Abstract
SEVEBAL letters have appeared recently in the Times on Prof. W. C. Rontgen's discovery of X-rays and their early use in surgery. As NATURE is mentioned by three of the correspondents, it may be worth while to recall the association of this journal with the notices of the discovery. General announcements appeared in the daily Press on Jan. 7, 1896, to the effect that Röntgen, who was then professor of physics in the University of Würzburg, had discovered that a number of substances which are opaque to visible rays of light are transparent to waves capable of affecting a photographic plate. A note upon these reports appeared in NATURE of Jan. 16, 1896 (vol. 53, p. 253). In the issue of the following week, Jan. 23, we published a letter from Sir Arthur Schuster on the physical significance of Röntgen's observations, and Sir Arthur himself arranged for the translation into English of Röntgen's paper “On a New Kind of Rays” from the Sitzungsberichte der Würzburger Gesellschaft, 1895, which appeared in the same issue. This, we believe, was the first complete account of Röntgen's work published in England. To the same issue (Jan. 23, p. 276) the late Mr. A. A. Campbell Swinton contributed an article describing how, “Working upon the lines indicated in the telegrams from Vienna, recently published in the daily papers, I have, with the assistance of Mr. J. C. M. Stanton, repeated many of Prof. Röntgen's experiments with entire success”; and his article was illustrated by an X-ray photograph of a human hand taken by him with a Crookes tube. In the following three months as many as one hundred and fifty-five notes and original communications upon X-rays and their applications appeared in our columns.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Discovery and Uses of X-Rays. Nature 129, 271–272 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129271d0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129271d0