History of Radiology

X-ray and Fluoroscopy

German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovered Xrays and received the Nobel prize for physics in 1901. His achievement heralded the age of modern physics and transformed medical practice.

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was born on March 27, 1845, in Lennep, Prussia. Educated in The Netherlands and Switzerland, Roentgen obtained his doctoral degree in physics at the University of Zürich in 1869. He conducted research and taught at the universities of Strasbourg, Giessen, Würzburg, and Munich.

In 1895 Roentgen began experiments at the University of Würzburg with an electric current flow in a partially evacuated glass tube (known as a cathode-ray tube). He noticed that, whenever the tube was in operation, a piece of barium platinocyanide in line with it gave off light. Roentgen theorized that the interaction of electrons striking the tube's glass wall formed an unknown radiation that caused the fluorescence. He called the mysterious phenomenon X radiation, or X rays. Further experiments revealed that X radiation produces an image on photographic plates and penetrates many materials such as paper, wood, certain metals, and living tissue. For the first time physicians had a nonsurgical tool to see inside the body. The medical and scientific uses of X rays spread quickly throughout Europe and the United States.

After receiving the Nobel prize for his work, Roentgen continued to conduct research in several fields including elasticity, fluids, and crystals. Roentgen died on Feb. 10, 1923, in Munich, Germany. In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen's discovery of x-rays in this laboratory revolutionized science and medicine but did you know that x-rays may have been produced by William Morgan, a Welsh mathematician, more than a century before Roentgen's discovery?

In 1785, Morgan was conducting experiments on electrical discharges in a vacuum when he noted that "according to the length of time during which the mercury was boiled, the 'electric' light turned violet, then purple, then a beautiful green...and then the light became invisible.

After the discovery of Xrays One of the first imaging improvements was the fluoroscope. Described by an Italian physicist three months after Roentgen's X ray discovery, it consisted of a tube with a fluorescent screen at one end and an eyepiece at the other. A body part placed between the X-ray tube and the screen produced an image even in a lighted room. A month later, Thomas Edison announced that calcium tungstate would fluoresce brighter than the original barium platinocyanide. Newspaper accounts of the day suggested that "X-ray photographs" would no longer be necessary because of the accurate images produced by the fluoroscope. History proved these predictions wrong. WE need both these types of Xray images depending on the patient's clinical problem.

Contents

History of Radiology

X-ray and Fluoroscopy