tesla didn’t realize it at the time. Tesla was playing around with some vacuum tubes that created electrical discharge in the form of cathode rays. You know how us old-timers would refer to television as “watching the tube?” Same idea. Anyway, Tesla took a photograph of his pal Mark Twain using such a vacuum tube. The photo didn’t turn out, and Tesla didn’t realize until after Röntgen’s discovery was made public that the blotchy photo that looked nothing like Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain was actually an X-ray that revealed the internal screw used to adjust the camera lens.
As for Röntgen’s discovery, he had his lab notes burned after he died because crazy-ass scientist, I guess, and his biographers had to reconstruct how he first figured it out. So, who fucking knows? Let’s make some shit up. Okay not really, but as famed historians Will and Ariel Durant said, “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”
On November 8, 1895, Röntgen was investigating cathode rays and wrapped a vacuum tube in black cardboard to cut the visible light from getting through. But he noticed that a screen a few feet away was giving off a green glow, and that some form of light was getting through the cardboard. What Tesla missed the year previous with his accidental X-ray photograph, Röntgen investigated further.
Röntgen began experimenting like mad, and six weeks later, on December 22, he took the first-ever “medical” X-ray, of his wife’s hand. She looked at it and said, “I have seen my death.” Nice. Six days later he submitted his first paper on the subject, referring to the images as “X” rays to indicate that this was an unknown type of radiation. When the term caught on, he was all no goddammit that’s not what I want to actually call them, but it stuck.
It wasn’t just the name that caught on, but the technology. Immediately. Röntgen saw the medical applications right away and sent letters to physicians across Europe saying, “Check out this cool shit I discovered” and they were like “Yeah that is cool shit ima use it.” And just two months after his discovery a doctor in England used X-rays to find a needle stuck in the hand of an associate, the first clinical application.
Röntgen won the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery. And me? I’ve broken several bones and had a half dozen root canals, so my corpse is probably gonna glow in the dark.
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In the Netherlands we sometimes call x-rays Rontgen photos. Now I know where that comes from. Thx for that!
Being a former X-ray technologist, this was pretty cool.