Friday, November 26, 2010

X-Ray History--Hidden Kitten, Quackery and more

115-Year-Old X-Ray

This 115-year-old picture of fingers is one of the first images ever made with x-rays
The hand belonged to Anna Bertha, wife of German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, the discover of x-rays. The black glob on the fourth finger is a ring made of gold, which absorbs x-rays.


X-Rays Target Presidential Bullet


A medical x-ray shows the rib cage of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt after an attempted assassination in 1912 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning. The nonfatal bullet was never removed .


X-Rays Reveal Art Under Art


Today, art historians routinely use x-rays to peer beneath the finished surfaces of paintings—such as Caravaggio's 17th-century masterpiece "Adoration of the Shepherds" (shown)—to reveal rough sketches or "underdrawings" and to discover changes that the artist made during the painting process.


X-Rays Find Inner Kitten


X-rays can also be used as a noninvasive way of peering inside priceless artifacts, such as this ancient Egyptian wooden cat coffin, which was found to hold the corpse of a kitten.


X-Rays Easy on the Eyes?


This ad from the February 1917 issue of National Geographic extols the virtue of so-called X-ray Reflectors.
There was a time shortly after their discovery that x-rays were as popular as lasers are today, according to Edwin Gerson, a radiologist in Riverdale, Georgia, who collects 19th- and 20th-century "x-ray products."
"Everyone focused on the x-ray as an unexpected technologic advancement that encouraged belief in other similar or even more miraculous advances," Gerson wrote in a 2004 article for the journal Radiographics.

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