This might be one of the most famous images in photographic history. The first ever X-ray image was taken on December 22, 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923), who was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The original radiograph is at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany.
When Anna Bertha Roentgen’s husband spent seven weeks obsessed in his lab in late 1895, she was supportive. She silently brought him hot meals when he forgot to eat, and otherwise left him to his work. And when he needed a hand, she patiently provided one. In fact, her left hand became the subject of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s most famous image, “Hand mit Ringen,” which helped him win the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
It is a ghostly picture of her hand, unlike any ever taken before, with long, shadowy finger bones and a large dark wedding ring. The image is the first radiograph, a photograph exposed by X-rays instead of light, ever taken. It was an image that sparked a craze for the invisible rays that could shine through the opaque and illuminate the inner workings of the human body, and it catapulted Wilhelm Roentgen to worldwide fame.
Those seven weeks that produced the image had started when Wilhelm noticed a strange light when he was fiddling with some Crookes tubes. Crookes tubes, glass tubes with a vacuum inside, were a popular scientific apparatus in the late 1800s. Researchers ran electricity through attached cathodes and anodes to create a stream of light called a cathode ray—made up of what we now know are electrons. Wilhelm was investigating something a colleague had noticed, that a small bit of aluminum could be used to redirect some of the cathode ray onto a fluorescent screen next to the tube, which would make the screen light up.
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,” which denotes something unknown. 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. He later took a better picture of his friend Albert von Kölliker’s hand at a public lecture.
Anna may not have been receptive to seeing her own bones, but Wilhelm knew a few people who would be. He mailed copies of some of his images, along with a draft of his paper detailing the discovery, to fellow physicists at universities throughout Europe, including Arthur Schuster at the University of Manchester. The potential medical applications are why Wilhelm Roentgen decided not to patent X-rays. The technology was quickly put to use by both the medical community and the general public.
(This original article was written by Mohamed Ali Morsy on LinkedIn)
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