This Day in #Physics History ---
(World Radiography Day)
In 1895, German physicist #Wilhelm_Conrad_Roentgen was the director of the physics department at the University of Wurtzburg and an active professor there. He had for some time been experimenting with a Lenard tube to produce cathode rays.
On Nov. 8, Roentgen was doing experiments in his darkened laboratory that involved covering the Lenard tube with lightproof paper and projecting the cathode rays onto various objects. Roentgen was surprised to see a piece of fluorescent material glowing under exposure to the cathode rays. He repeated the experiment, moving the fluorescent material further and further away from the Lenard tube. He noticed that the fluorescent material glowed up to two meters away from the Lenard tube’s cathode rays.
Roentgen knew that the cathode rays could not penetrate the lightproof covering over the Lenard tube, so he hypothesized that the glowing of the fluorescent material must be the result of some new kind of radiation. He began experimenting with putting different materials and objects between the Lenard tube and the fluorescent material and observing how the radiation passed through them.
It wasn’t until he had his wife put her hand in the path of the cathode ray that Roentgen made his famous discovery. The shadows from his wife’s hand over a photographic plate clearly showed the bones inside her hand and her wedding ring, while her flesh became transparent.
Roentgen named his discovery #X_rays because of their unknown properties. On Dec. 28, 1895, Roentgen published his first paper on X-rays and subsequently received dozens of scientific prizes and awards. Most notably, Roentgen was awarded the first-ever #NobelPrize in Physics in 1901 for his work.
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