X-ray

This voltage accelerated the electrons coming from the cathode to a high enough velocity that they created X-rays when they struck the anode or the glass wall of the tube.

In 1885, he presented a paper to the Royal Society of London describing the effects of passing electrical currents through a partially evacuated glass tube, producing a glow created by X-rays.

On 22 February after the end of their experiments two coins were left on a stack of photographic plates before Goodspeed demonstrated to Jennings the operation of Crookes tubes.

[11] Also in 1890, Roentgen's assistant Ludwig Zehnder noticed a flash of light from a fluorescent screen immediately before the covered tube he was switching on punctured.

His letter of 6 January 1893 to the Physical Review was duly published[13] and an article entitled Without Lens or Light, Photographs Taken With Plate and Object in Darkness appeared in the San Francisco Examiner.

[14] In 1894, Nikola Tesla noticed damaged film in his lab that seemed to be associated with Crookes tube experiments and began investigating this invisible, radiant energy.

[28] This was probably a conservative estimate, if one considers that nearly every paper around the world extensively reported about the new discovery, with a magazine such as Science dedicating as many as 23 articles to it in that year alone.

They are still referred to as such in many languages, including German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Danish, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, Estonian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Albanian, Japanese, Dutch, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, and Norwegian.

[33] News (and the creation of "shadowgrams") spread rapidly with Scottish electrical engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton being the first after Röntgen to create an X-ray photograph (of a hand).

[33] The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on 11 January 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate.

[34] In early 1896, several weeks after Röntgen's discovery, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that the rays "not only photograph, but also affect the living function".

On 3 February 1896, Gilman Frost, professor of medicine at the college, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy, whom Gilman had treated some weeks earlier for a fracture, to the X-rays and collected the resulting image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates obtained from Howard Langill, a local photographer also interested in Röntgen's work.

On 5 February 1896, live imaging devices were developed by both Italian scientist Enrico Salvioni (his "cryptoscope") and William Francis Magie of Princeton University (his "Skiascope"), both using barium platinocyanide.

American inventor Thomas Edison started research soon after Röntgen's discovery and investigated materials' ability to fluoresce when exposed to X-rays, finding that calcium tungstate was the most effective substance.

A worried McKinley aide sent word to inventor Thomas Edison to rush an X-ray machine to Buffalo to find the stray bullet.

While the shooting itself had not been lethal, gangrene had developed along the path of the bullet, and McKinley died of septic shock due to bacterial infection six days later.

[41] With the widespread experimentation with X‑rays after their discovery in 1895 by scientists, physicians, and inventors came many stories of burns, hair loss, and worse in technical journals of the time.

[citation needed] In August 1896, H. D. Hawks, a graduate of Columbia College, suffered severe hand and chest burns from an X-ray demonstration.

[citation needed] The use of X-rays for medical purposes (which developed into the field of radiation therapy) was pioneered by Major John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England.

For technical and political reasons, the overall project (including the X-ray laser) was defunded (though was later revived by the second Bush Administration as National Missile Defense using different technologies).

[80] These methods provide higher contrast compared to normal absorption-based X-ray imaging, making it possible to distinguish from each other details that have almost similar density.

This allows the photon energy to be adjusted for the application so as to give sufficient transmission through the object and at the same time provide good contrast in the image.

[97] Short nanosecond bursts of X-rays peaking at 15 keV in energy may be reliably produced by peeling pressure-sensitive adhesive tape from its backing in a moderate vacuum.

[101] In laboratory discharges with a gap size of approximately 1 meter length and a peak voltage of 1 MV, X-rays with a characteristic energy of 160 keV are observed.

One area where projectional radiographs are used extensively is in evaluating how an orthopedic implant, such as a knee, hip or shoulder replacement, is situated in the body with respect to the surrounding bone.

In medical diagnostic applications, the low energy (soft) X-rays are unwanted, since they are totally absorbed by the body, increasing the radiation dose without contributing to the image.

As of recent, modern fluoroscopy utilizes short bursts of x-rays, rather than a continuous beam, to effectively lower radiation exposure for both the patient and operator.

[116][117] X-rays are a form of ionizing radiation, and are classified as a carcinogen by both the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer and the U.S.

[109][118] Diagnostic X-rays (primarily from CT scans due to the large dose used) increase the risk of developmental problems and cancer in those exposed.

The knowledge that X-rays are actually faintly visible to the dark-adapted naked eye has largely been forgotten today; this is probably due to the desire not to repeat what would now be seen as a recklessly dangerous and potentially harmful experiment with ionizing radiation.