Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology, Photography, film and optics

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b. 27 March 1845 Lennep, Prussia (now Remscheid, Germany)

d. 10 February 1923 Munich, Germany

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German physicist who discovered X-rays.

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Expelled from school and so unable to attend university, Röntgen studied engineering at Zurich Polytechnic. After graduation he obtained a post as assistant to the distinguished German physicist Kundt and eventually secured an appointment at the University of Würzburg in Bavaria. He was successively Professor of Physics at the universities of Strasbourg (1876), Giessen (1879), Würzburg (1888) and Munich (1900–20), but he died in abject poverty. At various times he studied piezo-electricity; heat absorption by and the specific heat of gases; heat conduction in crystals; elasticity; and the capillary action of fluids. In 1895, whilst experimenting with the Crookes tube, a partially evacuated tube invented some seven years earlier, he observed that when a high voltage was applied across the tube, a nearby piece of barium platinocyanide produced light. He theorized that when the so-called cathode rays produced by the tube (electrons, as we now know) struck the glass wall, some unknown radiation occurred that was able to penetrate light materials and affect photographic plates. These he called X-rays (they also became known as Röntgen rays), but he believed (erroneously) that they bore no relation to light rays. For this important discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, but, sadly, he died in abject poverty during the hyperinflation of the 1920s.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

First Nobel Prize for Physics 1901.

Bibliography

1895, "A new kind of radiation", Meeting of the Würzburg Physical-Medical Society (December) (reported Röntgen's discovery of X-rays).

Further Reading

O.Glasser, 1945, Dr. W.C.Röntgen (biography).

KF