Today, a new discovery unleashes new hopes. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
It was a great moment of
Roentgen was working with cathode ray tubes. He
suddenly found he'd created a new kind of ray that
could "see" through flesh, but not through bone. In
1895, Roentgen gave us the X-ray.
Seldom has anything so taken the public's
imagination. Nancy Knight tells how this new marvel
set the inventive muse in motion. Right away,
magazine cartoons celebrated the idea. A man uses an
X-ray viewer to see through a lady's hat at the
theatre -- that sort of thing.
Soon we would all have X-ray viewers, and great the
mischief would be. The very next year a company came
out with lead panties to protect women from prying
eyes. A would-be poet wrote,
Not worth your while
That false, sweet smile,
Which o'er your features plays:
Thy heart of steel
I can reveal
By my cathodic rays!
By the time I was a little boy, that'd turned into
stories about Superman's X-ray eyes. Meanwhile, real
X-rays were cheap and accessible. I didn't have X-ray
eyes, but I could X-ray my feet in new shoes at the
department store. That didn't last long. We were just
catching on to the terrible hazards of X-rays.
So in 1896 futurists seized at the possibilities of
seeing through opacity. That year, the president of
Stanford University wrote about X-rays. He suggested
we might soon use them to read thoughts. Was that
satire or serious? We don't know.
Edison was deadly serious when he set out to focus
enough X- rays on the human skull to watch the brain
at work. He also proposed to heal tuberculosis with
X-rays. Now, in a world of CAT-scans and radiation
therapy, we hesitate to call Edison silly.
X-rays clearly attacked human tissue. So why
shouldn't they attack germs? At first those
destructive effects looked like one more benefit.
When X-ray experimenters started losing hair, a
French clinic opened up. It offered X-ray hair
removal to women.
In fact, only weeks after Roentgen's discovery, a
doctor in Chicago subjected a patient's breast cancer
to X-rays. We wouldn't call that silly today.
So scientists and science fictionists alike seized
this new marvel with the speed that's peculiar to the
imagination. Roentgen had seemingly given us means to
do what we've always craved to do. He gave us means
to see through the dark -- to pierce the veil -- to
know what we had once thought was unknowable.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Knight, N., 'The New Light': X-rays and Medical
Futurism. Imagining Tomorrow: History,
Technology, and the American Future. (Joseph
Corn, ed.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, Chapter
For more on the new X-rays, see Episode 923.
From the 1895 Century
This X-ray photo appears in an article published in
May of the year after Roentgen's discovery. The
article is made up of letters from distinquished
scientists of the day, including one where Edison
analyses the construction of X-ray systems.
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard. All Rights Reserved.
University Libraries, University of
Houston, Houston, TX 77204-2091.
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