X-ray technology

Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen

Transparent procedure

To see through something impenetrable, people often wish they had x-ray vision. In this way secrets, the unexpected or undesirable can be uncovered. In 1895, in contrast, the inventor of the x-ray was not driven by the desire to look through anything. Simply by chance, the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered light in a test setup, where, according to previous physical knowledge, there should have been none. The special thing about this light is its ability to penetrate matter.

This gave him the idea to photograph the inside of people. In contrast to soft tissue, the hard tissue absorbs the radiation especially well and leaves behind white shadows in the x-ray image. This makes it especially easy to diagnose broken bones. A medical revolution!

(Information taken from German Stars – 50 innovations, produced by the Federal Foreign Office, the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, Invest in Germany and the Goethe Institut.)