On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a German physicist, made a discovery so outlandish and terrifying that he cut himself off from the world completely while he studied it. He had found the X-ray, and discovered its ability to permeate through solid matter and record images of objects inside other objects. And while it was immediately apparent what he had discovered, it was so far beyond the generally agreed upon realm of possibility at the time that it took Röntgen seven weeks of intense study to convince himself of what was happening.
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| Anna Bertha Röntgen's Hand |
Röntgen hadn’t set out to make any discoveries that day. A fastidious researcher, Röntgen was repeating for his own edification an experiment that had been done many times. He was constructing what was called a Crookes tube, essentially a lightbulb with an internal vacuum containing two metal plates that were hooked up to an electric charge. This created a beam between the metal plates, which scientists were attempting to understand the composition of at the time. Röntgen planned on setting up a barium coated plate in order to document the beam. While initializing his Crookes tube, which he housed inside a sheet of thick black paper, he noticed that the barium coated plates, which had left across the room, were flickering. He brought the plate closer to the tube, but still outside of the paper covering, and turned it on again noting a much brighter and consistent illumination on the plate.
Noting this mysterious effect of the Crookes tube and its ability to permeate solid matter, Röntgen tried placing different objects between the tube and the detecting plate. He started with a book. Not only did the illumination carry through the many layers of paper, but they also clearly outlined the shake of the key Röntgen was using as a bookmark. Astounded, he continued placing things in the invisible beam until one scared him enough to stop him dead in his tracks. While switching out objects, Röntgen caught a glimpse of his own hand, and the bones inside it illuminated on the plate.
Convinced he’d lost his grip on sanity, Röntgen shut himself up in his lab for the next seven weeks to study, restudy, and try to confirm his findings beyond doubt. The doubt was mostly his own, as he legitimately believed he’d been hallucinating or otherwise had gone insane. It wasn’t until he coaxed his wife into allowing him to photograph her hand in the beam. He apparently hadn’t told her what the effect would be, most likely so should couldn’t share in his hallucination, and when she saw her bones cast upon the plate she left in a huff and wouldn’t return to his lab. And while he’d managed to anger his wife, he had also proven that these bizarre rays, which he dubbed X-rays (using the mathematical variable symbol of “x” to represent an unknown), could in fact see through matter. Röntgen soon presented his findings to the scientific community and was largely hailed as a great innovator. He received numerous honorary doctorates, august scientific medals, and even the Nobel Prize in Physics, all of which confirmed for him that those strange flickering on the plate across the room weren’t just all in his head.