The Age of Radiance Read Free Page A

unknown. Almost immediately after he began to report his findings, others started working with cathode-ray screens and published follow-up reports in scientific, medical, and electrical journals, which were in turn almost immediately taken up by the popular press. McClure’s :“Exactly what kind of a force Professor Röntgen has discovered he does not know. As will be seen below, he declines to call it a new kind of light, or a new form of electricity. He has given it the name of the X rays. Others speak of it as the Röntgen rays. Thus far its results only, and not its essence, are known. In the terminology of science it is generally called ‘a new mode of motion,’ or, in other words, a new force. As to whether it is or not actually a force new to science, or one of the known forces masquerading under strange conditions, weighty authorities are already arguing. More than one eminent scientist has already affected to see in it a key to the great mystery of the law of gravity. All who have expressed themselves in print have admitted, with more or less frankness, that, in view of Röntgen’s discovery, science must forth-with revise, possibly to a revolutionary degree, the long accepted theories concerning the phenomena of light and sound.”
    “Röntgen ray” articles appeared on January 5 in Vienna’s Wiener Press ; January 7, in Frankfurt’s Frankfurter and Berlin’s Vossiche ; January 11, London’s Saturday Review ; January 13, Paris’s Le Matin ; January 16, New York Times . In a journalist’s game of “telephone,” each would rewrite the previous item with an ever-growing collapse in accuracy, which continually enraged Röntgen. As the public then became obsessed with the discovery, the era’s newspapers fed the hunger by publishing thousands of haunting photographs illuminating the shadowy flesh and lacy, geometric skeletons of mice, chickens, puppies, and birds. Journalist Cleveland Moffett described one example of what were called shadow photographs :“A more remarkable picture is one taken in the same way, but with a somewhat longer exposure—of a rabbit laid upon the ebonite plate, and so successfully pierced with the Röntgen rays that not only the bones of the body show plainly, but also the six grains of shot with which the animal was killed. The bones of the fore legs show with beautiful distinctness inside the shadowy flesh, while a closer inspection makes visible the ribs, the cartilages of the ear, and a lighter region in the centre of the body, which marks the location of the heart.” Inside of a year, over fifty X-ray books and a thousand articles were released, and at London’s Crystal Palace, lucky visitors could have their change purses Röntgen-rayed as a souvenir. The fad was versified in Photography magazine:
    The Roentgen Rays, the Roentgen Rays.
    What is this craze?
    The town’s ablaze
    With the new phase
    Of X-ray’s ways.
    I’m full of daze,
    Shock and amaze;
    For nowadays
    I hear they’ll gaze
    Thro’ cloak and gown—and even stays.
    These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.
    Kaiser Wilhelm asked his nation’s most famous scientist to give him a private royal lecture in the Star Chamber on January 13, 1896, after which Röntgen was decorated with the Prussian Order of the Crown. One newspaper summed up the revolution:“Civilized man found himself the astonished owner of a new and mysterious power,” and for this power, Röntgen would be awarded, in 1901, the first Nobel Prize in Physics. At the same time, his embarrassment at the public’s hands continued, with X-rays taken up by spiritualists, Christians, somnambulists, and the temperance movement, with claims as well that they could erase the mustaches of women and transmit anatomical drawings directly into the brains of medical students. One man announced a secret alchemy technique of x-raying ordinary metals into gold; another claimed to have photographed souls.
    Cartoons in British Punch and American Life portrayed