Discoveries
X-rays
Also Known As Roentgen Rays
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X-rays are a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation that passes through soft tissue while being absorbed by denser material such as bone, making them the basis of medical radiography. They were discovered on 8 November 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, who produced the first X-ray medical image, of his wife hand, within weeks of the finding and provisionally named the radiation after the mathematical symbol for an unknown quantity.
Facts
Discovery Year Discovery Date DiscovererWilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a German physicist at the University of Wurzburg, discovered X-rays on 8 November 1895; credit is essentially uncontested, and he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics ever awarded, in 1901, for the finding. 3 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Cancer, Conditions X-ray imaging is foundational to cancer diagnosis and staging, and ionizing radiation itself became a cancer treatment, radiotherapy, within years of Rontgen's 1895 discovery.
Rontgen's 1895 discovery of X-rays rapidly became indispensable to orthopedic diagnosis of fractures and skeletal deformities.
Radiology began with Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen's 1895 discovery of X-rays.
Tuberculosis, Conditions Chest radiography became central to tuberculosis diagnosis and to twentieth-century mass screening campaigns.
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