Who invented X-rays?

Wilhelm Rontgen, 1895

Who invented X-rays? In the late 19^th century, German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen was interested in the newly discovered ‘cathode rays’ which were generated when high-voltage electricity was passed between two electrodes inside a glass tube almost empty of air. It would soon be shown that cathode rays were streams of tiny fragments of electric charge to be called ‘electrons’, the same particles that had caused the Edison Effect. The phenomenon would give rise in due course to television and other uses of the ‘cathode ray tube’.

Researchers had noted to their annoyance that photographic plates stored near such ‘discharge tubes’ were inexplicably fogged, as if they had been exposed to light. Rontgen wondered wondered if discharge tubes gave off invisible radiation, especially since the walls of the tubes glowed under the impact of the cathode rays. Perhaps the radiation could leak through the packaging surrounding photographic plates and expose them.

History of Invention:

In 1895, Rontgen found that radiation easily passed through a light proof shroud around the discharge tube, and made a plate covered with a fluorescent chemical glow several meters away. For something so unexpected and mysterious, the term X-rays seemed appropriate. They were also called Rontgen Rays for a time.

X-rays were stopped by a thin sheer of metal, but could cut through human tissue and emerge with enough energy to leave an image on a photographic plate. The first X-ray photograph’ ever taken was of Rontgen’s wife’s hand, clearly showing her bones and a ring surrounded by the shadow of her flesh.

Rontgen became famous winning the first Nobel Prize for Physics. He remained strikingly reticent and preferred to work alone, till he was taken by cancer at the age of 78.

Rontgen cannot be said to have ‘invented’ X-rays; they had always existed. But he did show how they might be used. X-ray images have proved of incomparable value to medicine and surgery and later to engineering and industry. More powerful and precise X-ray tubes were soon invented, particularly by the American William Coolidge from General Electric. The hazards of the technology, such as its capacity to cause cancer, were discovered only later.