The Age of Radiance Read Free

London, or of any of the great American universities, it was bare and unassuming to a degree.” Today the site of this lab is easy for medical-imaging enthusiasts to find, as it’s directly behind the Würzburg bus station.
    Röntgen used a Raps pump to vacuum out the pear-shaped Hittorf-Crookes and zeppelin-like Lenard tubes, which he then connected to a Rühmkorff that could throw sparks of four to six inches. On November 8, 1895, he covered a Lenard with black cardboard, drew the curtains to completely darken the room and ensure that the cardboard jacket was light-tight, and flipped the current. He then did the same with a different style of tube, a Crookes, but this time, though the cardboard still kept all light within, he noticed an odd, green glow coming from a lab bench, about a meter away. He turned the current off . . . the glow from the bench faded . . . then clicked the switch back . . . and once again the glow resumed. Lighting a match, he went over and found a piece of cardboard coated in barium platinocyanide—a standard fluorescent screen called a Leuchtschirm —and realized that, somehow,invisible rays from the cathode tube had to be passing through the black cardboard sheath and igniting this distant screen:“A yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds, waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting, and uncanny.”
    It was mysterious, and alarming. Wilhelm immediately began a series of investigatory experiments to learn as much as possible about these rays. He kept using thicker and thicker objects to try to block the emanations, from paper to cardboard to books, then experimented with sheets of metal. Only a disk of lead would wholly interfere; otherwise, the Leuchtschirm continued to luminesce. At one point he photographed his door, which produced a strange effect in the plate, and he couldn’t understand this result. He took the door apart, and the answer was plain: lead paint.
    Once while he was waving a lead disk between the tube and the screen, his hand fell before the stream. On the Leuchtschirm , within the vague, dark outline of the shadow of his skin, the bones of his fingers could plainly be seen. He was so stunned that he decided to tell absolutely no one about this:“When at first I made the startling discovery of the penetrating rays, it was such an extraordinary astonishing phenomenon that I had to convince myself repeatedly by doing the same experiment over and over again to make absolutely certain that the rays actually existed. . . . I was torn between doubt and hope, and did not want to have any other thoughts interfere with my experiments. . . . I was as if in a state of shock.”
    For the next two months, Röntgen spent every possible moment exploring this discovery, photographing the effects of the rays passing through wood, metal, books, and flesh, spending so much time at the lab that his wife became upset. When her husband then described what he’d found, Anna Bertha thought Wilhelm had lost his mind. On December 22, 1895, he asked her to come downstairs with him and had her rest her hand atop a cassette holding a photographic plate. He showered her with rays for fifteen minutes, then asked her to wait. He returned with the developed plate: a photograph of the bones in her hands and the rings on her fingers, with her flesh in soft outline around the whole. He was so pleased with what he had discovered. She was horrified, and like so many others in that era who would, for the first time, view what will remain, she cried out,“I have seen my death!”
    Even after constant efforts in the lab, Röntgen remained so mystified by his rays that he could only name them X . . . the