00:14Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think.
00:19Wilhelm Röngen
00:21Wilhelm Conrad Röngen was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep, in the Lower Rhine province of Germany,
00:29as the only child of a merchant inn and manufacturer of cloth.
00:34His mother was Chalot Constans Frohwein of Amsterdam, a member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam.
00:42When he was three years old, his family moved to Eppeldoorn in the Netherlands,
00:47where he went to the Institute of Martínez-Hermann van Doorn, a boarding school.
00:52He did not show any special aptitude, but showed a love of nature and was fond of roaming in the open country and forests.
00:59He was especially apt at making mechanical contrivances, a characteristic which remained with him also in later life.
01:07In 1862 he entered a technical school at Utrecht, where he was, however, unfairly expelled,
01:14accused of having produced a caricature of one of the teachers, which was in fact done by someone else.
01:21He then entered the University of Utrecht in 1865 to study physics.
01:26Not having attained the credentials required for a regular student, and hearing that he could not enter the Polytechnic at Zurich by passing its examination,
01:36he passed this and began studies there as a student of mechanical engineering.
01:42Rengen's first work was published in 1870, dealing with the specific heats of gases, followed a few years later by a paper on the thermal conductivity of crystals.
01:53Among other problems he studied were the electrical and other characteristics of quartz, the influence of pressure on the refractive indices of various fluids,
02:05the modification of the planes of polarized light by electromagnetic influences,
02:11the variations in the functions of the temperature and the compressibility of water and other fluids,
02:17the phenomena accompanying the spreading of oil drops on water.
02:21Rengen's name, however, is chiefly associated with his discovery of the rays that he called X-rays.
02:28In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure.
02:36On the evening of November the 8th 1895 he found that if the discharge tube is enclosed in a sealed, thick black carton to exclude all light,
02:48and if he worked in a dark room, a paper plate covered on one side with barium platino cyanide,
02:55placed in the path of the rays, became fluorescent even when it was as far as 2 meters from the discharge tube.
03:02During subsequent experiments he found that objects of different thicknesses interposed in the path of the rays showed variable transparency to them when recorded on a photographic plate.
03:17When he immobilized for some moments the hand of his wife in the path of the rays over a photographic plate,
03:23he observed after development of the plate an image of his wife's hand which showed the shadows thrown by the bones of her hand and that of a ring she was wearing,
03:34surrounded by the penumbra of the flesh, which was more permeable to the rays and therefore threw a fainter shadow.
03:42This was the first Rengenogram ever taken.
03:45In further experiments Rengen showed that the new rays are produced by the impact of cathode rays on a material object.
03:53Because their nature was then unknown, he gave them the name X-rays.
03:58Later, Marx von Law and his pupils showed that they are of the same electromagnetic nature as light,
04:05but differ from it only in the higher frequency of their vibration.
04:09Rengen married Anna Bertha Ludwig of Zurich, whom he had met in the cafe run by her father.
04:17She was the niece of the poet Otto Ludwig.
04:20They married in 1872 in Eppeldoorn, the Netherlands.
04:25They had no children, but in 1887 adopted Josephine Bertha Ludwig, then aged six, daughter of Mrs. Rengen's only brother.
04:36Four years after his wife, Rengen died at Munich on February the 10th, 1923, from carcinoma of the intestine.
04:46The ten and zeros of the maiters in New Yen remember her with the woman and her twin again for honey.
04:48The tomb scheme was every other, but ind expressing her Vamos or Phoebe.
04:52From the family to our white as well.
04:54It was 108, 1931, in 18zan.
04:58The 괜an world was on a story.
05:01Theというgyiser preparation where she died...
05:02But it was 11, returning to the king of theilles into each other,
05:05The tomb...
05:06Robbenly cursed him out on the fucking foot over the sea.
05:12His brother was juveniles in the drowning life.
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