Wilhelm Röntgen

Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays and refused to patent them. Born in Lennep in Prussia in 1845 and raised in the Netherlands, he was expelled from technical school for refusing to name a classmate who had drawn a caricature of a teacher, which left him without the qualification for university. He was admitted to the Zurich Polytechnic on an entrance examination, took a doctorate, and built an academic career in Germany. He was professor of physics at Würzburg in November 1895, working on cathode rays in evacuated glass tubes — a well-studied field. On 8 November he had covered a tube in black cardboard to exclude its light, and noticed that a screen coated with barium platinocyanide, lying some distance away, was glowing. Something was passing through the cardboard. He spent the following seven weeks alone in the laboratory, eating and sleeping there, and established the essentials: the rays travelled in straight lines, were not deflected by magnets, and passed through wood, paper and flesh but were stopped by metal and bone. He called them X for unknown. On 22 December he made a photographic plate of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, showing the bones and her ring; she is reported to have said she had seen her death. He published on 28 December, and the news went round the world within weeks. Hospitals were using the technique in months. He refused patents, holding that the discovery belonged to everyone, and gave his 1901 Nobel Prize money — the first in physics — to his university. He died in 1923 in the inflation, close to bankrupt.

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