Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845-1923)

It was more than 100 years ago that a physics professor named Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was working in his laboratory in Wurzburg, Germany doing an experiment that he discovered the phenomenon of x-ray.

Roentgen was doing an experiment where he was investigating cathode-ray fluorescence by passing electricity through tubes filled with rarefied gas - similar to fluorescent light bulbs. While doing this he noticed an unknown glow emanating from a small screen lying nearby on the table, which was not part of his work.

Roentgen was fascinated by this focused on investigating it and during that intensive research he saw the outline of the bones in his hand, then in his wife's hand. He concluded that a new type of ray emitted from the tube, passed through the covering, and casted shadows of solid objects. The rays passes through most substances, including the soft tissues of the body, but left the bones and most metals visible. One of his earliest photographic plate from his experiments was a film of his wife, Bertha's hand with a ring, was produced on Friday, November 8, 1895.

Through his work, Roentgen realized that this unknown glow or light was causing the fluorescence and the resulting image. Since X is used in mathematics to indicate an unknown quantity - Roentgen called the new phenomenon the "x-ray."

Less than two months after his discovery, Roentgen described his findings in the Wurzburg Physical Medical Society Journal and became instantly famous. So extraordinary and exciting was this discovery to the scientific word that dozens of books and thousands of articles on it were published in the first year after discovery.

This led the way to many medical advances that had begun with Roentgen's discovery of x-ray.

As the news spread rapidly through out the world equipment was quickly developed and manufactured for hospitals. As early as February 7, 1896, X-rays were being used in Canada.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1901. Roentgen refused to patent his discoveries and rejected all commercial offers relating to them. In his later years, he was embittered by the suggestion that he had taken credit for his laboratory assistant's discovery, and withdrew from public life.

Roentgen's discovery comes to Canada

Canadians were among the first to embrace Roentgen's discovery. On February 3, 1896 the first x-ray machine was assembled by Professor John Cox, Director of the Macdonald Physics Laboratory of McGill University.

On February 7, 1896, a Montreal physician Robert Kirkpatrick used Cox's machine to take an x-ray of a young man who was shot in a street brawl on Christmas Day 1895. Although the man had been in hospital previously, surgeons were unable to locate the position of the bullet in his leg, and decided to allow the wound to heal without removing the bullet. When the leg began to bother the man, Dr. Kirkpatrick decided to take an x-ray image of the leg. After exposing the firm for 45 minutes, the x-ray showed a clear image of the bullet lodged against the patient's tibia and it was subsequently removed without incident during surgery.

This use of the Roentgen's x-ray resulted in several firsts in Canada including the first known use of an x-ray image in conjunction with surgery. It was also the first time x-rays were accepted as evidence in the courtroom. This occurred when the young man who was shot, entered the x-ray image as evidence when suing the man who had shot him.