Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen | Biography

In 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen made a unique finding that electrified both the scientific world and the general public. He unintentionally discovered the existence of a mysterious ray that could penetrate various materials. He named the unknown ray the "x ray," and it would rapidly revolutionize both physics and medicine.

Röntgen was born in Lennep, Germany, the only child of a cloth manufacturer and merchant. Three years later his family moved to the Netherlands, where Röntgen attended the Utrecht Technical School, which he was expelled unfairly from after being accused of a prank another student had committed. Although Röntgen did not appear to be especially gifted in his schoolwork, he was good at tinkering with and building mechanical objects, a talent that would serve him well later in life as he would build many of his own experimental devices. In 1869, he earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Zurich, where he attended lectures by the noted physicist Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius. Röntgen published his first work in 1870. His interests ranged from research in the specific heats of gases and thermal conductivity of crystals to the electromagnetic influences that could modify planes of polarized light. After several appointments at Strassbourg University, the Academy of Agriculture at Hohenheim in Wurtemberg, and the University of Giessen, Röntgen accepted an appointment as chair of the physics department at the University of Wurzburg, where he worked with Hermann Helmholtz and Hendrik Lorentz.

On the evening of November 8, 1895, Röntgen, who was elected Rector of the University of Wurzburg the previous year, was working on an experiment with cathode rays using a Hittorf-Crookes tube. He immediately noticed a fluorescent glow on a nearby screen painted with barium platinocyanide and determined that it was coming from the tube, even though he had surrounded his tube with black paper. A gifted experimentalist, Röntgen conducted a series of subsequent studies of the x ray, which thoroughly outlined the properties of the mysterious ray. In his most famous experiment, he used the hand of his wife and past the x rays over a photographic plate to reveal the bone structure beneath her flesh. Within months of revealing his discovery, x rays were heralded as a new diagnostic tool in medicine. So astounded was the world by this new discovery, that several cities named streets after Röntgen. In 1901, he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1900, Röntgen had accepted a post at the University of Munich, where he would spend the rest of his career. A quiet, modest, and private man, Röntgen never patented his discovery, which could have made him millions even then. Instead, he wanted his discovery to be available to all for the good of the world. Married to Anna Berta Ludwig, an innkeeper's daughter, Röntgen was content to remain in academia to teach and continue his research, taking time when he could to explore nature and do mountain climbing at his summer home near the Bavarian Alps. Near the end of his career, Röntgen spent more and more time caring for his ailing wife. He retired after she died in 1919. Although world famous and once comfortable financially, Röntgen was nearly bankrupt near the end of his life due to rapid inflation following World War I. He died from cancer of the rectum on February 10, 1923.