What do you think?
Rate this book
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: Aufbruch ins Innere der Materie
Die Physik revolutionierte die Welt. Einer der Hauptakteure dieser Revolution war Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. Seiner bahnbrechenden Bedeutung als Entdecker der X-Strahlen zum Trotz war Röntgens eigene Biographie bisher wenig bekannt. Albrecht Fölsing schafft Abhilfe mit der Lebensgeschichte des ersten Nobelpreisträgers für Physik. »Eine Epoche der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, die sich als großes Kapitel der deutschen Kulturgeschichte erweist... sachlich, spannend.« DIE WELT
383 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
4 people want to read
About the author
Albrecht Fölsing
8 books7 followersAlbrecht Fölsing was a trained physicist turned into a scientific journalist. Having studied physics in Berlin, Philadelphia, and Hamburg, he worked as an academic research assistant for the German electron synchrotron named DESY. In the years 1973–2001, Fölsing was head of the Nature and Science Department of the North German Radio and Television. He has written several biographies of well-known physicists and studies of the "cheating factor" in science.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 14, 2017
When Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen detected “a new type of ray” in his lab on November 8, 1895 he pushed over a symbolic domino that set off a scientific revolution of countless other streams of dominos that are still falling today. Röntgen was a solitary scientist who conducted his experiments without assistants, rarely published, and never attended professional meetings or conferences. He was a respected but relatively minor figure at a small university—Würzburg was no Berlin, Strasbourg, or Göttingen—known more for his exacting measurements in how heat, light and pressure affected molecules. His focus was theory, not practice. By the time he reached his fiftieth birthday in 1895, there was no reason that any of the leaders in physics would have taken much note of him. The Bavarian government was happy with his respectable anonymity as a teacher of seminars, paid him well, and he was content with that.
No one actually knew what he was up to when he became fascinated a paper by German physicist Phillip Lenard to study how a new type of light energy, cathode rays, that were emitted from new gas-filled vacuum tubes. He mentioned to his wife that his colleagues would think he had “gone crazy.” But as he rushed to publish a report on his findings before the end of 1895, he came to the realization that once they were made public, “All hell would break loose.” Although no record exists of what he did in the lab, Fölsing, in gathering the clues found in the public record, concluded that Röntgen, an avid photographer who had a photographic plate in his lab, accidently exposed the film when working with the tubes. In the only interview he ever gave about his discovery, a leading British scientific reporter asked him what he thought. “I didn’t think,” he said, “I experimented” which led him to take the world’s first ultraviolet x-ray of his wife’s hand.
It is hard to imagine another discovery that changed the world so quickly and consequentially. He had about 70 copies of his article published and made copies of his films, carefully pasting them into about a dozen special copies for highly-esteemed colleagues. He put them in the mail on New Year’s Day 1896. On January 5, the leading physicist in Prague convinced his father, who published a newspaper in Vienna, to print a story demystifying Röntgen’s academic language into terms lay persons could grasp. He wrote that the findings “sound like a fairy tale or even an audacious April Fool’s joke.” He explained how the x-rays were absorbed by things like bone and metal and went through softer substances like human soft tissue and wood to create images that could be used one day to diagnose and heal bone injuries and see the sources of injury like bullets. Just three days later, a translation of the article appeared in a London newspaper and eight days after that, in the New York Times. Physicists throughout the world started to duplicate the experiments immediately. Röntgen was summoned to appear before Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin on Sunday, January 12 to present a private lecture.
Accolades from leading scientists throughout the world poured into Würzburg. Röntgen-mania broke out. X-rays of hands became essential parts of any respectable lab. By February, a Röntgen atlas with x-ray pictures of hands, toes, salamanders, fish, chameleons, frogs, rabbits, and snakes was published in Vienna. On February 5, William Randolph Hearst contracted with Thomas Edison to prepare x-ray photographs for publication. Within three months, doctors in the United States were experimenting to use x-rays as behavior-changing therapy on the brains of criminals, alcoholics, and smokers. By late-January, British labs were creating more effective vacuum tubes using uranium to create and already noticing a delayed effects of red, burn-like marks on patients who had been x-rayed (at the time a single x-ray could take an hour to complete); an understanding of radiation was born. By the end of the year, x-rays became a common part of most medical institutions. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity had its roots in the understanding of x-rays. And with that came the end of the pseudoscience of ether, which dominated theoretical physics in the 19th century. Further applications of tube technology and use of differing metals to enhance reflection eventually led to the development of radio vacuum tubes and the first television screens.
Röntgen was actually left behind all these developments but continued to reap the rewards of his discovery. In 1901 he was the awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics—actually the first prize ever awarded—and in 1900 he took the chair of physics at the University of Munich. With the exception of the story about his discovery and its ramifications, I think the rest of the book would only appeal to those with an interest in the history of German higher education. The first part of the book is an insight into the beginning of technical education, such as the applied sciences, and how hard it was for those fields to be taken seriously in 19th century academia. The third part focuses more on inner university politics which, in Germany, have changed little since the beginning of the 20th century.
No one actually knew what he was up to when he became fascinated a paper by German physicist Phillip Lenard to study how a new type of light energy, cathode rays, that were emitted from new gas-filled vacuum tubes. He mentioned to his wife that his colleagues would think he had “gone crazy.” But as he rushed to publish a report on his findings before the end of 1895, he came to the realization that once they were made public, “All hell would break loose.” Although no record exists of what he did in the lab, Fölsing, in gathering the clues found in the public record, concluded that Röntgen, an avid photographer who had a photographic plate in his lab, accidently exposed the film when working with the tubes. In the only interview he ever gave about his discovery, a leading British scientific reporter asked him what he thought. “I didn’t think,” he said, “I experimented” which led him to take the world’s first ultraviolet x-ray of his wife’s hand.
It is hard to imagine another discovery that changed the world so quickly and consequentially. He had about 70 copies of his article published and made copies of his films, carefully pasting them into about a dozen special copies for highly-esteemed colleagues. He put them in the mail on New Year’s Day 1896. On January 5, the leading physicist in Prague convinced his father, who published a newspaper in Vienna, to print a story demystifying Röntgen’s academic language into terms lay persons could grasp. He wrote that the findings “sound like a fairy tale or even an audacious April Fool’s joke.” He explained how the x-rays were absorbed by things like bone and metal and went through softer substances like human soft tissue and wood to create images that could be used one day to diagnose and heal bone injuries and see the sources of injury like bullets. Just three days later, a translation of the article appeared in a London newspaper and eight days after that, in the New York Times. Physicists throughout the world started to duplicate the experiments immediately. Röntgen was summoned to appear before Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin on Sunday, January 12 to present a private lecture.
Accolades from leading scientists throughout the world poured into Würzburg. Röntgen-mania broke out. X-rays of hands became essential parts of any respectable lab. By February, a Röntgen atlas with x-ray pictures of hands, toes, salamanders, fish, chameleons, frogs, rabbits, and snakes was published in Vienna. On February 5, William Randolph Hearst contracted with Thomas Edison to prepare x-ray photographs for publication. Within three months, doctors in the United States were experimenting to use x-rays as behavior-changing therapy on the brains of criminals, alcoholics, and smokers. By late-January, British labs were creating more effective vacuum tubes using uranium to create and already noticing a delayed effects of red, burn-like marks on patients who had been x-rayed (at the time a single x-ray could take an hour to complete); an understanding of radiation was born. By the end of the year, x-rays became a common part of most medical institutions. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity had its roots in the understanding of x-rays. And with that came the end of the pseudoscience of ether, which dominated theoretical physics in the 19th century. Further applications of tube technology and use of differing metals to enhance reflection eventually led to the development of radio vacuum tubes and the first television screens.
Röntgen was actually left behind all these developments but continued to reap the rewards of his discovery. In 1901 he was the awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics—actually the first prize ever awarded—and in 1900 he took the chair of physics at the University of Munich. With the exception of the story about his discovery and its ramifications, I think the rest of the book would only appeal to those with an interest in the history of German higher education. The first part of the book is an insight into the beginning of technical education, such as the applied sciences, and how hard it was for those fields to be taken seriously in 19th century academia. The third part focuses more on inner university politics which, in Germany, have changed little since the beginning of the 20th century.
Displaying 1 of 1 review