How Did Röntgen Use X-Rays

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Have you ever had an X-ray taken? X-rays are used to look at problems with bones, teeth, and organs in the human body. Yet, despite their skillfulness, the invention of the X-ray wasn't intentional. The scientific and medical community will forever be grateful to an accidental discovery made by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895.

While experimenting with electrical currents through glass cathode-ray tubes, Röntgen discovered that a piece of barium platinocyanide glowed even though the tube was wrapped in thick black cardboard and was across the room. He hypothesized that some kind of radiation must be traveling in the space. Röntgen didn't fully understand his discovery so he dubbed it X-radiation for its unexplained nature. …show more content…
In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure. Previous work in this field had already been carried out by Emmanuel Goldstein (1850-1931), and by the work of these scientists the properties of cathode rays - the name given by Goldstein to the electric current established in highly rarefied gases by the very high tension electricity generated by Heinrich Ruhmkorff's induction coil which had become well known. Röntgen's work on cathode rays led him, however, to the discovery of a new and different kind of …show more content…
During subsequent experiments, he found that objects of different thicknesses interposed in the path of the rays showed variable transparency to them when recorded on a photographic plate. When he immobilised for some moments the hand of his wife in the path of the rays over a photographic plate, he observed after development of the plate an image of his wife's hand which showed the shadows thrown by the bones of her hand and that of a ring she was wearing, surrounded by the penumbra of the flesh, which was more permeable to the rays and therefore threw a fainter shadow. This was the first "röntgenogram" ever taken. In further experiments, Röntgen showed that the new rays are produced by the impact of cathode rays on a material object. Because their nature was then unknown, he gave them the name X-rays. Later, Max von Laue and his pupils showed that they are of the same electromagnetic nature as light, but differ from it only in the higher frequency of their
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