The Age of Radiance Read Free Page B

high-society swells reduced to skeletons, while eavesdropping maids no longer had to stoop with their ears to keyholes, as they could now see through doors. The state of New Jersey thought it necessary to debate a bill forbidding X-ray glasses in theaters, while a London manufacturer produced shielding undergarments for ladies who didn’t want to be seen naked on the streets by hordes of X-ray-spectacle-equipped voyeurs.
    Miracles in our time always seem to combine blessing with menace. Röntgen had used a zinc box and a lead plate to focus his beams, to protect the photographic plates in his lab from being accidentally exposed. This procedure coincidentally protected Röntgen himself. Others were not so fortunate. In 1896 Columbia’s H. D. Hawks demonstrated Röntgen rays at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York City. He noticed a dryness on his skin, which became something like a sunburn, and then scales appeared. Over the following months, his fingernails stopped growing, the hair on theside of his head fell out, and he had trouble seeing. His eyelashes and eyebrows fell out, and the skin became extremely painful.
    The February 1896 Electrical World announced that Thomas Edison suffered from“Röntgenmania.” Following the public euphoria, the great inventor ordered his employees to investigate any and all X-ray possibilities for seventy hours nonstop, keeping them awake and working by hiring a man to aggressively play the accordion. By May, the New Jersey lab offered a fluoroscope demonstration at New York’s Electrical Exhibit so that the public could appraise its own bones. The exhibit was run by glassblower Clarence Madison Dally, who then spent a number of years helping to develop an Edison X-ray lightbulb. After eight years of work, Dally’s hair fell out and his skin started erupting in lesions that wouldn’t heal. Edison canceled the bulb, but Dally continued working with Röntgen rays. Burns on his hands became cancerous; both of his arms were amputated to save his life. It didn’t work, and he died in 1898 at the age of thirty-nine, becoming the first human known to be killed by X-rays. His death stopped Edison’s Röntgenmania for good; the wizard of Menlo Park never worked with radiation again.
    Blessing, with menace. X-rays started being used for medical diagnosis eight weeks after Röntgen announced his discovery. A student at Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago, Emil Grubbe, stuck his hand in an X-ray machine and noticed that, after a while, the skin from that hand was falling off. Showing this to one of his professors, he convinced him to try the rays on a breast-cancer patient named Rose Lee, diagnosed as hopeless. With the rays, Lee improved; the cancer shrank and seemed to remit. Radiotherapy was born. In February 1896, Grubbe founded the first radiation-therapy facility in Chicago—he didn’t graduate from medical school until 1898—and by 1929, the rays had so damaged his left hand with cancer that it had to be amputated. In 1960, he died of squamous cell carcinoma.
    By 1959, Germany’s Röntgen Society announced that 359 people had died of X-ray overexposure. The mixed blessing produced by science, and its disturbing qualities, triggered mixed feelings about the discoverer. Wilhelm Röntgen, with his unruly beard and hair, wild and untamed, would become the world’s image of a mad genius.

    W hen Röntgen sent preprints of his article announcing X-rays out to fellow scientists at the end of 1895, his discovery was the dramatic breakthrough in an investigation of the mysterious relationship between matter and energy that had been building long before he’d ever charged a tube. One of therecipients was French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who shared Röntgen’s X-ray photographs with the fellow members of Paris’s Académie des Sciences on January 20, 1896. In that audience was Antoine Henri Becquerel, who, inspired by the fact that the X-rays seemed to emanate from the area of