Day 224 - Radiation #14: X-ray discovery

Today marks my halfway mark! I am halfway through the radiation process. Only four more treatments to go... or three more weeks! Yipeee! Treatment was same ol' same ol'. My techs du jour... Beth and Rebecca! I like them. If you recall, Beth was the one who was with me for the first CT mapping. I missed Rebecca last week. She was on vacation (lucky!). Dan joined in the festivities after I was all done. He says that he came back from lunch just in time to say hi and bye to me. I also got to see Linea. Next week I'm bringing my camera back in and will be taking a picture of the others... that way you get to see my whole team.

Today's fact is actually a little history lesson... courtesy of Rebecca (and I found it most interesting). Fact #14: Wihelm Rontgen was the person who discovered X-rays in 1895. What's so remarkable about it... is that only 117 years have passed (relatively short period) since the discovery and look where we are now... guiding those beams in a precise area to erradicate nasty diseases and such. But back to the lesson... Rontgen was studying the phenomena of the passage of an electric current through a gas at an extremely low pressure. The rays he was looking at were previously discovered by the works of other scientists (cathode rays), but his continued experimenting led him to x-rays.

Wilhem Conrad Rontgen

This is the cool part: (excerpt from Nobelprize.org)
During subsequent experiments he found that objects of different thicknesses interposed in the path of the rays showed variable transparency to them when recorded on a photographic plate. When he immobilised 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 flesh, which was more permeable to the rays and therefore threw a fainter shadow. This was the first "röntgenogram" ever taken. Because their nature was then unknown, he gave them the name X-rays.

Bertha's, Rontgen's wife, hand.

Rontgen won the Nobel Prize in 1901 for his work in Physics. He died in 1923 of intestinal cancer.