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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
1901 Winner |
Biography
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany, as the only child of a merchant in, and manufacturer of, cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam, a member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam.
When he was three years old, his family moved to Apeldoorn in The Netherlands, where he went to the Institute of Martinus Herman van Doorn, a boarding school. He did not show any special aptitude, but showed a love of nature and was fond of roaming in the open country and forests. He was especially apt at making mechanical contrivances, a characteristic which remained with him also in later life. In 1862 he entered a technical school at Utrecht, where he was however unfairly expelled, accused of having produced a caricature of one of the teachers, which was in fact done by someone else.
He then entered the University of Utrecht in 1865 to study physics. Not having attained the credentials required for a regular student, and hearing that he could enter the Polytechnic at Zurich by passing its examination, he passed this and began studies there as a student of mechanical engineering. He attended the lectures given by Clausius and also worked in the laboratory of Kundt. Both Kundt and Clausius exerted great influence on his development. In 1869 he graduated Ph.D. at the University of Zurich, was appointed assistant to Kundt and went with him to Würzburg in the same year, and three years later to Strasbourg.
In 1874 he qualified as Lecturer at Strasbourg University and in 1875 he was appointed Professor in the Academy of Agriculture at Hohenheim in Württemberg. In 1876 he returned to Strasbourg as Professor of Physics, but three years later he accepted the invitation to the Chair of Physics in the University of Giessen.
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Speed Read: An Illuminating Accident
On a dark November evening in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was perplexed by a fluorescent screen in his laboratory that was glowing for no apparent reason. Röntgen's experiment on how cathode-ray tubes emit light appeared to be affecting something that was not part of the study. It took weeks spent eating and sleeping in his lab to identify the cause of this mysterious glow – a discovery with which Röntgen's name is linked for all time, and which earned him the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Röntgen's discovery of a new form of energy would be subsequently named after him, but he always preferred the term X-rays – from the mathematical designation for something unknown – as no one understood what these remarkable rays actually were. In a series of experiments Röntgen discovered X-rays could travel distances of metres, and could pass through materials such as cardboard, wood and aluminum unimpeded, but not denser materials such as lead and, perhaps more notably, bone.
The stark images of Röntgen's first X-ray-photographs, in particular a ghostly picture of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, with bones and a ring on her third finger clearly visible, had a profound effect worldwide. Accounts and images of Röntgen's experiments appeared in almost every newspaper and scientific publication. Doctors instantly realised this new photographic technique could help them look inside the human body without surgery, and within weeks were using X-rays to diagnose bone fractures, locate embedded bullets and identify causes of paralysis.
For a man known to be quiet and reserved, the instant global attention Röntgen and his discoveries received seems ironic, but this was thanks to another of his traits. Researchers worldwide could experiment on X-rays as Röntgen refused to patent his findings, convinced that his "inventions and discoveries belong to the world at large."
Source: Nobelprize.org
Legacy
Below is the picture of first medical X-ray by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig's hand(Courtesy - Wikipedia) .
X-radiation (composed of X-rays) is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz (3×10^16 Hz to 3×10^19 Hz) and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV.
They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma rays. In many languages, X-radiation is called Röntgen radiation, after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who is usually credited as its discoverer, and who had named it X-radiation to signify an unknown type of radiation.[1] Correct spelling of X-ray(s) in the English language includes the variants x-ray(s) and X ray(s).
To know more about X-ray(s) log into the URLs given below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/25/2/25-2-assmus.pdf
http://www.phys.boun.edu.tr/~burcin/xray_physics.pdf
http://www.mendeley.com/research/xrays-discovery-applications-1/
http://www.celnav.de/hv/xrays.pdf
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