Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (born March 27, 1845, Remscheid – died February 10, 1923, Munich), German physicist. Nobel Prize winner in Physics, discoverer of X-rays.
The Life of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen
Röntgen was born in the Lennep district of Remscheid, Germany. His childhood and primary school years were spent in the Netherlands and Switzerland. He studied at the Zurich Polytechnic University, which he entered in 1865, and graduated in 1868 as a mechanical engineer. He received his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1869. After his graduation he worked as a professor in Strasbourg in 1876, at Giessen in 1879 and at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg in 1888; then in 1900 he took the chair of physics at the University of Munich and the director of the newly established Institute of Physics.
He died in Munich in 1923, four years after his wife's death, in financial difficulties amid the high inflationary economy created by the First World War.
X-Ray Discovery Studies
In addition to his teaching duties, he also did research. In 1885 he showed that the motion of a polarized permeable has the same magnetic effects as an electric current. In the mid-1890s, like most researchers, he was studying the phenomenon of luminescence in cathode ray tubes. He was working with an experimental setup consisting of two electrodes (anode and cathode) placed inside a hollow glass tube called a "Crookes tube". Electrons detached from the cathode hit the glass before reaching the anode, creating flashes of light called fluorescence. On November 8, 1895, he changed the experiment a little, covered the tube with a black cardboard and darkened the room to understand the light transmittance and repeated the experiment. 2 meters from the test tube, he noticed a glow in the paper wrapped in barium platinocyanite. He repeated the experiment and observed the same event each time. He described it as a new ray that could pass through a matte surface and named it "X-ray", using the letter X, which symbolizes the unknown in mathematics. Later, these rays began to be called "X-Rays".
After his invention, Röntgen observed that materials of different thickness transmit the beam at different intensity. He used a photographic material to understand this. He also carried out the first medical X-ray radiography (X-ray film) in history during these experiments and officially announced this important discovery on December 28, 1895. However, when he found the X-ray, he lost his fingers from the X-ray overdose because he used his hand in his experiments.
Although the physical explanation of the event could not be made clearly until 1912, the discovery was met with great enthusiasm in physics and medicine. Most scientists considered this discovery the beginning of modern physics.
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