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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
X-ray Wilhelm Conrad. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
In January 1896, a typhoon of newspaper reports swept over Europe and America about the sensational discovery of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, professor at the University of Würzburg. It seemed that there was no newspaper that would not have printed a picture of the hand, which, as it turned out later, belonged to Bertha Roentgen, the professor's wife. And Professor Roentgen, having locked himself in his laboratory, continued to intensively study the properties of the rays he had discovered. The discovery of X-rays gave impetus to new research. Their study led to new discoveries, one of which was the discovery of radioactivity. The German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen was born on March 27, 1845 in Lennep, a small town near Remscheid in Prussia, as the only child of a successful textile merchant, Friedrich Konrad Roentgen, and Charlotte Constance (nee Frowijn) Roentgen. In 1848, the family moved to the Dutch city of Apeldoorn, the home of Charlotte's parents. Expeditions made by Wilhelm in his childhood in the dense forests in the vicinity of Apeldoorn instilled in him a love of wildlife for life. Roentgen entered the Utrecht Technical School in 1862, but was expelled for refusing to name a friend who had drawn an irreverent caricature of an unloved teacher. Without an official certificate of graduation from a secondary school, he formally could not enter a higher educational institution, but as a volunteer he took several courses at the University of Utrecht. After passing the entrance exam in 1865, Wilhelm was enrolled as a student at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he intended to become a mechanical engineer, and in 1868 received a diploma. August Kundt, an outstanding German physicist and professor of physics at this institute, drew attention to Wilhelm's brilliant abilities and urged him to take up physics. Roentgen followed his advice and a year later defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich, after which he was immediately appointed by Kundt as the first assistant in the laboratory. Having received the chair of physics at the University of Würzburg (Bavaria), Kundt took his assistant with him. The move to Würzburg was the beginning of an "intellectual odyssey" for Roentgen. In 1872, together with Kundt, he moved to the University of Strasbourg and in 1874 began his teaching career there as a lecturer in physics. In 1872, Roentgen married Anna Bertha Ludwig, the daughter of a boarding house owner, whom he had met in Zurich while studying at the Federal Institute of Technology. Having no children of their own, in 1881 the couple adopted the six-year-old Bertha, the daughter of Roentgen's brother. In 1875, Roentgen became a full (real) professor of physics at the Agricultural Academy in Hohenheim (Germany), and in 1876 he returned to Strasbourg to begin reading a course in theoretical physics there. Roentgen's experimental research in Strasbourg covered various areas of physics, such as the thermal conductivity of crystals and the electromagnetic rotation of the plane of polarization of light in gases, and, in the words of his biographer Otto Glaser, earned Roentgen a reputation as "a subtle classical experimental physicist." In 1879 Roentgen was appointed professor of physics at the University of Hesse, where he remained until 1888, refusing offers to take chairs in physics at the universities of Jena and Utrecht. In 1888 he returned to the University of Würzburg as professor of physics and director of the Physics Institute, where he continued to conduct experimental research on a wide range of problems, including the compressibility of water and the electrical properties of quartz. In 1894, when Roentgen was elected rector of the university, he began experimental research on electric discharge in glass vacuum tubes. On the evening of November 8, 1895, Roentgen was working as usual in his laboratory, studying cathode rays. Around midnight, feeling tired, he prepared to leave. Glancing around the laboratory, he turned off the light and was about to close the door, when he suddenly noticed some kind of luminous spot in the darkness. It turns out that a screen made of barium synergistic was glowing. Why is he glowing? The sun had long since set, the electric light could not cause a glow, the cathode tube was turned off, and, in addition, it was covered with a black cardboard cover. Roentgen took another look at the cathode tube and reproached himself for forgetting to turn it off. Feeling for the switch, the scientist turned off the receiver. Disappeared and the glow of the screen; turned on the receiver, the glow appeared again and again. So the glow is caused by the cathode tube! But how? After all, cathode rays are delayed by a cover, and the air gap between the tube and the screen for them is armor. Thus began the birth of the discovery. Recovering from a moment of amazement. Roentgen began to study the discovered phenomenon and new rays, which he called x-rays. Leaving the case on the tube so that the cathode rays were covered, he began to move around the laboratory with a screen in his hands. It turned out that one and a half to two meters is not an obstacle for these unknown rays. They easily penetrate a book, glass, frame... And when the scientist's hand was in the path of unknown rays, he saw on the screen the silhouette of her bones! Fantastic and creepy! But this is only a minute, because Roentgen's next step was a step to the cabinet where the photographic plates lay, since it was necessary to fix what he saw on the picture. Thus began a new night experiment. The scientist discovers that the rays illuminate the plate, that they do not diverge spherically around the tube, but have a certain direction ... In the morning, exhausted, Roentgen went home to rest a little, and then start working with unknown rays again. Fifty days (days and nights) were sacrificed on the altar of an unprecedented pace and depth of research. Family, health, pupils and students were forgotten at this time. He did not initiate anyone into his work until he figured out everything himself. The first person to whom Roentgen demonstrated his discovery was his wife Berta. It was a photograph of her hand, with a wedding ring on her finger, that was attached to Roentgen's article "On a new kind of rays", which he sent on December 28, 1895 to the chairman of the University's Physico-Medical Society. The article was quickly released as a separate pamphlet, and Roentgen sent it to the leading physicists in Europe. The first report of Rontgen's research, published in a local scientific journal at the end of 1895, aroused great interest both in scientific circles and among the general public. “We soon discovered,” Roentgen wrote, “that all bodies are transparent to these rays, although to a very different degree.” And on January 20, 1896, American doctors with the help of X-rays for the first time saw a broken arm of a person. Since then, the discovery of the German physicist has forever entered the arsenal of medicine. Roentgen's discovery aroused great interest in the scientific world. His experiments were repeated in almost all laboratories in the world. In Moscow they were repeated by P. N. Lebedev. In St. Petersburg, the inventor of radio, A. S. Popov, experimented with x-rays, demonstrated them at public lectures, receiving various x-rays. At Cambridge, D. D. Thomson immediately applied the ionizing effect of X-rays to study the passage of electricity through gases. His research led to the discovery of the electron. Roentgen published two more papers on x-rays in 1896 and 1897, but then his interests shifted to other areas. Doctors immediately appreciated the importance of x-rays for diagnosis. At the same time, X-rays became a sensation, which was trumpeted around the world by newspapers and magazines, often presenting materials on a hysterical note or with a comic undertone. The fame of Roentgen grew, but the scientist treated her with complete indifference. Roentgen was irritated by the sudden fall on him of fame, which took away his precious time and interfered with further experimental research. For this reason, he began to rarely publish articles, although he did not stop doing this completely: during his life, Roentgen wrote 58 articles. In 1921, when he was 76 years old, he published an article on the electrical conductivity of crystals. The scientist did not take a patent for his discovery, refused the honorary, highly paid position of a member of the Academy of Sciences, from the Department of Physics at the University of Berlin, from the title of nobility. On top of that, he managed to turn against himself the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1899, shortly after the closure of the physics department at the University of Leipzig. Roentgen became professor of physics and director of the Physics Institute at the University of Munich. While in Munich, Roentgen learned that he was the first recipient of the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the extraordinarily important services to science, expressed in the discovery of remarkable rays, subsequently named after him." At the presentation of the laureate, K. T. Odhner, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said: "There is no doubt how much progress physical science will achieve when this previously unknown form of energy is sufficiently explored." Odhner then reminded the audience that X-rays had already found numerous practical applications in medicine. Roentgen accepted this award with joy and excitement, but because of his shyness he refused to make any public appearances. Although Roentgen himself and other scientists did much to study the properties of open rays, their nature remained unclear for a long time. But in June 1912, at the University of Munich, where Roentgen had worked since 1900, M. Laue, W. Friedrich and P. Knipping discovered interference and diffraction of X-rays, which proved their wave nature. When the overjoyed students ran to their teacher, they were met with a cold welcome. Roentgen simply did not believe in all these fairy tales about interference; since he himself did not find it in due time, it means that it does not exist. But young scientists have already got used to the oddities of their boss and decided that now it’s better not to argue with him, some time will pass and X-ray himself will admit that he was wrong, because everyone had a fresh story with an electron in their memory. Roentgen for a long time not only did not believe in the existence of the electron, but even forbade the mention of this word in his physical institute. And only in May 1905, knowing that his Russian student A.F. Ioffe would speak on a forbidden topic during the defense of his doctoral dissertation, he, as if by the way, asked him: “Do you believe that there are balls that flatten out, when are they moving?" Ioffe replied: "Yes, I'm sure they exist, but we don't know everything about them, and therefore we need to study them." The dignity of great people is not in their oddities, but in the ability to work and admit they are wrong. Two years later, the "electronic taboo" was lifted at the Munich Physics Institute. Moreover, Roentgen, as if wanting to atone for his guilt, invited Lorentz himself, the creator of the electronic theory, to the department of theoretical physics, but the scientist could not accept this offer. And the diffraction of X-rays soon became not just the property of physicists, but laid the foundation for a new, very powerful method for studying the structure of matter - X-ray diffraction analysis. In 1914, M. Laue for the discovery of X-ray diffraction, and in 1915, father and son Bragg for studying the structure of crystals using these rays, became Nobel Prize winners in physics. It is now known that X-rays are short-wave electromagnetic radiation with a high penetrating power. Roentgen was quite satisfied with the knowledge that his discovery was of such great importance for medicine. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received many awards, including the Rumfoord Medal of the Royal Society of London, the Barnard Gold Medal for Distinguished Service to Science from Columbia University, and was an honorary member and corresponding member of scientific societies in many countries. The modest, shy Roentgen, as already mentioned, was deeply disgusted by the very idea that his person could attract everyone's attention. He loved to be in nature, visiting Weilheim many times during his holidays, where he climbed the neighboring Bavarian Alps and hunted with friends. Roentgen retired from his posts in Munich in 1920, shortly after his wife's death. He died on February 10, 1923 from bowel cancer. It is worth finishing the story about Roentgen with the words of one of the founders of Soviet physics A.F. Ioffe, who knew the great experimenter well: “Roentgen was a great and integral person in science and life. All his personality, his activity and scientific methodology belong to the past. But only on the foundation , created by physicists of the XIX century and, in particular, Roentgen, modern physics could appear. Author: Samin D.K.
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