The first X-ray image, “Hand mit Ringen” by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, December 22, 1895. Wellcome Library, London/CC BY 4.0
wellcomecollection.org/works/wjc8ejn2/items
Röntgen’s (1845-1923) subject was his wife Anna Bertha's left hand. On seeing the picture, she is reported to have said "Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen" ("I have seen my death"). And she never set foot in his lab again 😊.
“It has sometimes been suggested that the discovery of X-rays was a happy accident ; but there is no doubt, from the nature of his preparations, that Rontgen had, as he himself stated, set out to see whether the electric discharge through a gas at low pressure gave out any kind of 'invisible radiation' capable of detection outside the walls of the glass tube in which the discharge was taking place. The discharge tube (an ordinary Crookes tube of the cylindrical pattern, with a fiat cathode at one end, and an anode tucked away in a side tube) had been wrapped in black paper, to cut off all the visible glow from the discharge, and a primitive fluorescent screen, consisting of a few crystals of barium platinocyanide on a piece of cardboard, lay handy on an adjacent bench-barium platinocyanide being a substance commonly used at the time to detect the invisible rays in the solar spectrum. On exciting the tube by means of a small induction coil to see if the light from the discharge was properly obscured by its black paper wrapper, Rontgen found that this was, indeed, the case ; but he also noticed that his primitive fluorescent screen was now glowing brightly. The discovery of X-radiation had been made.”
Source:
Röntgen Centenary and Fifty Years of X-Rays
•J. A. CROWTHER
Nature volume 155, pages 351–353 (1945)
Via accidental discovery or not, Röngen concluded, correctly, that he was dealing with a new kind of ray. He dubbed these rays X-rays because of their unknown nature. The name stuck.
Röntgen published a paper about his discovery: "On a New Kind of Rays", which can be found here:
web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/roentgen.html
Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1901. Prize motivation: “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him”. However, Röntgen gave away the prize money to his university, the University of Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Moreover, he never took out any patents on X-rays, to ensure that the world could freely benefit from his work. Unfortunately, his altruism came at considerable personal cost: at the time of his death in 1923, Röntgen was nearly bankrupt from the inflation following World War I.
Further reading:
caferoentgen.com/2023/10/07/a-tale-of-two-hands-the-story... 