Wilhelm Rontgen published his discovery of X-rays
On this day · 28 December 1895
On this day in 1895, Rontgen submitted the paper announcing X-rays, giving medicine its first look inside the living body.
On December 28, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen submitted a ten-page paper, “On a New Kind of Rays,” to the Physical-Medical Society of Wurzburg — the formal announcement of X-rays.
The discovery itself had come seven weeks earlier. On November 8, 1895, while experimenting with a cathode-ray tube in a darkened laboratory, Rontgen noticed a nearby coated screen glowing, even though the tube was shrouded in black cardboard. Some invisible, penetrating ray was escaping. Not knowing its nature, he labeled it with the mathematical symbol for the unknown: X.
Over the Christmas holiday he wrote up his findings, including a now-famous radiograph of his wife’s hand, with bones and ring plainly visible.
The publication gave doctors their first way to see inside a living patient without cutting.
In 1901 Rontgen received the very first Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery, which rapidly transformed both medicine and physics.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
