January 2003 - Nr. 1
Wilhelm Röntgen,
Discoverer of X-Rays
TWIG - Troubled teens can take heart from his life story. He was kicked out of high school, was never allowed to graduate, then went on to win a Nobel Prize. German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, a tool that has aided medical diagnoses for more than 100 years.
Röntgen was born on March 27, 1845 in Lennep (North Rhine-Westphalia), the son of a textile manufacturer. He spent much of his childhood in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, and attended a technical high school in Utrecht, at which he was accused - unfairly, historians say - of drawing a caricature of his teacher on the blackboard, and subsequently expelled. Without a high school diploma, Röntgen could not enroll in a German or Dutch university, but was accepted at a technical school in Zurich, which judged applicants on the basis of an entrance exam alone. In 1869, he earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Zurich. He taught and conducted research at Strasbourg, Hohenheim and Giessen before accepting a post as chair of the physics department at the University of Würzburg in 1888.
It was there that Röntgen made his scientific breakthrough. On November 8, 1895, while conducting an experiment on the properties of cathode rays - an electric current that passes through gases at extremely low pressure - he found that if the discharge tube projecting the rays was enclosed in a light-proof carton and he worked in a dark room, a paper plate covered on one side with barium platinocyanide placed in the path of the rays became fluorescent. The fluorescent glow was not created by the cathode rays themselves, but, he later showed, by "a new kind of ray" produced by the impact of the cathode rays on a material object. Röntgen discovered that materials of different thicknesses produced light shadows of varying transparency, and quickly recognized the significance of his discovery. On November 22, he created the first "röntgenogram" - an X-ray image of his wife’s hand.
For this discovery, Röntgen received 110, including the first Nobel Prize for physics in 1901. Yet he avoided celebrity, never patented his work and gave away much of the prize money he was awarded. After his death in Munich in 1923, his scientific papers were destroyed, in accordance with his will.
