by Craig Nelson
It was mysterious, and alarming. Wilhelm immediately began a series of investigatory experiments to learn as much as possible about these rays. He kept using thicker and thicker objects to try to block the emanations, from paper to cardboard to books, then experimented with sheets of metal. Only a disk of lead would wholly interfere; otherwise, the Leuchtschirm continued to luminesce. At one point he photographed his door, which produced a strange effect in the plate, and he couldn’t understand this result. He took the door apart, and the answer was plain: lead paint.
Once while he was waving a lead disk between the tube and the screen, his hand fell before the stream. On the Leuchtschirm, within the vague, dark outline of the shadow of his skin, the bones of his fingers could plainly be seen. He was so stunned that he decided to tell absolutely no one about this: “When at first I made the startling discovery of the penetrating rays, it was such an extraordinary astonishing phenomenon that I had to convince myself repeatedly by doing the same experiment over and over again to make absolutely certain that the rays actually existed. . . . I was torn between doubt and hope, and did not want to have any other thoughts interfere with my experiments. . . . I was as if in a state of shock.”
For the next two months, Röntgen spent every possible moment exploring this discovery, photographing the effects of the rays passing through wood, metal, books, and flesh, spending so much time at the lab that his wife became upset. When her husband then described what he’d found, Anna Bertha thought Wilhelm had lost his mind. On December 22, 1895, he asked her to come downstairs with him and had her rest her hand atop a cassette holding a photographic plate. He showered her with rays for fifteen minutes, then asked her to wait. He returned with the developed plate: a photograph of the bones in her hands and the rings on her fingers, with her flesh in soft outline around the whole. He was so pleased with what he had discovered. She was horrified, and like so many others in that era who would, for the first time, view what will remain, she cried out, “I have seen my death!”
Even after constant efforts in the lab, Röntgen remained so mystified by his rays that he could only name them X . . . the unknown. Almost immediately after he began to report his findings, others started working with cathode-ray screens and published follow-up reports in scientific, medical, and electrical journals, which were in turn almost immediately taken up by the popular press. McClure’s: “Exactly what kind of a force Professor Röntgen has discovered he does not know. As will be seen below, he declines to call it a new kind of light, or a new form of electricity. He has given it the name of the X rays. Others speak of it as the Röntgen rays. Thus far its results only, and not its essence, are known. In the terminology of science it is generally called ‘a new mode of motion,’ or, in other words, a new force. As to whether it is or not actually a force new to science, or one of the known forces masquerading under strange conditions, weighty authorities are already arguing. More than one eminent scientist has already affected to see in it a key to the great mystery of the law of gravity. All who have expressed themselves in print have admitted, with more or less frankness, that, in view of Röntgen’s discovery, science must forth-with revise, possibly to a revolutionary degree, the long accepted theories concerning the phenomena of light and sound.”
“Röntgen ray” articles appeared on January 5 in Vienna’s Wiener Press; January 7, in Frankfurt’s Frankfurter and Berlin’s Vossiche; January 11, London’s Saturday Review; January 13, Paris’s Le Matin; January 16, New York Times. In a journalist’s game of “telephone,” each would rewrite the previous item with an ever-growing collapse in accuracy, which continually enraged Röntgen. As the public then became obsessed with the discovery, the era’s newspapers fed the hunger by publishing thousands of haunting photographs illuminating the shadowy flesh and lacy, geometric skeletons of mice, chickens, puppies, and birds. Journalist Cleveland Moffett described one example of what were called shadow photographs: “A more remarkable picture is one taken in the same way, but with a somewhat longer exposure—of a rabbit laid upon the ebonite plate, and so successfully pierced with the Röntgen rays that not only the bones of the body show plainly, but also the six grains of shot with which the animal was killed. The bones of the fore legs show with beautiful distinctness inside the shadowy flesh, while a closer inspection makes visible the ribs, the cartilages of the ear, and a lighter region in the centre of the body, which marks the location of the heart.” Inside of a year, over fifty X-ray books and a thousand articles were released, and at London’s Crystal Palace, lucky visitors could have their change purses Röntgen-rayed as a souvenir. The fad was versified in Photography magazine:
The Roentgen Rays, the Roentgen Rays.
What is this craze?
The town’s ablaze
With the new phase
Of X-ray’s ways.
I’m full of daze,
Shock and amaze;
For nowadays
I hear they’ll gaze
Thro’ cloak and gown—and even stays.
These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.
Kaiser Wilhelm asked his nation’s most famous scientist to give him a private royal lecture in the Star Chamber on January 13, 1896, after which Röntgen was decorated with the Prussian Order of the Crown. One newspaper summed up the revolution: “Civilized man found himself the astonished owner of a new and mysterious power,” and for this power, Röntgen would be awarded, in 1901, the first Nobel Prize in Physics. At the same time, his embarrassment at the public’s hands continued, with X-rays taken up by spiritualists, Christians, somnambulists, and the temperance movement, with claims as well that they could erase the mustaches of women and transmit anatomical drawings directly into the brains of medical students. One man announced a secret alchemy technique of x-raying ordinary metals into gold; another claimed to have photographed souls.
Cartoons in British Punch and American Life portrayed high-society swells reduced to skeletons, while eavesdropping maids no longer had to stoop with their ears to keyholes, as they could now see through doors. The state of New Jersey thought it necessary to debate a bill forbidding X-ray glasses in theaters, while a London manufacturer produced shielding undergarments for ladies who didn’t want to be seen naked on the streets by hordes of X-ray-spectacle-equipped voyeurs.
Miracles in our time always seem to combine blessing with menace. Röntgen had used a zinc box and a lead plate to focus his beams, to protect the photographic plates in his lab from being accidentally exposed. This procedure coincidentally protected Röntgen himself. Others were not so fortunate. In 1896 Columbia’s H. D. Hawks demonstrated Röntgen rays at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York City. He noticed a dryness on his skin, which became something like a sunburn, and then scales appeared. Over the following months, his fingernails stopped growing, the hair on the side of his head fell out, and he had trouble seeing. His eyelashes and eyebrows fell out, and the skin became extremely painful.
The February 1896 Electrical World announced that Thomas Edison suffered from “Röntgenmania.” Following the public euphoria, the great inventor ordered his employees to investigate any and all X-ray possibilities for seventy hours nonstop, keeping them awake and working by hiring a man to aggressively play the accordion. By May, the New Jersey lab offered a fluoroscope demonstration at New York’s Electrical Exhibit so that the public could appraise its own bones. The exhibit was run by glassblower Clarence Madison Dally, who then spent a number of years helping to develop an Edison X-ray lightbulb. After eight years of work, Dally’s hair fell out and his skin started erupting in lesions that wouldn’t heal. Edison canceled the bulb, but Dally continued working with Röntgen rays. Burns on his hands became cancerous; both of his arms were amputated to save his life. It didn’t work, and he died in 1898 at the age of thirty-nine, becoming the first human known to be killed by X-rays. His death stopped Edison’s Röntgenmania for good; the wizard of Menlo Park never worked with radiation again.
Blessing, with menace. X-
rays started being used for medical diagnosis eight weeks after Röntgen announced his discovery. A student at Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago, Emil Grubbe, stuck his hand in an X-ray machine and noticed that, after a while, the skin from that hand was falling off. Showing this to one of his professors, he convinced him to try the rays on a breast-cancer patient named Rose Lee, diagnosed as hopeless. With the rays, Lee improved; the cancer shrank and seemed to remit. Radiotherapy was born. In February 1896, Grubbe founded the first radiation-therapy facility in Chicago—he didn’t graduate from medical school until 1898—and by 1929, the rays had so damaged his left hand with cancer that it had to be amputated. In 1960, he died of squamous cell carcinoma.
By 1959, Germany’s Röntgen Society announced that 359 people had died of X-ray overexposure. The mixed blessing produced by science, and its disturbing qualities, triggered mixed feelings about the discoverer. Wilhelm Röntgen, with his unruly beard and hair, wild and untamed, would become the world’s image of a mad genius.
When Röntgen sent preprints of his article announcing X-rays out to fellow scientists at the end of 1895, his discovery was the dramatic breakthrough in an investigation of the mysterious relationship between matter and energy that had been building long before he’d ever charged a tube. One of the recipients was French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who shared Röntgen’s X-ray photographs with the fellow members of Paris’s Académie des Sciences on January 20, 1896. In that audience was Antoine Henri Becquerel, who, inspired by the fact that the X-rays seemed to emanate from the area of the vacuum tube that glowed, immediately began experimenting with fluorescent materials and their emissions.
Henri’s grandfather, Antoine César Becquerel, was a Parisian celebrity for having discovered the use of electrolytes to refine metal and was one of the first graduates of the École Polytechnique, which became so central to the military, scientific, and engineering cultures of France that anyone wanting a career in those fields needed to be a polytechnicien. After Antoine César was told in 1815 that he was terminally ill and that death would arrive shortly, he resigned from the army, became a physics professor at Paris’s Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, developed a keen interest in electricity, electrochemistry, and fluorescence, became the museum’s director, and lived to the age of ninety. After himself graduating from the Polytechnique, son Alexandre-Edmond worked at his father’s museum and taught at his father’s school. The Becquerels would assemble at their institution a profound collection of minerals that could absorb, and then radiate, light. They were of two kinds: those that could glow after the light was turned off phosphoresced; and those that only glowed with the light on luminesced. Antoine César told his son, “I will never be satisfied with explanations they give why some chemicals and minerals shine in the dark. Fluorescence is a deep mystery and nature will not give up the secret easily.” By 1896 and the age of X-rays, grandson Antoine Henri had the Musée chair and taught at the Polytechnique, following in his father’s and grandfather’s shoes with fluorescence and phosphorescence; he also typified his era by sporting a commandingly luxuriant and astonishingly manicured barrage of facial hair.
After winning his doctorate investigating crystal phosphorescence, Henri decided to take the Becquerels’ dynastic expertise into a new direction inspired by Röntgen, with this one experiment: “One wraps a Lumière photographic plate with a bromide emulsion [photography then being done on glass panes coated with a warmed colloidal suspension of potassium bromide and silver nitrate] in two sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day. One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance [Becquerel used uranyl potassium sulfate—a uranium salt], and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours. When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes that the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative. If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the paper a piece of money or a metal screen pierced with a cut-out design, one sees the image of these objects appear on the negative. . . . One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper.” If Becquerel had been able to conduct his research with modern photographic paper, he would have been even more flabbergasted, for the results are the shadow of a rock veined in energy; matter seeming to pulse with an inner life.
Henri was trying to determine if uranium captures sunlight and emits it later. One day was so overcast that he decided it wouldn’t be productive, so he put away that day’s plate and his rocks in a drawer. By accident, he developed that pane as well and was stunned to find that “there is an emission of rays without apparent cause. The sun has been excluded.” Even after leaving his ore in the dark for many months, it still inscribed its uranic form into the photographic gelatin, and no other element he tried matched this feat. When he discovered that uranium’s emanations could penetrate aluminum, copper, and even platinum, he believed he’d discovered another form of Röntgen rays.
Becquerel’s uranium results were in equal measure mystifying and alarming because all the other known incidents of phosphorescence and luminescence began with an external source of illumination. Instead, the rays of uranium emitted all on their own accord. Unlike what everyone had known so far about the boundaries of the material world, Becquerel’s accident revealed matter creating energy through its own volition: “Its luminosity came from within.” He had discovered light that comes from a stone, and called it les rayons uraniques—“uranic rays.”
Despite this earthshaking revelation, scientists at the time continued studying Röntgen rays instead of uranics—which, after all, did not dramatically reveal skeletons—but that lack of broad interest appealed to a Sorbonne graduate student looking for a topic for a doctorate in 1897, as this meant there was no lengthy history of journal scholarship to research, and the properties of uranic rays could immediately be investigated firsthand in the lab. This academic “shortcut” led to six years of backbreaking toil and a discovery that would revolutionize the science of physics, as well as the stature of women in the world.
When they were teenagers together in Warsaw, Bronya Skłodowska (Squaw-DOFF-ska) made a pact with her littlest sister, Manya. If Bronya was accepted to medical school in Paris, Manya would work two years to support her; then if Manya was accepted to the university, she would be supported in turn. As Polish women were forbidden from anything approaching higher education in the czarist Russian colony of that time, though, they first attended the Floating University—“we agreed among ourselves to give evening courses, each one teaching what he knew best,” as Manya described it. This illicit underground educational collective got its name from the fact that its classes met in changing locations, the better to evade the eyes of imperial authorities and local snitches, and its students’ lofty goal went far beyond mere self-improvement. They hoped their grassroots educational movement would raise the likelihood of eventual Polish liberation, and many followed the “positivist” philosophy of Auguste Comte, which promoted a scientific method for understanding both human affairs and the universe. Even to this day in the Polish tongue, a positivist is a pragmatist, accepting of people as they are and the world as it is.
From the example of the Skłodowskas, the Floating University was exemplary in educating its brave students. Bronya was indeed accepted to medical school at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Manya, as promised, began work as a nanny, first in Kraków with a family whom she unreservedly despised, telling her cousin Henrietta on December 10, 1885, “My existence has been that of a prisoner [working for] a family of lawyers [who] when there is company speak a chimney-sweeper’s kind of French. . . . I shouldn’t like my worst enemy to live in such a hell. . . . They are sunk in the darkest stupidity. . . . I learned to know the human race a little better by being there. I learned that the characters described in novels really do exist, and that one must not enter into contact wit
h people who have been corrupted by wealth.”
Manya was then hired by the Zorawskis, the managers of a sugar-beet plantation north of Warsaw. The family house was stucco, with a pleasure garden, a croquet lawn, forty horses, and sixty cows, adjacent to the immense brick sugar-beet factory, which processed the bounty of two hundred acres, continually arriving in a stream of oxen carts, and discharged into the river a “dark, sticky scum.” Her charges on the estate included Bronka, eighteen; Andzia, ten; Stas, three; and Maryshna, six months. Manya wrote Henrietta that “Stas is very funny. His nyanya told him God was everywhere. And he, with his little face agonized, asked: ‘Is he going to catch me? Will he bite me?’ . . . I ought to think myself very lucky.” Manya and Bronka, with the parents’ assent, spent two hours a day teaching the farm’s eighteen peasant children how to read and write in Polish—an effort considered such a crime by Russian authorities it was punished with hard labor at a concentration camp. The Zorawskis paid Manya a good salary of five hundred rubles a year, and she would stay with them for four years. This job would change Manya’s future course in the world, but it also included “moments which I shall certainly count among the most cruel of my life.”
The cruelty arrived when firstborn son Kazimierz (Casimir), studying mathematics and agricultural engineering at Warsaw University, returned home for the holidays. He quickly fell in love with the nineteen-year-old Manya, and she fell back, tail over teacup. In time, he told his parents they wanted to get married, and the young couple expected a happy consent. Everyone adored Manya. But, they were wrong. The parents believed their brilliant son was destined to marry above, not below, his station and forbade an engagement with this penniless nobody. Casimir agreed to his parents’ wishes, which made him seem weak to Manya, but she still loved him, and she couldn’t afford to quit a job that paid so well.