How X-Rays Were Discovered4 photos

He put your things in a black cardboard box and completely closed the windows of the laboratory. When he turned on the X-ray tube, Rentgen suddenly saw a flash of light in the other half of the room. It turned out that the light was coming from a piece of paper covered with barium platinocyanide, a substance that emits light when exposed to radiation. Rentgen was very surprised and turned off the tube—the light disappeared. But when he turned it on again, the light appeared once more. So he moved the paper to another room, and it still continued to glow. The scientist realized that some kind of radiation had been produced in the X-ray tube that could not only pass through cardboard but also through walls. Rentgen had no idea what this radiation was, so he called it X-rays.

Rentgen studied X-rays for about a year and published three articles describing these new rays in detail. In the following 12 years, hundreds of studies by his followers added nothing significant to his findings. Rentgen, who lost interest in X-rays, told his colleagues, "I have already said everything I needed to say; don't waste your time." Other scientists later began calling them "X-rays." For their discovery, Rentgen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. What surprised scientists the most was a photograph of a hand taken using X-rays.

In Russia, these rays were named "X-rays" at the suggestion of one of Rentgen's students, Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe.