Abstract
PROF. RÖNTGEN, of Wurzburg, at the end of last year published an account of a discovery which has excited an interest unparalleled in the history of physical science. In his paper read before the Wurzburg Physical Society, he announced the existence of an agent which is able to affect a photographic plate placed behind substances, such as wood or aluminium, which are opaque to ordinary light. This agent, though able to pass with considerable freedom through light substances, such as wood or flesh, is stopped to a much greater extent by heavy ones, such as the heavy metals and the bones; hence, if the hand, or a wooden box containing metal objects, is placed between the source of the Rontgen rays and a photographic plate, photo graphs such as those now thrown on the screen are obtained. This discovery, as you see, appeals strongly to one of the most powerful passions of human nature, curiosity, and it is not surprising that it attracted an amount of attention quite disproportionate to that usually given to questions of physical science. Though appearing at a time of great political excitement, the accounts of it occupied the most prominent parts of the news papers, and within a few weeks of its discovery it received a practical application in the pages of Punch. The interest this discovery aroused in men of science was equal to that shown by the general public. Reports of experiments on the Rontgen rays have poured in from almost every country in the world, and quite a voluminous literature on the subject has already sprung up.
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The Röntgen Rays1. Nature 54, 302–306 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/054302a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/054302a0