Dr. Wilhelm Roentgen

During the 1800's Wilhelm Concord Roentgen invented the x-ray tube. An interesting fact about him is his failures never stopped him. The first complete ballet performance called “Swan Lake” was held during this time and in history, Armenians were massacred in Turkey, and Babe Ruth was a baseball great.

Wilhelm was born in Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany. He was born March 27, 1845. He was an only child of a merchant and manufacturer of cloth. His mother was Charoltte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam. Throughout his life he retained his love of nature and outdoor occupations. Many vacations were spent at his summer home at Weilheim, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, where he entertained his friends and went on many expeditions into the mountains. He was a great mountaineer and more than once got into dangerous situations.

He went to a boarding school in the Netherlands. In 1862 he entered a technical school at Utrect. He went to the University of Utrect in 1865 to study physics. He didn't have credentials needed to be a regular student so he entered Polytechnic at Aurich (Germany) and started as a student of mechanical engineering.

Mr. Roentgen graduated in 1869 with a Ph.D from the University of Aurich and was appointed to work with Kundt and they worked in Wurzburg and Strasbourg. Five years later, he qualified to lecture at Starsburgh University and a year later he was appointed professor at the Academy of Agriculture at Hohenheim in Wurteinberg. A year after that, he went back to Strasbourg for three years and then accepted the chair of physics at the University of Geissen. By 1900 Roentgen accepted a position at the University of Munich and stayed there the rest of his life.

Amiable and courteous by nature; he was always understanding the views of difficulties of others. He was always shy of having an assistant and preferred to work alone. Much of the apparatus he used was built by himself with great ingenuity and experimental skill. Roentgen retained the characteristic of a strikingly modest and reticent man.

His first work was published in 1870, dealing with the specific heats and gases, followed a few years later by a paper on the thermal conductivity of crystals. Among other problems he studied were the electrical and other characteristics of quartz. The influence of pressure on the refractive indices of various fluids: the modification of plans of polarized light by electromagnetic influences; the variations in the functions of the temperature, and the compressibility of water and other fluids; the phenomena accompanying the spreading of oil drops in water.

Roentgen's name, however, is chiefly associated with his discover of the rays that he called x-rays. In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through gas of extremely low pressure. The electric current established in highly rarefied gases by the very high-tension electricity generated by Ruhmkoff's induction coil. Roentgen's work on cathode rays led him, however, to the discovery of a new and different kind of rays. On the evening of November 8, 1895, he found that if the discharge tube is enclosed in a sealed, thick black carton to exclude all light, and if he worked in a dark room, a paper plate covered on one side with barium plantinocyanide placed in the path of the rays became fluorescent even when it was as far as two meters from the discharge tube. When Roentgen immobilized, for some moments, the hand of his wife in the path of the rays over a photographic plate, he observed after development of the plate an image of his wife's hand which showed the shadows thrown by the bones of her hand and that of a ring she was wearing surrounded by the penumbra of the flash. This was the first “roentgenogram” ever taken. Because their nature was then unknown, he gave them the name x-rays, but differ form it only in the higher frequency of their vibration.

Roentgen's invention helped doctors know where to fix the problem. Today there are x-ray machines that look through people's bags before they get on planes to see if there are any weapons or harmful things. People would have broken bones for the rest of their lives and crippled people would walk the earth without his device. There is a museum in Germany for him, as well as a ray named after him called the Roentgen Ray there is another ray named after him called the roentgenogram.

"Dr. Wilhelm Roentgen"

X-Rays