X-Ray's First Year
Today, X-Rays one year old. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Roentgen made quite a splash when he announced, and named, X-Rays in 1895. Now I open the following year’s issue of Century Magazine. And I find an article about how far his X-Rays had come in just that year. The authorship is a rogue’s gallery of notable scientists. I’ll list all their names and Wikipedia pages in the posted episode.
Least interesting of those is Thomas Edison. He merely describes experiments that he’s working on. But the first segment is by one Thomas Commerford Martin – more a student of science than a scientist himself. And he sings my favorite song – namely that nothing is without antecedents, Roentgen included.
Twenty-five years earlier, Crookes had found that cathode rays would pass through some materials, but they were partially blocked by others. The X-Ray images we see here are all labeled cathodgraphed. That was because an X-ray is created when a cathode-ray’s electrons strike glass or metal. By the way, these people aren’t yet comfortable with the term X-Ray. In fact, the article is titled: “Photographing the Unseen: A Symposium on Roentgen Rays.”
For the rest, Martin – and the others – ask what the true character of these modified cathode rays might be. How best to manage them? How to set the density of images? They offer a cornucopia of research subjects for other scientists. And I’m struck by how unlike our media, this magazine is. These people are not so much telling us things. They are, instead, sharing with us their own curiosity.
So we face ten large pages of small type. And they do little in the way of anticipating X-Rays’ future. Oh, naturally, they foresee the obvious promise of an aid to surgeons. That much is patently obvious. After all, every user begins by X-Raying a human hand. If we can look through a hand, we can surely look through any other part of a wounded human. Well, at one’s bones, at least.
Nor do we find any anticipation of the terrible damage that early X-Rays will cause. How many would later die from cancers before we understood the danger?
What Century Magazine has done for us here is to display what experts are thinking about this new thing. And most speak in terms that we ordinary readers might follow. Oh, I’m sure that many just looked at pictures, said Gee Whiz, then turned to the next article.
But then, the pictures here are, alone, worth ten thousand words – a frog with a broken leg, a living anesthetized mouse, a human hand with a diseased bone. The images alone suggest the profound role in Twentieth-Century medicine that X-Rays were poised to assume.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
The Wikipedia article: X-ray - Wikipedia
By the many authors linked below: Photographing the Unseen. A Symposium on the Roentgen Rays: The Century Magazine, Vol. LII, or New Series Vol. III, pg. 120-131.
Wikipedia pages for each of the six authors of this article:
Thomas Commerford Martin - Wikipedia
Silvanus P. Thompson - Wikipedia
Engines episodes about our early X-Ray mania, X-Ray Hair Removal, and a very early medical user of X-Rays
This Episode first aired on July 28, 2026.