Wilhelm Röntgen, who saw through the body, was born

On 27 March 1845, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany, the only child of a cloth merchant. A patient, hands-on experimenter, he eventually became a professor of physics at the University of Würzburg.

There, on 8 November 1895, while studying how electricity passes through low-pressure gas, he noticed a screen glowing across the room even though his apparatus was shielded. He had stumbled onto an unknown, penetrating radiation he called X-rays — borrowing the mathematical symbol for the unknown.

Within weeks he made the first medical X-ray image, capturing the bones of his wife’s hand, ring and all. The discovery let doctors see inside the living body without cutting it open, transforming medicine almost overnight.

He refused to patent his findings, insisting the rays belonged to all of humanity.

In 1901, Röntgen received the very first Nobel Prize in Physics, honouring a single observation that still illuminates hospitals worldwide.