Life / Medicine

X-rays

Wilhelm Roentgen discovered rays that photograph the inside of the living body.

On 8 November 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen noticed a new kind of ray from a cathode-ray tube in Wuerzburg and soon imaged his wife's hand. X-ray machines were in hospitals within months, and he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901). They began medical imaging and later became the basis of the crystallography that decoded DNA and proteins.