When Anna Bertha Roentgen’s husband spent seven weeks obsessed in his lab in late 1895, she was supportive. She silently brought him hot meals when he forgot to eat, and otherwise left him to his work.
And when he needed a hand, she patiently provided one. In fact, her left hand became the subject of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s most famous image, “Hand mit Ringen,” which helped him win the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.It is a ghostly picture of her hand, unlike any ever taken before, with long, shadowy finger bones and a large dark wedding ring. The image is the first radiograph, a photograph exposed by X-rays instead of light, ever taken. It was an image that sparked a craze for the invisible rays that could shine through the opaque and illuminate the inner workings of the human body, and it catapulted Wilhelm Roentgen to worldwide fame.
Those seven weeks that produced the image had started when Wilhelm noticed a strange light when he was fiddling with some Crookes tubes. Crookes tubes, glass tubes with a vacuum inside, were a popular scientific apparatus in the late 1800s. Researchers ran electricity through attached cathodes and anodes to create a stream of light called a cathode ray—made up of what we now know are electrons. Wilhelm was investigating something a colleague had noticed, that a small bit of aluminum could be used to redirect some of the cathode ray onto a fluorescent screen next to the tube, which would make the screen light up.
In early November, he repeated the experiment in the dark in his lab at the University of Würzburg in Germany. But then he noticed something happening far away from the Crookes tube. A screen coated in barium platinocyanide, the fluorescent material that was used on photographic plates, was sitting on a chair near the experiment, and every time Wilhelm turned on the electricity, the screen glowed. Not quite believing what he was seeing, he dedicated his…
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