The first X-ray of a human hand made its owner say she saw her death
Soon after discovering X-rays in November 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen placed his wife's hand in front of a photographic plate. The result, bones and a ring floating in faint flesh, was the first X-ray picture of a human body part. On seeing it, she reportedly said that she had seen her own death.
Rontgen, a German physics professor, was studying cathode rays with a Crookes tube wrapped in black cardboard when he noticed a faint green glow on a fluorescent screen about a metre away. Something invisible was passing through the cardboard. He called it X, meaning unknown, and found it went through flesh but not bone or metal. The discovery earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics. Accounts differ on details because his lab notes were burned after his death.
Doctors seized on it within weeks. On 11 January 1896, John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham X-rayed a needle lodged in a colleague's hand, and in February he used X-rays during surgery. At Dartmouth College, Frank Austin tested every discharge tube in the physics lab and found only one, built to Ivan Pulyui's design, produced the rays; on 3 February two brothers, one a physician and one a physicist, used it to image a boy's broken wrist. Marie Curie later championed X-rays for treating wounded soldiers in the First World War, long after early labs had opened before anyone understood radiation's dangers.
The principle is simple. A generator sends X-rays toward the body, dense materials such as calcium-rich bone absorb more of them, and a detector behind records the shadow, once on film and now often digitally. Computed tomography goes further: the source and detectors circle the patient, many beams cross each point from different angles, and computers assemble slices that can be stacked into three-dimensional images.
Early vocabulary was colourful. Radiographs were once called roentgenograms, and until about 1918 a radiographer might be termed a skiagrapher, from Greek for shadow writer. The Japanese word for an X-ray picture still echoes Rontgen's name. Beyond medicine, the same ideas inspect industrial parts and power airport body scanners.
Source: Radiography
