Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  The last decade of the nineteenth century saw a series of astonishing discoveries about the nature of matter, culminating in the moment when Pierre Curie held aloft that beguiling vial of luminous radium. But the first hints of the new physics came from a small German university in 1895. It was a discovery that quite literally transformed our way of looking at ourselves and the world.

  On a late November afternoon, a physicist at the University of Würzburg was setting up an experiment with a Crookes tube, a glass vacuum tube with wires sealed into each end which allowed an electric current to build up inside. It was named after the famous English chemist Sir William Crookes, who had pioneered the investigation of electrical discharges in vacuum tubes, principally what were called cathode rays. When the current to the tube was switched on, a violet or green glow could be seen starting at the positive (anode) end of the tube and gradually fading before it reached the negative (cathode) end.

  The experimenter, Professor Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, had constructed a box of black, light-proof card around the glass tube. He was fascinated by the tube’s ability to create rays. Today he wanted to see if any could penetrate beyond its glass walls. But, as the electric current built up inside the tube, he became aware of a strange green glow coming from a bench a metre away. He switched the current off, and the glow faded.

  When Röntgen switched the current back on again, his eyes were fixed on the adjacent bench. Again a green light shone out, as if something in the gloomy room had been ‘smitten with a ray of bright sunshine’.14 He struck a match and went over to investigate. On the bench he found a small cardboard screen coated with barium platinocyanide, a chemical whose atoms emit light, or fluoresce, when struck by rays. Röntgen found that whenever the Crookes tube was charged with electricity, the screen glowed with its distinctive green light.

  The 50-year-old physicist knew that he had made the discovery of his life. A mysterious ray was being generated in the Crookes tube and passing right through its lightproof covering. This was something quite new and unexpected. The rather staid professor became so absorbed in his astonishing discovery that he completely lost track of time. The clock ticking on the wall above his bench was forgotten. When he failed to return home for dinner, his puzzled wife dispatched a servant to find him. But as soon as he’d eaten, the distracted Röntgen grabbed his hat and coat and hurried back to the laboratory. There he continued exploring the mysterious rays late into the night. Indeed, so mysterious were these rays that Röntgen christened them ‘X’ for unknown – X-rays.

  Over the course of the following days and nights he saw what no person had ever seen before. When he held his hand between the tube and the fluorescent screen, he could see a shadow of his hand cast by the invisible X-rays. But inside the shadow, Röntgen suddenly realized he could also see the bones of his own hand. It must have been a heart-stopping moment. He could see through his own flesh and blood! But what kind of rays could pass through human flesh? Soon Röntgen, a keen photographer, found that he could capture images with these unearthly rays, which travelled effortlessly through a thick book, a plank of wood and even a thin sheet of metal.

  Wilhelm Röntgen was working such long hours that his wife began to fear for his health. So he finally plucked up the courage to tell her what he had discovered. When her husband said that he had found a way to see through solid objects, she must have thought he had taken leave of his senses. To prove that he was not mad, he placed her hand on a photographic plate and powered up the Crookes tube. When the plate was developed, his wife saw an image of the bones in her hand surrounded by a ghostly veil of insubstantial flesh. On one skeletal finger was the dark band of her wedding ring. It was an astonishing image, verging on the miraculous.

  Another person at this time who saw his own hand X-rayed, described the experience: ‘Every bone is perfect, even the cartilaginous spaces between being discernible. It is impossible to describe the feeling of awe that one experiences on actually seeing the image of his own skeleton within the enshrouding flesh.’15 For Röntgen’s wife, as for many people, the sight of her own bones was a chilling reminder of her own mortality.

  Röntgen finally announced his discovery in a scientific journal at the end of December 1895. The news travelled fast and within days, the world’s press was hailing his new rays as a ‘marvellous triumph of science’.16 Some readers simply didn’t believe the newspaper reports, refusing ‘to be hoodwinked by sensation-mongering journalists’, as one writer put it.17 But it was hard to ignore the evidence of your eyes. Soon X-ray photographs, like ghostly glimpses of a hidden world, were appearing in all the newspapers and journals of the day.

  At a public lecture where Professor Röntgen demonstrated X-ray photography, the final images, or ‘shadowgrams’, were greeted with the kind of cheering and loud applause that was usually reserved for great theatrical performances. This was science for the common man. But emperors too were impressed. Kaiser Wilhelm II personally awarded Röntgen an important Prussian decoration after attending one of his lecture. The world was awestruck by the Röntgen rays, as they were soon being called, although never by their extremely modest discoverer.

  According to one journal, ‘civilized man found himself the astonished owner of a new and mysterious power’. The writer continued:

  Never has a scientific discovery so completely and irresistibly taken the world by storm. Its results were of a kind sure to acquire prompt notoriety. The performances of ‘Röntgen’s rays’ are obvious to the man in the street; they are repeated in every lecture-room; they are caricatured in comic prints; hits are manufactured out of them at the theatres; nay, they are personally interesting to every one afflicted with a gouty finger or a misshapen joint, and were turned to account, at the last Nottingham Assizes, to secure damages for an injury to a lady’s ankle.18

  In laboratories and law courts alike, Röntgen’s discovery was the subject on everyone’s lips. Visitors to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London queued impatiently to see ‘the Wondrous X Rays, the Greatest Scientific Discovery of the Age’. Posters promised that visitors would be able to ‘Count the coins within your purse’, although at a charge of threepence – a considerable sum for working people – those purses would be rather less full when they left than when they arrived.19

  In 1896, newspapers were full of haunting, ethereal ‘shadow pictures’. Among the many images were skeletal hands, a ‘living but chloroformed mouse’ whose diaphanous shoulder blades looked like ‘the wings of a bee’, a two-day-old puppy, a chicken with a broken leg laid out like a bony marionette, even an ancient Egyptian mummified bird stripped of its wrappings for the first time in thousands of years by the mysterious rays.20 To the popular mind, Professor Röntgen was a scientific wizard, drawing back the veil of appearances so that people could gaze for the first time upon nature’s hidden secrets.

  The popular American magazine McClure’s sent a reporter to interview the wizard of Würzburg in his laboratory. The room where the miraculous had been revealed was ‘bare and unassuming to a degree’. Professor Röntgen entered his laboratory ‘like an amiable gust of wind’. His ‘whole appearance bespeaks enthusiasm and energy’, claimed the man from McClure’s, adding that ‘his long, dark hair stood straight up from his forehead, as if he were permanently electrified by his own enthusiasm’. From Röntgen to Einstein, unruly hair has always been seized upon by journalists as a sign of eccentric genius if not incipient madness. Clearly, the figure of the scientist-inventor was as instantly recognizable in 1896 as he is today in characters such as Dr Emmett Brown from the Back to the Future films.

  The reporter described the Professor as a Sherlock Holmes of science, ‘a man who, once upon the track of a mystery which appealed to him, would pursue it with unremitting vigour’. Nevertheless, this scientific sleuth remained baffled by X-rays, as Röntgen frankly admitted to the awe-struck interviewer.

  ‘Is it light?’ asked the reporter.

  ‘No,’ replied the Professor.


  ‘Is it electricity?’

  ‘Not in any known form.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked the man, his voice hushed.

  ‘I don’t know.’21

  America was engulfed by a wave of ‘Röntgen mania’. The Professor himself was so appalled by the unscientific media frenzy that his first interview was also his last, and he withdrew forthwith from the limelight. But the damage had been done. Within two months of Röntgen’s discovery hitting the headlines, Philadelphia and Chicago had sold out of Crookes tubes. A worried assemblyman in Somerset County, New Jersey, brought forward a bill in the State Legislature banning the use of X-ray opera glasses in the theatre. A similar concern for public decency led an English firm to market X-ray-proof underwear for ladies.

  A contributor to Photography magazine put the salacious possibilities of Röntgen’s discovery into verse:

  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 now-a-days

  I hear they’ll gaze

  Thro’ cloak and gown – and even stays,

  These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.22

  In February 1896, media mogul William Randolph Hearst telegraphed America’s most famous scientist and inventor, Thomas Edison, asking for a ‘cathodograph’ of the living human brain.23 Never one to turn down a good publicity opportunity, Edison agreed. Expectant reporters staked out Edison’s laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, eager for news of this latest scientific marvel. Inside his ‘invention factory’, America’s own Wizard worked day and night to capture the matter of the mind on a photographic plate.24 Of course, it was impossible, and after three weeks of waiting in the cold the newshounds ran out of patience and departed.

  Edison did, however, produce one of the first fluoroscopes, a device which enabled live, instantaneous X-ray images to be seen on a fluorescent screen. It must have been an extraordinary, almost revelatory experience for people at this time to see such images from within their own bodies. Ordinary moving pictures were scarcely a year old. Louis Lumière had patented his cinematograph in 1895. The technological innocence of people at this time is difficult to imagine in our own age of virtual reality. An audience at one of the first films by the Lumière brothers, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), ran from their chairs at the sight of a train hurtling towards them from the screen.

  Georges Méliès, the pioneer of the trick film, made one of the first movies about X-rays in 1897, although like others of its day it was just a minute long. In the film, Les Rayons Roentgen, a man steps behind a screen, where – lo and behold – the X-ray of his skeleton appears. But then, with masterly cinematic sleight of hand, the skeleton steps out from behind the screen and the man’s empty skin drops to the floor. It’s a superb visual joke, and the film ends with a slapstick explosion as the X-ray equipment blows up, killing the scientist.

  When the American Wizard’s fluoroscope went on public display, hundreds waited in line to see ‘Edison’s Beneficient [sic] X-ray Exhibit’.25 The savvy inventor was soon marketing the ‘Thomas A. Edison X-ray Kit’ and even produced a hand-held X-ray device. As the craze gripped the nation, an Iowa farmer claimed to have transmuted a piece of metal worth 13 cents into $153 worth of gold by using X-rays. It was even suggested by a New York newspaper that the College of Physicians and Surgeons were using X-rays ‘to reflect anatomic improvement on the ordinary methods of learning’.26 Such was the public hunger for miraculous science that, within a year of their discovery, over a thousand articles and fifty books had been published on X-rays.

  The medical potential of Röntgen’s new technique for seeing inside bodies was immediately realized. The veil of flesh could now be withdrawn at will, with obvious diagnostic applications. One of the first medical X-rays shows a needle in the foot of a Manchester dancing girl, taken just weeks after Röntgen’s announcement. Such was the eagerness of medics to find people to X-ray that one wit commented that ‘suitable patients are at a premium. A woman who has absorbed a needle, a man harbouring a projectile, is a persona grata at every Surgical Institute in the Old and New Worlds.’27

  On the battlefield, bicycle-powered X-ray machines, which looked as though they had been designed by Heath Robinson, effortlessly located bullets in bodies. Surgeons no longer needed their often inadequately sterilized probe: ‘Modern science has provided the surgeons with a probe which is painless, which is exact, and, most important of all, which is aseptic’.28

  Thomas Mann’s classic novel The Magic Mountain (1924) explores the attitudes of a generation doomed to die in the trenches of World War I. This pathology of an age sleepwalking towards the abyss of war is set in a sanatorium in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. Here the main character, Hans Castorp, has his first X-ray. The gloomy X-ray laboratory smells of ‘stale ozone’ and reminds him of a ‘technological witches’ kitchen’. The radiologist proclaims X-rays as a ‘triumph of the age’ and, like a conjuror, announces the start of the process: ‘The magicking is about to begin!’ With these words his assistant pulls a lever and releases an electrical display worthy of any mad scientist’s laboratory:

  Now, for the space of two seconds, fearful powers were in play – streams of thousands, of a hundred thousand of volts, Hans Castorp seemed to recall – which were necessary to pierce through solid matter. They could hardly be confined to their office, they tried to escape through other outlets: there were explosions like pistol-shots, blue sparks on the measuring apparatus; long lightnings crackled along the walls.29

  Hans Castorp’s cousin is the first to be examined with the fluoroscope. Castorp watches, fascinated by ‘a bag, a strange, animal shape’ which ‘expanded and contracted regularly, a little after the fashion of a swimming jelly-fish’. Suddenly, he realizes what it is. Castorp is shocked: ‘Good God, it was the heart…’ This glimpse into the living body of his cousin is a profoundly moving experience for Castorp. He is overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. Although he is unable to take his eyes away from the image of ‘this lean memento mori’, he feels that it is forbidden knowledge, something no one should see. As he looks at his own hand rendered translucent on the fluoroscope’s screen, he realizes why he feels so ambivalent:

  And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he must have expected, but what it is hardly permitted man to see: he looked into his own grave. The process of decay was forestalled by the powers of the light-ray, the flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist, and there within it was the finely turned skeleton of his own hand, the seal ring he had inherited from his grandfather – a hard, material object, with which man adorns the body that is fated to melt away beneath it, when it passes on to another flesh that can wear it yet a little while… He gazed at this familiar part of his own body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die.30

  At Davos, the X-ray machine is invaluable in diagnosing tuberculosis. Elsewhere the therapeutic uses of the rays were also rapidly exploited, often with dubious results. In December 1896, a Viennese doctor used X-rays to treat a five-year-old girl with hirsutism, a condition in which too much hair grows on the body. Her back was exposed to X-rays for two hours a day for sixteen days. The unwanted hair did indeed fall out, but at a high cost to the patient: the poor child’s back became acutely inflamed, as if she had been badly scalded. ‘This accident was full of instruction,’ observed her doctor dryly, before reducing the X-ray treatment to ten minutes a day.31 Elsewhere, doctors began prescribing what were known as ‘X-ray séances’ to cure everything from cancer to painful inflammations.32

  Scientists had little understanding of what X-rays were or what effects they had on the body. Their use posed grave risks to both patient and radiologist. Long exposures were needed for photographs: forty minutes was not uncommon. By the end of 1896, twenty-t
hree incidents of burns had been reported. In March that year, the great Wizard himself, Edison, noted that his eyes were sore after experimenting with X-rays. His assistant, Clarence Dally, suffered rather more serious injury. He was fated to become the first of many ‘martyrs to science through the Roentgen rays’, to quote the title of a book by a radiologist who himself died of cancer.33

  High-energy electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays, can punch electrons out of atoms. This results in atoms becoming electrically charged, a process known as ionization. Such ionized atoms can be highly unstable. In living tissue they can cause changes leading to serious genetic damage, illness and ultimately death. But X-ray injuries often take time to appear, and for many years the full dangers went unrecognized.

  Dally worked with X-rays for several years with little or no protection. Initially he was helping Edison develop an X-ray light bulb for mass production. But when Dally’s hair fell out and he developed painful ulcers that refused to heal, Edison wisely decided that ‘it would not be a very popular kind of light’, and dropped the idea.34 However, Dally continued to work with X-rays, and it was not long before his radiation burns developed into cancer. Eventually, his left arm was amputated up to the elbow and his right removed up to the shoulder, but even these drastic measures failed to save him. He died in 1904 at the age of 39. In 1936 a monument was erected in Hamburg to the X-ray and radium martyrs. Initially only 169 names were remembered, but by 1959 that death toll had risen to 360. Although Röntgen’s name is not one of them, Marie Curie’s is.

  While X-rays were celebrated by journalists, fiction writers highlighted the potential dangers of this new knowledge. Just weeks after the discovery of X-rays, a wonderfully grotesque short story called ‘Röntgen’s Curse’ was published in the popular Longman’s Magazine. Written by C. H. T. Crosthwaite, it tells how a scientist named Herbert Newton is determined to make a great discovery and be ‘hailed as the greatest benefactor of the human race in modern times’. Inspired by the possibilities of Röntgen’s ‘photography of the invisible’, Newton feels there’s ‘no limit to the power which might be acquired by one who could make the X-rays his servants, and compel them to obey him’.35