Anna Bertha Ludwig

Anna Bertha Ludwig put her hand on a photographic plate on 22 December 1895 and looked at her own skeleton. She was born in Zurich in 1839, the daughter of an innkeeper, and married Wilhelm Roentgen in 1872 after a long engagement his family had opposed. She was six years older than he was. In November 1895 he noticed that a screen coated in barium platinocyanide glowed when a covered discharge tube was running, and spent seven weeks working almost without leaving the laboratory before telling anyone - including her - what he was doing. At the end of it he brought her in. She held her hand over a photographic plate for fifteen minutes while the tube ran, and the resulting image shows the bones of her hand and the ring on her finger, with the flesh a faint shadow around them. She is reported to have said afterwards that she had seen her own death. The remark is quoted in almost every account of the discovery, is attributed to her rather than recorded verbatim at the time, and has the shape of something improved in the retelling; it is also exactly what the picture looks like. That image is why the discovery moved as fast as it did. Roentgen's paper was circulated on 1 January 1896 and the technique was in hospitals within months, because a photograph of a living hand needs no physics to be understood. She had no part in the work beyond that quarter of an hour and never claimed one. She and Roentgen adopted her niece; she was ill for years before her death in 1919, and he outlived her by four.

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