Skip to main content

X-ray history

The X-rays were discovered in 1895 and from there they became a very revolutionary application in many branches of science, from astronomy to radiographs that we have not done so many times.the 120th anniversary of the X-rays knowing his inventor and the research that led him to such an important scientific advance.

Article index

Who invented the X-rays?

The inventor or, rather, the person who discovered the X-rays was Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen , a German physicist who was focused on the field of electromagnetics Nothing else to present his discovery, Rontgen's theory received great attention from critics and public, and was translated into French, English or Russian.

Although it is not a name as well known today as that of others you celebrate writers, the name of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen is written in gold letters in the medical field, where he has had and has and numerous applications.The importance of his discovery was such in his day that he was the first Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1901 .

But how did he really discover them? Was that what I was looking for or, like so many other inventions, arose almost by chance?

How were X-rays discovered?

The November 8, 1895 the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen , was conducting experiments to analyze the violet fluorescence of the cathode rays , for which he used a device called Crookes tube .But an unexpected effect caught my attention: a subtle yellow-greenish glow on a cardboard with a solution of barium platinum-cyanide crystals.This prompted some small tests to see what was happening.

Rontgen began to move the solution away more and more, checking that the glow I had.It was a very penetrating radiation but invisible to the human eye.The experiments continued for several weeks to try to understand the properties of these rays, so far never studied, which led to a new discovery.When trying to make a photograph I check that the plates were veiled.

This new event led him to think Rontgen that the rays influenced the photographic emulsion, which triggered new tests.Soon I see that the rays crossed the matter and impressed their form in the photography .At the time he decided to experiment with the human body.His wife exposed her hand to the rays and placed it on the plate.They thus obtained the first x-ray of the human body (including her ring!), a advance that would later revolutionize medicine.

Rontgen decided or call his discovery "incognita rays", or "x-rays". His studies had a high impact on the scientific community, obtaining in 1901 the Nobel Prize of Physics .

X-ray applications

X-ray history

Most of us have thought about it,« How it would be nice to have X-rays to see Pepito or the neighbor of the third without clothes ".Do not deny it.At the moment there is no evidence that such an apparatus exists, and if there were we do not believe that it would last long in the market.But X-rays have other applications of much more relevance.

As we know, X-rays have given rise to specialties such as radiology , which allows you to see the inside of the human body to analyze the state of bones or organs.

This type of "technology" is also often used for reasons of security .For example, special security forces have X-ray equipment to see through certain materials, while in other places, such as airports , they are used to check if passengers carry something hidden.

X-ray history

However, X-rays may also have other uses which are not as well known among the middle population.For example, they are used to study fossils and wreckage from millions of years ago without damaging it.

Technological advances allow various radiologies to be made of objects consisting of a kind of transverse plates that, all joined together, would form the object itself in 3D.This technology, assisted by computers, is used, among other things, for the ham salting process .

Finally, another of its uses has to see with art and design; X-rays are also used to find out if a picture is authentic or to determine the purity of precious stones .

You can find much more information about X-rays in this History Channel documentary:

Images

Google

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gregorio Imedio Biography

Gregorio Imedio (Calzada de Calatrava, 1915-Madrid, 2002) Spanish businessman, creator of the popular glue that bears his name.Gregorio Imedio was born in 1915, in Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real province, where a few decades later another universal character would see the light, the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. His father, in addition to a drugstore, ran a summer cinema, and Gregorio, a fifteen-year-old boy, was in charge of the camera and drawing the poster for the films.Accustomed to experimenting with chemicals in his father's store and making splices with film tapes, one day he observed that acetone was able to bind the cellulose to the celluloid and generate a sticky gelatin. That discovery led him to find the optimal formula, but not before breaking a large part of the dishes at home to do bond tests and check their resistance.He was then sixteen years old.His only training was school and he never, if not for his own hobby, had access to chemistry books. Versatile a...

Gaston thorn Biography

Gaston Thorn (Luxembourg, 1928-2007) Luxembourgian politician, Prime Minister of his country between 1974 and 1979 and President of the European Commission between 1981 and 1985.Active member of the resistance against the Nazis , his father was arrested by the Germans, accused of trying to dynamite the railway network to stop the Nazi advance in World War II.Both he and his mother also collaborated with the resistance, and in 1943 he was arrested. Gaston Thorn After the war he pursued law studies at the Universities of Montpellier, Lausanne and Paris.Although he practiced as a lawyer, he soon entered the world of politics.In 1959 he was elected Member of the Parliament of Luxembourg.Later he presided over the Liberal International.Between 1976 and 1980 he assumed the presidency of the Liberal and Democratic Parties within the European Community. After the legislative elections of 1968, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.The following year he also to...

Edward young Biography

Edward Young (Upham, near Winchester, 1683-Welwyn, Hertfordshire, 1765) British poet, one of the main precursors of romanticism.He studied at New College, Oxford.In the course of his activity he aspired to obtain distinctions, an objective that he possibly thought to achieve through adulation, since his first publications include an Epistle to Lord Lansdowne , the extensive poem The last day (1713), dedicated to the queen, and The force of religion or Jupiter defeated (1714). Edward Young The tragedy Busiris (1719) marked his entry into the theater and gave him a certain popularity; However, some contemporaries criticized him for his desire for exhibition and his style, high-sounding, rhetorical and lacking in poetic inspiration.The same year, with a former fellow student, the dissolute Duke of Wharton, his benefactor, Edward Young undertook a trip to Ireland; However, economic circumstances put an end to such friendship.In 1721 the author worked again for the scene with ...

Georg simmel Biography

Georg Simmel (Berlin, 1858-Strasbourg, France, 1918) German philosopher and sociologist.A representative of relativistic neo-Kantianism, he taught philosophy at the universities of Berlin (1885-1914) and Strasbourg (1914-1918).He wanted to resolve the contradictions to which the formalism of the Kantian "a priori" led and also made an effort to deduce moral types ( Introduction to the science of morality , 1892) and classify the feelings and ideas that they determine the historical reconstruction ( Problems of the philosophy of history , 1892).On the other hand, he contributed decisively to the consolidation of sociology as a science in Germany ( Sociology , 1908) and outlined the main lines of a sociological methodology, isolating the general and recurrent forms of social interaction at scale political, economic and aesthetic.He paid special attention to the problem of authority and obedience in his Philosophy of money (1900) and diagnosed the specialization and depe...

Gabriel Ferrater Biography

Gabriel Ferrater (Gabriel Ferrater i Soler; Reus, 1922-Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1972) Spanish poet in the Catalan language.Specialist in mathematics and linguistics, literary and artistic critic, he is the author of an interesting poetic work, marked by his opposition to romantic poetry ( Women and days , 1968). Gabriel Ferrater The son of a bourgeois family, he did not attend school until the age of ten, educating himself particularly and with the support of a respectable family library.In the autumn of 1938 he went to Bordeaux (France), where his father had been appointed counselor of the Spanish consulate.If until this moment his important literary readings had been Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, Jorge Guillén and Carles Riba, since then he would add his knowledge of the French classics: Montaigne, Jean Racine, François de La Rochefoucauld, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and Cardinal de Retz.On the other hand, this unusual school situation would allow him to learn to read in ...

Alexander Archipenko Biography

Alexander Archipenko (Alexander Porfirievich Archipenko; Kiev, 1887-New York, 1964) Russian sculptor, pioneer of cubist sculpture.An emigrant from Ukraine, Alexander Archipenko arrived in Paris in 1908 attracted by the works of Picasso and Braque, and a year later he exhibited his first cubist sculpture, Torso , at the Autumn Salon. The dance (1912), by Alexander Archipenko "Sculpture, Archipenko stated," can begin at the point where space it is surrounded by matter." This statement came true in the successive game of concave and convex shapes, as an alternation between hollow and volume, with which he built structures such as Woman walking (1912, The Denver Art Musem) or El boxing match (1913, Perls Galleries Collection, New York), in which he inverted the traditional concept of sculpture, making space emerge as a negative of the mass and creating a dynamic of rhythms and contrasts. His "sculptural paintings" preluded Dadaist assemblages and ...

Gustav Kirchhoff Biography

Gustav Kirchhoff (Königsberg, Prussia, 1824-Berlin, 1887) German physicist.A close collaborator of chemist Robert Bunsen, he applied spectrographic analysis methods (based on the analysis of radiation emitted by an energetically excited body) to determine the composition of the Sun. Gustav Kirchhoff In 1845 he enunciated the so-called Kirchhoff laws, applicable to the calculation of voltages, intensities and resistances in the yes of an electrical mesh; understood as an extension of the law of conservation of energy, they were based on the theory of physicist Georg Simon Ohm, according to which the voltage that causes the passage of an electric current is proportional to the intensity of the current. In 1847 he served as a Privatdozent (non-salaried professor) at the University of Berlin, and after three years he accepted the post of professor of physics at the University of Breslau.In 1854 he was appointed professor at the University of Heidelberg, where he befriended Rober...

Clément Ader Biography

Clément Ader (Muret, 1841-Toulouse, 1925) French aeronautical engineer.Already in his childhood he designed a large kite that could lift adult men off the ground.Ader was inventive, and in his youth he made a velocipede with rubber wheels and a balloon that he built during the Franco-Prussian War and that he gave to the city of Toulouse at the end of the war. In 1876 he left his job at the Administration des Ponts et Chaussées (Ministry of Bridges and Roads), he moved to Paris and devoted himself to communications.In 1880 he collaborated in the installation of the first private telephone line in the city, using components designed by him; one of them was the Théâtrophone , with which you could listen to opera from your own home.All of this brought him great income. Ader observed the flight of numerous species of birds and bats, which he captured and kept in facilities built in his own home.His purpose was to achieve a machine with a lifting force such that it counteracts that o...

Carlo Crivelli Biography

Carlo Crivelli (Venice, c .1430-Ascoli Piceno, c .1495) Italian painter.In 1474 he moved to Marche and directed an important workshop that executed polyptychs for the churches and convents of the region, in a style that combined Renaissance foreshortenings, the Mantegna style and the decorative cadences of late Gothic ( Polyptych of Saint Sylvester, Annunciation , Pieta , Magdalena ).

Biography and works of Leonardo Da Vinci

It is not easy to become part of even a simple line in the great book of history , without a doubt the thousands of names that are part of it are worthy and worthy of being included.Beyond history there is a special place where only the great, the geniuses arrive, where there are plenty of presentations because history could not be understood without them. Leonardo Da Vinci, a genius with a point of madness , a visionary or an inventor, painter or thinker, surely a lot and a little of everything. Biography and works of Leonardo Da Vinci , the legacy of an artist, who went ahead of his time giving meaning to a new era called Renaissance. Article index Leonardo Da Vinci | Biography Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in Vinci, in the Arno river valley, Tuscany, territory controlled by the Medici family and belonging to the Republic of Florence, in an era in which Italy was then a compendium of city-states like Florence, republics like Venice and fiefdoms ...