WILHELM KONRAD RŒNTGEN (1845–1923)
Many interesting stories have been told about the rush to the West during the gold-fever period, caused by the discovery of gold in the far West. The rush into X-ray experimentation was very similar, and I also caught the fever badly. Newspaper reporters and physicians heard of it, and I had to lock myself up in my laboratory, which was in the cellar of President Low’s official residence at Columbia College, in order to protect myself from continuous interruptions. The physicians brought all kinds of cripples for the purpose of having their bones photographed or examined by means of the fluorescent screen. The famous surgeon, the late Doctor Bull of New York, sent me a patient with nearly a hundred small shot in his left hand. His name was Prescott Hall Butler, a well-known lawyer of New York, who had met with an accident and received in his hand the full charge of a shotgun. He was in agony; he and I had mutual friends who begged me to make an X-ray photograph of his hand and thus enable Doctor Bull to locate the numerous shot and extract them. The first attempts were unsuccessful, because the patient was too weak and too nervous to stand a photographic exposure of nearly an hour. My good friend, Thomas Edison, had sent me several most excellent fluorescent screens, and by their fluorescence I could see the numerous little shot and so could my patient. The combination of the screen and the eyes was evidently much more sensitive than the photographic plate. I decided to try a combination of Edison’s fluorescent screen and the photographic plate. The fluorescent screen was placed on the photographic plate and the patient’s hand was placed upon the screen. The X-rays acted upon the screen first and the screen by its fluorescent light acted upon the plate. The combination succeeded, even better than I had expected. A beautiful photograph was obtained with an exposure of a few seconds. The photographic plate showed the numerous shot as if they had been drawn with pen and ink. Doctor Bull operated and extracted every one of them in the course of a short and easy surgical operation. Prescott Hall Butler was well again. That was the first X-ray picture obtained by that process during the first part of February, 1896, and it was also the first surgical operation performed in America under the guidance of an X-ray picture. This process of shortening the time of exposure is now universally used, but nobody gives me any credit for the discovery, although I described it in the journal Electricity, of February 12, 1896, before anybody else had even thought of it. Prescott Hall Butler was much more appreciative and he actually proposed, when other offers to reward me for my efforts were refused, to establish a fellowship for me at the Century Club, the fellowship to entitle me to two toddies daily for the rest of my life. This offer also was refused.
On March 2, 1896, the late Professor Arthur Gordon Webster, of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, addressed a letter to the Worcester Gazette, from which I quote:
Sunday morning I went with Professor Pupin to his laboratory to try the effect of a fluorescent screen in front of the plate. I placed my hand under the bulb and in five minutes the current was stopped.... The result was the best plate that I had yet seen.... One who has tried the experiments and seen how long it takes to obtain a good result can judge of an improvement. I think that Doctor Pupin should enjoy the credit of having actually ... shortened the time of exposure ten and twenty times.
A description of the improvement, which I published in final form in Electricity, of April 15, 1896, ends with the following sentence:
My only object in working on the improvement of the Roentgen ray photography was for the purpose of widening its scope of application to surgical diagnosis. I think that I have succeeded completely and I wish full credit for the work done.
My friends suggested that I apply for a patent on the procedure and enforce recognition that way, but I was having one expensive experience in the patent office with my electrical resonators and did not care to add another.
The question of reflection and refraction of the X-rays had to be answered, and several strange claims were brought forward by investigators. My investigations of this matter, aided by Thomas Edison’s most efficient fluorescent screen, resulted in a discovery, which, in a communication to the New York Academy of Sciences, on April 6, 1896, I summed up as follows: “Every substance when subjected to the action of X-rays becomes a radiator of these rays.” The communication was published in several scientific journals, like Science and Electricity, and no statement can claim the discovery of the now well-known secondary X-ray radiation more clearly than the one given above. But of this matter I shall speak a little later.
Looking up some data lately I found that I had finished writing out these communications relating to my X-ray research on April 14, 1896. I also found a reprint of an address delivered before the New York Academy of Sciences in April, 1895, and published in Science of December 28, 1895, at the very time when the X-ray fever broke out. It was entitled: “Tendencies of Modern Electrical Research.” But the X-ray fever prevented me from reading it when it was published. I saw it three months later, but never again since that time, and I had forgotten that I had ever composed it. I find now that the picture which I had drawn then of the growth of the electromagnetic theory is in every detail the same as that which I have given in this narrative. Both of them are due to the lasting impressions received in Cambridge and in Berlin. Evidently these impressions are just as strong to-day as they were twenty-eight years ago, proving that the tablets of memory have a mysterious process of preserving their records. I remember that on April 14, 1896, I did not go to the laboratory, but stayed at home and reflected, and read my address mentioned above. I took an inventory of what I had done during my six years’ activity at Columbia and I closed the books satisfied with the results. My wife, who had helped me, writing out my reports, lectures, and scientific communications, and who knew and watched every bit of the work which I was doing, also was satisfied, and congratulated me. My colleague Crocker, I knew, was satisfied, and so were all my scientific friends, and that was a source of much satisfaction. But nothing makes one as happy as his own honest belief that he has done his best.