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Show 0(3 x ROENTGEN AND HIS X-.RAY. The last few years of the nineteenth century saw the discovery of a new kind of light which, in its behavior, subverted all previous conception of the nature and action of light. It has been named the X-ray and wa3 discovered dis-covered by Professor W. C. Roentgen of the Royal University of Wuncburg. Just how It came to get Its name has never been clearly stated, but it is generally supposed because the letter let-ter "X," in algebraic formula, represents repre-sents the unknown quantity, and the hitherto unknown and oluslvo quality ot this light suggested to Professor Roentgen this appropriate name. Electrical experiments by Sir William Wil-liam Crookes and by HIttorf and Len-ard Len-ard paved the way to the dlscoery of Professor Roentgen. ' It wns known that a vacuum time, variously callod after the names of the scientists already al-ready mentioned, having platinum electrodes sealed in its ends would, undor the static discharge of electricity electric-ity through It, give peouliar manifestations manifes-tations of light. One of the conducting conduct-ing terminals of such tubes was called "anode" and the other "cathode." If the exhaustion of the air in the tube is carried very high, approaching a perfect vacuum, or to about one-mllllonth one-mllllonth of the atmospheric pressure, the glow light at the anode disappears, disap-pears, and tho cathode increases until it fills the entire tube with its characteristic char-acteristic light. This Is called the "cathode ray." Many of the characteristics of the cathode ray had been observed prior to Professor Roentgen's discovery, which, briefly stated, grew out of the following observations: He noticed that when a vacuum tube illuminated .by the cathode ray was completely masked or covered up by an, external shield of black paper, so that no illumination il-lumination of the tubo was visible to the naked eye, there still passed through It certain subtle rays of light, invisible to tho eye, but which wouia lusuuuiy lnuuuiime a sneei oi paper coated on one side with barium platino-cyanide, even at a distance of two yards or more, and that these Invisible light rays were capable of passing through many substances opaque to ordinary light. Roentgen also discovered that these rays could be made to take a shadow photograph on a sensitive plate without with-out even exposing the plate In the usual way, the X-ray passing freely through the pasteboard screen of the plate holder It did not take the scientific world long to realize the immense Import-anceance Import-anceance of this discovery, and today X-ray apparatus constitutes the greatest great-est aditlon to the surgeon's resources that has ever been made In the form of mechanical appliances, since by its aid any foreign body in the human frame of greater density than the human hu-man flesh may be at once definitely Jocated and extracted, or any fracture of the bono disclosed, as the case may be. |