Gary Upchurch, age 11, of jamestown, tenn., for his question:
When was the X ray invented?
The X ray is a gadget for probing hidden things below the surface. If Andy had such a built in prober, he might be able to tell the age of all his pen pals. Many of you send top questions and forget to say how old you are. This information is necessary for Andy to write an answer in language you can understand.
Scientists are famous for their endless curiosity. They probe to find the answer to a question and often the answer leads to another question. Sometimes they run smack into a mystery. When they meet a new or unknown object, it is their custom to call it X. In 1895, a bearded professor tried to discover the cause of spoiled photographic plates. By chance, he found a source of radiation that nobody knew anything about. He called it X rays.
His discovery made possible a number of major breakthroughs in biology and other sciences. For a time his fellow scientists called it the roentgen ray, but for a very good reason. The man who discovered the miracle was Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, a German physicist at the university of Wurzburg. His name is pronounced as if it were spelled Runtgen, and we borrowed it to name the roentgen unit of radioactivity.
The curious professor lived when research was beginning to uncover the mysteries of radioactivity. Many researchers of his day used electric currents sent through glass tubes from which the air had been removed. If a photographic plate happened to be near such a tube, it became fogged. Roentgen set about finding what caused the plates to fog.
The invisible radiation Seemed to come from the tube, ;so he covered it with black paper. This shut off the visible light, but it did not stop the Mysterious film fogging rays. They came right on through the paper and caused samples of fluorescent minerals to glow in the dark. Roentgen then tested the Penetration powers of his X rays on other substances. News of his wondrous discovery quickly spread throughout the world of Science, and he received the first Nobel Prize to be awarded in the field of physics.
X rays were discovered 70 years ago. In testing them, roentgen found that the invisible rays pass through flesh, but not through bone. HE used them to reveal the bone structure of his own hand and took the first X ray photograph. Medical scientists Were quick to SEE how useful this could be to them, and today X ray machines are in Every hospital and clinic and in the offices of most doctors and dentists.