Friedrich Dessauer (1881–1963) was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, on July 19, and died in Frankfurt am Main on February 16. He led an active life as an inventor, entrepreneur, politician, theologian, and philosopher who put forth a strong ethical justification of technology as being even more significant than science. On the basis of his experience with technological creativity Dessauer argued that the act of invention goes beyond appearance to provide contact with Kantian things-in-themselves and, in theological terminology, realizes the imago dei in which human beings have been created.

Early in his life Dessauer became fascinated with Wilhelm Röntgen's (1845–1923) discovery of X-rays (1895), which promised a penetration of appearances, and his design of high-energy X-ray power supplies earned him a doctorate in 1917. As an inventor and entrepreneur he developed techniques for deep-penetration X-ray therapy in which weak rays are aimed from different angles to intersect at a point inside...