Having completed 2014 by chewing the facts about chewing gums, we will be beginning 2015 with the unknown. Not quite the wilderness of the entirely unknown, but something whose name has become synonymous with ‘X’, the alphabet we associate with unknowns.
William Conrad Roentgen was born on March 27, 1845 in Germany - the only child of a cloth merchant. Except for a love of nature, open country and forests, Roentgen showed no special aptitude while he was at a boarding school.
He was even mistakenly expelled from a technical school he had enrolled himself into, for having drawn a caricature of one of the teachers - a caricature that was in fact produced by some other student. He went on to study physics, completed his PhD and rose the academic ladder, from being a lecturer to the Chair of Physics in the University of Giessen.
Discovery of a new ray None of these, however, were going to define Roentgen. It was November 8, 1895, when he inadvertently stumbled upon his greatest find. Roentgen was conducting experiments with Crookes tube in his laboratory. His experiment included evacuating a glass bulb and filling it with a special gas, which on the passage of a high-voltage current produced a fluorescent glow.
What Roentgen noticed on that day was that even when the tube was heavily shielded with a black cardboard, a green coloured fluorescent light could be seen coming from a screen setting that was about 10 feet from the tube. Roentgen rightly concluded that he was dealing with a new kind of ray, which he called X-ray, as the alphabet is used in mathematics to indicate the unknown quantity.
On this day in 1896, Austrian newspaper Wiener Presse reported the discovery of a new kind of radiation. Part of the electromagnetic spectrum, X-rays are invisible to the human eye. And unlike any part of the visible spectrum, they can penetrate solid matter, allowing pictures of the inside of objects possible.
Even though it was suggested that the rays be named after Roentgen, X-rays had got stuck by then in the people’s minds. The discovery, however, won Roentgen the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Harmful too The mystery surrounding the radiation, and the unknowingness about it, quickly vanished as people poured hours studying it. It is now known that X-rays are in equal measures helpful and harmful.
Doctors now examine the insides of a patient’s body without surgery using X-ray machines. Examining insides of packages in the airport for safety is also conducted with the help of these. X-rays also come in handy in observatories that explore outer space by detecting radiations from objects. It is, however, well known that exposure to a large amount of these radiations can damage the health of those involved.
