Röntgen & The Serendipity

Well, today I have to write about someone I admire related to my career, which is hard to me, because I don’t admire anyone. So after thinking a while I decide to write about Wilhelm Röntgen, because I like the story about his discovery.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist and engineer; he was born in 27^th march 1845, in Lennep, German Confederation. He died in 10^th February 1923, in Munich, Germany.

 He discovered the X-Rays in 1895. His discovery was by serendipity, he was working with the Hittorff- Crookes tube and with the Ruhmkorff coil because he wanted to find out why the cathode ray has a violet fluorescence. He covered the tube with a cardboard and then he saw a green light which disappear when the tube was off.  Then Röntgen realized that the tube irradiate some invisible ray through some metals. He named the ray as “X-Rays” because he did not know almost anything about the rays. For this achievement he earned the Novel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Nowadays we still use the X-Rays in medicine, to do radiographies, which is really useful to find out if our body is working good and healthy. Well the X-rays can be dangerous to our health; we have to use it with responsibility.

 

As a funny fact: Röntgen take the first radiography, it was of his wife’s hand, and here is: