In the winter of 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen could be found almost always in his laboratory, by all reports working with a fervor every night. He had eaten all his meals there, and even slept there between his experiments. This work had been sparked by an experiment with invisible cathode rays in October, where he discovered what he referred to as a “new light,” a light that could pass through objects that were opaque to the naked eye. By coincidence, during the course of these experiments, as he passed his hand over the experiment area, he discovered something quite frightening – his own skeletal hand, impressed upon the film. Soon he was ready to move on to new specimens. On the evening of the 22nd of December, his wife volunteered, placing her left hand upon the photographic film that had replaced Röntgen’s initial, less stable chemical plates. The result was a ghostly impression of her skeleton, each finger carefully defined– excepting, of course, her ring finger, obscured by a circle of black. Her wedding ring.

Röntgen was himself puzzled by the nature of these “new lights,” and referred to them as “x-rays,” due to the mathematical definition of x, for “unknown.” His contemporaries would refer to these rays as “Röntgen Rays,” but the term x-ray took over the popular consciousness.

Mr. Röntgen’s “unknown rays” were an interesting fad for society. His findings were first published in the Vienna Newspaper in early January, and then translated for Nature by the end of that same month, followed swiftly by a publication in Science. Soon, x-ray images were being published in magazines, too – not just of human bodies but of other animals, as well as non-living things like coin purses.

While the medical usage of these pictures was quickly understood, people were just generally taken with the concept of this new form of photography, which promised to reveal the unseen and really show what a person was made of.

Works Cited:

Bradley, William G. 2008. “History of Medical Imaging.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152 (3): 349–61.

Keller, Corey. 2004. “The Naked Truth or the Shadow of Doubt?: X-Rays and the Problematic of Transparency.” InVisible Culture, no. 7 (March). https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.5491ce30.

Panchbhai, Arati S. 2015. “Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and the Discovery of X-Rays: Revisited after Centennial.” Journal of Indian Academy of Oral Medicine and Radiology 27 (1): 90. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-1363.167119.

Withers, Sanford. 1931. “The Story of the First Roentgen Evidence.” Radiology 17 (1): 99–103.https://doi.org/10.1148/17.1.99.