Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen - The Nobel Prize in Physics 1901
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman-Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering Nuclear Engineering Physics |
| Special Topic(s): |
History of Technology |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Reference - General |
| Media Type: |
Unknown |
| Author(s): |
Organization:Nobelprize.com |
| Description: | Biography from the Nobelprize.com site. "Röntgen's name, however, is chiefly associated with his discovery of the rays that he called X-rays. In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure. Previous work in this field had already been carried out by J. Plucker (1801-1868), J. W. Hittorf (1824-1914), C. F. Varley (1828-1883), E. Goldstein (1850-1931), Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), H. Hertz (1857-1894) and Ph. von Lenard (1862-1947), and by the work of these scientists the properties of cathode rays - the name given by Goldstein to the electric current established in highly rarefied gases by the very high tension electricity generated by Ruhmkorff's induction coil-had become well known. Röntgen's work on cathode rays led him, however, to the discovery of a new and different kind of rays. On the evening of November 8, 1895, he found that, if the discharge tube is enclosed in a sealed, thick black carton to exclude all light, and if he worked in a dark room, a paper plate covered on one side with barium platinocyanide placed in the path of the rays became fluorescent even when it was as far as two metres from the discharge tube. During subsequent experiments he found that objects of different thicknesses interposed in the path of the rays showed variable transparency to them when recorded on a photographic plate. When he immobilised for some moments the hand of his wife in the path of the rays over a photographic plate, he observed after development of the plate an image of his wife's hand which showed the shadows thrown by the bones of her hand and that of a ring she was wearing, surrounded by the penumbra of the flesh, which was more permeable to the rays and therefore threw a fainter shadow. This was the first "röntgenogram" ever taken. In further experiments, Röntgen showed that the new rays are produced by the impact of cathode rays on a material object. Because their nature was then unknown, he gave them the name X-rays. Later, Max von Laue and his pupils showed that they are of the same electromagnetic nature as light, but differ from it only in the higher frequency of their vibration." |
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| Keywords: | x-rays invention |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | October 2007 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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