The X-Ray

a Nobel Prize in physics? I would not have known prior to recording this, not off the top of my head either. No, I wouldn't have been able to come up with a name. So the very first Nobel Prize in Physics recipient is a German physicist by the name of Wilhelm Konrad Rundkin. And in the words of the Nobel Prize organization, he got the prize quote in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him. So raise

named after him one of these Wilhelm rays. Yeah, we don't call him that. No, No, these were the Runtkin rays. And sure enough, if you go back into the eight ten nineties, and look at the journals of the time. You can find like articles in the journal Nature by no less than J. J. Thompson, the guy who's credited with the discovery of the electron, comparing Runtkin rays with the radiation emitted by uranium salts. But most people, probably today do not know what Runtkin rays are because we

call them by a different name. We call them X rays, and that is going to be the topic for today. We're gonna be talking about X rays. Now. Of course, this is a show about invention, and before you get out all your well, actually's it's quite true that X rays were never at any point invented. They are not

a human invention. They are part of nature. In fact, X rays are no more human invention than visible light is than though what makes X rays special is that while we've long had the ability to produce copious amount of visible light, it's only since around the beginning of the twentieth century, a little bit before the beginning of the twentieth century, that we understood how to produce and

control X rays. And it's this power, the power of the X ray machine that we're looking at today and That's one of the wonderful things though about this episode, is that this is a case where we can point to one individual, one scientist, one physicist, and and identify their key role in this turning point in history. Yeah. I think a lot of inventions are are kind of murkier, right, Like a lot of things that we think of as inventions are actually just like slight modifications of something that

came before. H This is a case where there really was a tremendous, sudden breakthrough and it had far reaching effects all over the world. Just try to imagine the time before X rays, Before say X rays in a diagnostic medical context. We now know X rays are useful for a lot more than just medicine. But just think about going to the doctor and maybe having something wrong inside you at a time when there were no X rays. Yeah.

This reminds me of the old saying um about how a book is man's best friend outside of a dog or was that because inside of a dog is too dark to see? Yeah, but it is. It is dark inside the body, and it was it was truly dark and in many other ways before the X ray, Because before X rays, the best way to peer inside the living body. It was to look through a natural aperture

using what you would call the old knifeoscope. Yeah. Basically, yeah, if you if you didn't have a natural aperture to look into, you would have to make one, You'd have to cut one. And it's I think it was really difficult to overstate the importance of this bit of medical technology, the ability to see how bones and tissues are aligned, to see what might be wrong with them, what's broken,

how are they healing. But to use a very basic example that comes up a lot discussing the X ray and the advent of x ray technology is, Uh, you have an individual who is say shot with a with a by a gun. A bullet enters their body. Now, sometimes the bullet exits the body, but other times it does not. How do you find the bullet? Well, today we can x ray, somebody find the foreign map matter and you know, hone in on where we need to

remove it from. But prior to this, one might have to do a bit of searching and sometimes the bullet couldn't be found at all, which can have dire results. In one for instance, a US President James Garfield was shot and subsequently died in large part because they could not find the bullet. That story is actually weird and worth reading about in depth if you ever get a chance. The the assassin was a guy named Charles Julius Gatteaux.

Who he was, this dude who thought that he had helped James Garfield get elected, and so he thought that God was telling him that he had like a special appointment coming to him, like that he deserved a console ship or something, and he ended up shooting James Garfield.

But it's often been said that Garfield's death was not caused directly by the assassin's bullet, but by the failures of medicine at the time, because he didn't die until eleven weeks after he was shot, and not only could the doctors not find the bullet inside him, they had to keep digging around looking for it with like the unsterilized equipment and dirty hands of the time, probably leading

to the infections of the wound which ended up killing him. Now, I don't I don't want to imply that the X ray, of course, is our only way of understanding what's going on inside the body or diagnosing illnesses, but it is tremendously important, and that was one of the reasons that X rays are taken so often. That is why I venture to say everyone listening to this podcast has received an X ray in their life. I'm sure you've received

multiple X rays. I would be I would be shocked if there was anyone out there who has never received an X ray. And you should be thankful that X rays are so much safer today than they were when they were first invented. But even when, even back at that time, when they were dangerous, they could be a life saving intervention. Um so a bit more, I guess on Mr Runchkins So. He was born in Prussia now Germany March five. He died in February of nineteen twenty

three in Munich. And in the mid eighteen nineties, Runtgan was working as a professor of physics at Wurzburg University in Bavaria, and around this time, the behavior of discharge known as cathode rays was extremely hot stuff in science. Lots of physics researchers around the world that they were pushing the limits of science working with cathode ray tube experiments. So what's a cathode ray tube? Here's the simple version. You get an enclosed glass tube and use a vacuum

to suck most of the air out of it. You want to try to create like a partial vacuum, a rarefied gas environment inside the tube. And then inside this tube, you have two metal electrodes known as a cathode and an anode, And imagine you connect those two electrodes separately to the terminals of a battery. The cathode is connected to the negative terminal. The anode is connected to the

positive terminal. Now, obviously the current wants to flow, right, it wants to flow from the negative to the positive. And if you apply a great enough voltage to this tube, you will actually begin to see the tube glow as a result of electrons flying off of the cathode and jumping to the anode, jumping across the gap. And so

different forms of the anode can create different effects. Like if you use an anode that's the receptive terminal with a hole in the middle, so it's kind of a ring that's attracting these electrons, you can essentially create a kind of beam of electrons that flows through the anode and projects against the inside wall of the tube on the far side. And if you use an anode in

a particular shape. You can kind of cast a shadow in that shape of the two against the back of the two wall, surrounded by the glow of the streaming electron flow. Now, of course, at the time, physicists did not know what was happening in the tube right. The electron was not even formally discovered until when the physicist J. J. Thompson used Catherine Cathode ray tube experiments to prove the existence of this tiny sub atomic particle with a negative charge,

which we would later come to call the electron. In the years before this, there was still a lot of mystery, what's happening, what's causing this glow? So a little bit earlier in the eighteen nineties, Wilhelm Rundkin was performing experiments

with Cathode ray tubes. Specifically, it was on one day in November of eight that he was doing experiments on a kind of tube called a Crooks tube, named after the English physicist William Crooks, and while performing experiments with the tube in a completely darkened room, Rundkin noticed out of the corner of his eye that a screen of barium platinum cyanide in the room with him began to glow.

When the cathode ray was powered up. Now, this barium platinum cyanide, this is a material that was used in photographic plates that we now know fluoresces. It glows in the presence of ionizing radiation like X rays and gamma rays, and so in this dark room it was glowing. He found that the screen was being excited by some kind of energy that was emitted from the tube every time he turned it on, and the screen glowed as if it were being illuminated by light. But whatever caused it

to glow was completely invisible to the naked eye. It was as if he had discovered a form of invisible light, which sounds pretty freaky to the Halloween music, and it it is essential though in understanding what's going on here, because they did not understand what this was. No, they did not originally understand that this was a higher energy form of the same type of radiation that that causes visible light. So he was doing experiments trying to figure

out what was going on here. He immediately started all these different tests, like he found that the rays left images on photographic plates, so that's one thing you could use them to essentially expose a photograph, And he also experimented with placing different objects between the tube and the photographic plates, and he found that this unknown energy which started calling X rays seemed to pass right through some objects like wood and paper, while being stopped by others

that would leave a dark spot on the exposed photographic plate. In his most famous experiment, Runt again extended this this idea of the variable opacity or transparency of of solid matter to his own wife's hand. His wife, Anna Bertha. He asked her, he was like, honey, come in, and he had her hold her hand over a photographic plate while he bombarded it with X rays for about fifteen minutes.

And there's a story not not known for sure, if it's true that, upon seeing the X ray of her own hand, uh Anna Bertha said, I have seen my death. And when you've seen the skeleton, yeah, when you look at the image, it's not hard to see why it is so spooky. You can see the bones within the

palm reaching up. I mean it looks like these like long ghoulish fingers, because what you're actually seeing is that the poem is composed of of long bones that connect to the fingers at the knuckles, and so it makes the X ray of the hand look like a hand with like freakishly long fingers, and then her wedding ring is in there, so it's this huge black lump on the third finger. Uh, it's it's it's creepy. You know this.

I can't help but think of the scene and David Cronenberg's The Fly where he wants to drag Gina Davis, his character, his his his former lover into the telepod with him as part of the ongoing experiment. But another comparison I want to draw here between fictional mad science and real science and real innovation is something we've already touched on that he was not acting alone in all

of this research. There were other people engaging with the same sort of technology, uh, sort of reaching after some of the same ideas, and he was the first person to really put things together. Yeah, so right after he discovered this, he immediately pretty much began to publicize his findings. It was the same year, and other researchers replicated them. So other people did they you know, like, it wasn't all that hard to put together the apparatus he had.

It wasn't like he had some special materials or something. He was just like, hey, try this, and people pretty easily could and they did, and so another scientist named Arthur Schuster soon discovered that X rays were, in fact the same type of radiation is visible light, just in a much higher energy form, higher frequency, shorter wavelengths. And so it's almost like, you know, the the keys to discovering the X rays had been lying around. Yeah, but like with the fly, though, we just see this one

vision of this. Uh, this mad sign is working on his own as if no one else has has really any access to the same ideas or technology, when in reality they would probably be like six other additional films in which someone did not successfully teleport themselves or did not wind up being turned into a monster, that sort of thing, I mean, I guess also like the fly, Uh, this story has some lessons about informed consent right where he I don't think that runtgen meant to cause his

wife harm, but people at the time did not understand that overexposure to X rays would be extremely dangerous, even lethal, And so you have the idea here of like of runt again inviting his wife into this experiment when she didn't really know what the risks were, and he didn't either. Now, so we've touched on before. Runtken, is this turning point because there's no real reason why someone else couldn't have

technically made the same discovery sooner uh as As. Then this was pointed out in Early History of X rays by Alexei Asthmus. First of all, cathode ray tubes and fluorescent screens were the only required technology, and they've been around for decades. Some researchers had even observed a fluorescence

in the tubing or fogged photographic plates. But prior to the work of German physicist Nobel Prize winner and al toly total Nazi um like seriously joined up early and despised any non German science, including the quote Jewish fraud of relativity um Philip Lennard who lived eighteen sixty two seven.

Prior to his work, everyone was focused on what was going on inside the tube, not the effects of the ray outside the tube, and Leonard was the was actually the first to do this, and Runkin made the key connections using equipment that came from Leonard and others as well, including that Nicola tesla oh I didn't know that, but again, it's just it's helpful to to look at at a key innovation, key discoveries taking place, you know, not in

a vacuum like that. There is something that that there is something kind of storybook special about that, that that one person who is the first to make the ultimate connection that leads to these new discoveries. Well, there were so much going on with physics discoveries around the turn of the twentieth century, in those decades surrounding it, I mean, must have been such an exciting time to be working

in a field like this. All Right, we're gonna take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk some more about the kind of energy the kind of uh innovations that come in the wake of this discopion. All right, we're back. So you remember the story We don't know if it's true, but the story that in a Bertha will Holm, Rundkin's wife, after she saw the X ray of her hand, she said, I have seen

my death. And that's interesting in multiple ways because it sort of unknowingly portends the risks the dangers of X rays. But also I think what she would have meant by that is that she could see her skeleton, she could see inside her own body, and this was something so unusual to people at the time, right, I mean, and in many cases, essentially what a doctor is able to do is take the X ray and say, oh, I see your death right here. Um, but we can remove it.

Don't worry about it, right, I Mean that's not always. Uh, this is an over simplification and doesn't apply to all medical scenarios, but it again, it does give us this phenomenal ability to look inside the body and see in some cases things that should not be their conditions that should not be there, or the evidence of injury. And soon after the discovery of X rays, in fact, very

soon after, it was almost immediately picked up for medical uses. Yeah, everything from examining broken bones to as we mentioned, finding lost bullets in a body. Now, as with pretty much any cutting edge medical technology found at the dawn of the twentieth century. Uh, you can find a terrific look at at at X ray technology in the Steven Soderberg medical drama The Nick, which I think I've mentioned on this show before. I definitely mentioned on Stuff to Blow

your mind before. Uh, there's just a fabulous drama that

wasn't seen by enough people. In the two seasons that it ran highly recommend anyone pick it up because in season one, episode six, the hospital at the center of this drama they acquire a second hand X ray machine and the whole time there's just there's just reckless use of X rays in this episode because again we're in a period of time where there's all this enthusiasm about the about the technology and there's this this just revelation about what it can be used for, and at the

same time, uh, the dangers of the technology are only just beginning to be made evident. But in in the Nick there's a there's a scene where the salesman UH and UH members of the hospital staff are are trying it out without any regard for the dangers of radiation exposure. There's a scene where the salesman boasts that the machine works just fine. He says, quote, my children were taking dozens of X rays for the of themselves the other day. They had the thing running for hours. That's some dark

humor it is. It's it's a wonderful show, but it's like it's like in Madmen, when you know the kids are always playing with like a plastic bag over their heads and stuff from the don't care. Yeah, there are a lot of moments like that that the show itself is particularly good because it has this minimal electronic score. It has this there's a way that they do the cinematography that Soderbrook shoots it, you know, in which it

doesn't feel like a period piece it is. It's you know, obviously a period said in a historic period, but it's displayed bright and almost futuristic because it was a time when all these amazing discoveries were being made and all of these technologies that are explored in this episode and and others were the cutting the bleeding edge of our understanding of human physiology but also the physical nature of

the world. But it's also got this dark, retrospective irony. Yeah, why why is it that we love stuff like that? I've noticed that's a thing that lots of historical TV shows and movies do now and generally audiences tend to love. Is that kind of thing like that my kids were playing with the X ray machine, or that you know, this little girls playing with plastic bag overhead. Like people just really love the like, oh, they don't understand the danger yet. Well, in a way, I think a show

like The Nick is kind of reverse science fiction. Like science fiction look looks to the future but deals with contemporary anxieties about science and technological advancement and the cultural response to all of that. And the nick especially looks to the past, but I think you can you can see ways in which it is also speaking to the definitely speaking to the modern viewer. So it is kind

of a reverse science fiction. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, I mean it's interesting in a different way than looking at the science fiction of the past, is because we different things. Seems significant to us in retrospect then seemed then, I guess seemed interesting to them in prospect exactly. Now, certainly as we've we've touched on the danger was not recognized yet.

Rather than radiation, the prevailing idea was that this was essentially a type of photography it was being demonstrated with the X ray machine, and that the rays involved were were more akin to harmless light visible light. Yes, and Runkin accepted Leonard's view that the cathode rays were quote vibrations of the ether uh and that it was ethereal and didn't and you know, therefore did not reflect or refract. Uh.

They were He suggested longitudinal vibrations of the ether. The ether, I guess this was the day of the luminiferous ether, right, the idea that there was a substance through which light had to propagate, and this was one thing that people would often continue to think basically until Einstein. Right. But part of Einstein's achievement was showing, like, you don't need an ether theory to show how light travels by the way.

This is another thing it's interesting about Runkin is that he himself only published three papers on X rays during his life, But again, there were just so many people that were just ready to jump in on this research. I know one of his papers I was looking at an article that talked about how I think it was his very last paper on X rays was about how to make them visible? And I think it was like that they could be perceived directly by the eye at

a very high intensity or certain circumstances. Interesting, it doesn't sound safe, but but again, yeah, it was. It was all these other researchers and innovators and inventors that came in the aftermath of his initial discovery that really made all of this difference. Um. And then there were those two that dismissed it as mere novelty, and this is actually reflected in that episode of The Nick as well. But other people saw its appeal. Dr Henry W. Ktell,

demonstrator of morbid anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. It sounds like a Hogwarts position, doesn't, But he told The New York Times in quote, the surgical imagination can pleasurably lose itself and devising endless applications of this wonderful process. And that is in contrast to other individuals who thought this was a fad, that this was just a you know, a side show, and that clearly wasn't going to be a major part of medical diagnosis or treatment. Now it can't.

We were talking at the beginning about how it wasn't immediately clear how dangerous it was. But it can't have taken too long for people to catch on, right, because they would start to see the effects, right. That's and and that's was that was driven home in a couple

of different resources I looked at here for this. The dangers apparently became clear too many of these individuals who were working with radiation pretty early by seven for instance, hair loss and skin burns, were already being reported because you have these researchers working without protection, exposing themselves to to these rays way too much, and they're beginning to notice damage to their own tissues. Yeah, and if you if you want to see something really horrible, you can

look up what X ray burns look like. It is a nasty business. Now. Throughout this time, researchers continued to weigh in on just what it was. You know, what was this this a vorta of vortex in the ether that I'm looking at here high frequency light? Of course that's the correct answer. Longitudal waves. That was the original idea. Transverse impulses of the ether and similar properties were also

of course observed in uranium. But it was also really ultimately going to be a thirty year journey for scientists to really gain like a kind of a bedrock understanding of what they were dealing with. Another thing that modern audiences might not understand is that because if you've had an X ray at the dentist recently or something like that, it probably did not take all that long. You know, they just flash it on and off and there you go. Uh,

The older X ray machines took a lot longer. Well, you mentioned earlier a fifteen minute exposure and some of the original experiments, uh, and it would require you would need even longer periods of time for certain parts of the end of the anatomy, such as the head. There's another scene in that episode of The Nick where he's testing it out on the hospital administrator character and he says, what part of your body do you want to see? And he said, oh, I want to see my head.

So he has him hold up the plate and it sets up the machine and says, all right, this should take about an hour. Yeah, because the head and the brain were extremely difficult to image at the time. But as we said, there there was a lot of danger in the early days of radiation experimentation and usage. UH. Dr Walter James Dodd, for instance, who lived eighteen sixty nine through nineteen through nineteen sixteen. He was one of

the United States first radiologists. He made some very key early innovations, but he also suffered numerous radiation burns and had to have several appendages amputated, and he eventually died of cancer from radiation exposure at the age of fifty three. Thomas Edison actually abandoned his own research into X ray technology after his assistant, a glassblower by the name of Clarence Madison Dally suffered, you know, an identical fate to

Dodd due to radiation exposure. Yeah, that's something to hammer home that, um. I mean a lot of the risk at the time was obviously if you were being imaged a lot and having a lot of exposure to X rays that way, it was risky for you. But it's especially risky for the people who were operating the machines because they're around them all the time. They're not just there when they're being image they're they're all day. Yeah.

I was looking at one source here, early clinical use of the X ray by Joel D. Howell, m d, pH d, published in and the Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, and the author pointed out the following. He says, quote, early X ray users would test to see if the tube was putting out an adequate amount of X ray by looking for a glow in their hand when they put it in front of the beam. Method of testing that would soon reveal itself to have

delaterious consequences. But he also adds that evidence seems to indicate that many of them knew way more about the dangers than they let on, and that he says that there was this zeal uh you know, this really this idea that there was a valor and pushing this amazing and life saving technology, um, even though there were these ever more apparent risks. Oh, I want to talk about a very clear example of that in a minute with with Marie Curie. Actually, he also points out another thing

that's very interesting. They says that it's it's very about how we we can't quite look at the X ray machine in isolation to understand the changes that came about because of it. I'm going to read a longer quote from that paper, he says, quote, one must study how the machine is used with a specific social, political, and economic system. The technology to be considered is not only a machine, it is also the system within which that

machine is used. In the case of the X ray machine, that would include the organizational structure of the institution, the people designated to run the machine, and the forums on which such use was recorded. Even though the published medical literature would suggest that the case for using X rays to diagnose fractured bones was firmly established by nineteen hundred, it was not a regular part of patient care for

decades to come. What was required for it to become a part of routine patient care included changes in the type of person who was running the machine, changes in the payment mechanism, and changes in the way that data were conceptualized. Yeah. I mean it's introducing a whole new paradigm to medical care. Yeah. And again this is just another reason that it it's difficult to to overstate, uh, the impact of of X ray technology on medicine. Absolutely, and I want to talk about an example of that

also in early early twentieth century wartime medicine. So there's a fantastic article I read by Timothy J. Jorgenson, who's the director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate program at Georgetown University. And the article is on the Conversation. It's called Marie Curry and her X ray vehicles contribution to World War One battlefield medicine. And so this is a story I actually somehow I had never read about before. Um,

but this was fascinating. So we all know Marie Cury, the Polish born French physicist and chemist and She's best known probably for the discovery and isolation of the elements radium and polonium, and for her work on radioactivity spontaneous radiation, for which she received two different Nobel Prizes in nineteen oh three and nineteen eleven. Uh So, Curie was doing

her work. She was conducting her research in Paris with the Radium Institute when World War One broke out in Europe, and in one of the early maneuvers of the war in nineteen fourteen, German troops clearly had set their sights on the city of Paris, on the French capital, and they eventually they invaded France through Belgium, and we're trying

to march towards Paris to take the capital city. Obviously, Cury knew that she couldn't continue her research if the city was attacked, so she packed up her fly of radium, like literally packed it up in a leadlined case and fled to the southwest towards Bordeaux, which I think is also where the French government were moved to. But she went to Bordeaux and she hid her radium in a safe deposit box in a bank vault. Yeah, but having

safely stored France's supply of radium her radioactive treasures. She did not just continue to flee the war. Instead, Curie was determined to help with the war effort and defend France against the German assault. But she couldn't, of course, pick up a rifle and go to the front lines. But she had another idea. Instead, she used her knowledge about physics and radiation to create an invention that would go on to save the lives of thousands of injured

French and Allied soldiers on the front lines. And this would all be with the help of X rays. So, by the time of World War One, X rays were known to be a life saving medical technology. Like we've been talking about, they were useful for diagnosing internal injuries. But you had the big, clunky X ray machines of the day that were usually cooped up in the high tech urban hospitals. Right, So if a French soldier was filled with bullets or shrapnel along the front, these hospitals

would have been many miles away. You can't like take the soldier all the way back to the hospital. A lot of times they'll often die on the way to take a long time to get there. Um, so what do you do? How do you bring the life saving power of X rays to the injured fighters on the front.

So Marie Curry's invention was the radiological car. It's a car on the bottom, but outfitted with a compartment containing an X ray machine and a dynamo to generate the electricity to power it, as well as dark room equipment for the development of radiological photographs. And these radiological cars were nicknamed by the soldiers petite curies, and Curry oversaw the creation of the first car, which was used to treat wounded soldiers at the Battle of Marne later in

nineteen fourteen, a battle which the Allies won. But obviously one car was not enough to put a serious dint in this problem, so Cury herself petition donations of cars from rich French women to be turned into petite curies, and with the help of her daughter Irene, Currie trained female volunteers to operate the X ray machines on the front lines, and by the end of the war they had trained a hundred and fifty women as front line radiographers.

Now Currie also oversaw the creation of more fixed facilities like X ray diagnostic stations at field hospitals behind the front and drove and she actually drove and operated a radiological car for the war effort herself. Of course, repeated exposure to X rays which Curry and her technicians experienced come that comes with a lot of associated health risks,

like we've been talking about. And Currie understood this, like she knew that she was putting herself and her health and her life at risk by exposing herself to these X rays. But I think she saw it as part of the risk of aiding in the war effort, just like a soldier would put his life on the line

going out over the trenches. And actually later in her life when he suffered from a plastic anemia, which can of course result from radiation exposure, some people thought, well, maybe it was her experiments with radium and stuff that caused that condition, but Curie actually believed it was her repeated exposure to X rays during the war that were

more likely to have caused the condition. And all told, it's been estimated that Curi's efforts contributed to more than a million wounded soldiers receiving X rays during the war, a huge fraction of which likely had their lives saved. By the procedure. It is interesting in retrospected, you know, to see how this technology came online in time, just in time for the two World Wars, times of such

injury and loss of life. Yeah, I mean often when you think about the nightmare of the First World War in particular, it seems like it's a time of such terrifying chaos and confusion, largely brought about by new technology, right, new warfare technology. Uh, that it was almost like an experimental labor to worry for ways to kill and harm one another. And so it's kind of interesting also seeing going on in the background at being a laboratory of

ways to save lives. Indeed. All right, on that note, we're going to take another break, and when we come back, we're going to discuss the legacy of the X ray. So X ray has changed the world in other ways, as Richard Gunderman, Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy at Indiana University, pointed out in an article that he wrote for The Conversation, UH, this discovery of X ray and the advent of X ray technology led to X ray crystallography, which allows us to see the world at

a very small scale. To image molecules, and in fact, the father son team of William H. And William L. Bragg shared in the nineteen fifteen Nobel Prize in Physics for this advancement, and without it, James Watson and Francis Crick wouldn't have been able to discover the chemical structure of DNA. Oh Yeah, and always got a shout out Franklin and Wilkins as well. Now, additionally, X ray astronomy allowed us to understand the greater cosmos. Yeah, and X

ray astronomy is an interesting case. It's worth putting in the context to the broader ecosystem of technology like astronomy saw such an explosion of new techniques after the nineteen sixties once we could put observatories in space, and this is largely because Earth's atmosphere blocks many kinds of radiation that we now use to image the universe. And this

obviously is a very good thing, right. The atmosphere lets most visible light through while stopping a lot of ionizing radiation from space like X rays, and by adding space based telescopes that could see other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum,

not just visible light, we greatly expanded astronomical capabilities. For example, X ray astronomy in particular has helped us detect and understand some of the most extreme and energetic objects in the universe, like it played a role in the detection

and understanding of neutron on stars and black holes. Like we often detect black holes from the X rays them, not necessarily from the body itself, but when a black hole has material spiraling into it, it spews jets of X rays out into space as the black hole superheats the gases that are swirling into it. Not on a

much smaller scale. Um Gunderman doesn't mention this in his article, but airport security X rays, no matter how much they make irritatus, that they do help keep commercial flights safe in this day and age. Can you imagine if they couldn't X ray your bags and they had to like open up everybody's bag and look through it, or just like just looking in eyes and just it's just like a trust system or gosh, yeah, you can just imagine all the myrroad complications that would arise from not being

able to perform that scan. Yeah, I'm gonna say I'm open to being argued otherwise, but as annoying as airport security is, it would be infinitely worse and infinitely more annoying without X rays. But it's it's kind of like said, this is part of the broader ecosystem of the technology. And of course there were also additional changes in the way we used X rays for medical purposes. Uh, not only to find bullets in boken broken bones, but you know,

spot pneumonia's swallowed objects, cavities, and even cancer. And then you get more advanced versions of X ray scans that became possible, uh, CT scans, for instance, being X ray X rays through the body at different angles to create a superior image. Yeah, and people who are outside the medical professions might not realize how absolutely essential CT scans are these days, like how how frequently they're used and

how many lives they save. Gunderman points to a study in the journal Radiology that looked into the use of CT scans in the emergency department of hospitals, and the authors they're just wanted to see how often a CT scan changes the doctor's primary diagnosis of a patient. Right, doctor sees you, examines you externally, they think one thing, so they order us CT scan. How often does the CT scan change what they think is wrong with you?

And the study found, quote, the leading diagnosis changed in two hundred and thirty five of four hundred and sixty patients with abdominal pain, and that's about fifty one hundred and sixty three of three and eighty seven with chest pain and or dispania, which is difficulty breathing, and that's forty two and a hundred and three out of four hundred and thirty three with headache, which is so we can't compare this directly with the time before CT scans,

because it's just it's kind of apples and oranges. But if you take it as a very rough estimate, just think about what it means that CT scans change what a doctor thinks is wrong with you fifty one percent or forty two percent of the time, and then think

about what that meant before we had these technologies. Right, Just imagine going to the doctor with chess pain or trouble breathing in the eighteen hundreds, before there is any any of this kind of internal imaging, when even doctors today change their primary diagnosis about forty two percent of the time after looking at a CT scan, Gunderman writes, quote, Thanks to CTS wide availability and great speed, doctors can determine within minutes whether or not a patient's abdominal pain

is due to impendicitis, chest pain reflects a tear in the order, or a severe headache is due to the rupture of a blood vessel in the brain. It is no wonder that about eighty million CT scans are performed each year in the US. And it also turned out that the same radiation that could detect cancer could also destroy it. Radiotherapy. Yeah, radiation oncology has its roots actually in the years immediately following Ruigan's discovery, when doctors discovered

this peculiar power. Now and to be sure, X rays were used to treat a lot of illnesses before its dangers were discovered. Um again, you just have to think to this, the zealous use of radiation and just the idea that this new technology could do just about anything. But looking broadly at these and the zeroing in on

on some of the treatment details. X rays to treat cancer may have occurred as early as eighteen, which, if you'll recall from earlier, that's the year right after Runkin discovered X rays and it was like at the end of eighteen that he discovered them. Now I want I want to stress though used in an attempt to treat

this was This was certainly extremely early days. Now. One thing that's interesting and worth noting is that Runkin actually did not seek riches from his discovery, like he did not file for a patent on the production of X rays through his method UH, and he even donated the cash component of his Nobel prize to the university worked for.

He believed that scientific discoveries like X rays that were useful in helping people in medicine were the common property of humankind, not something to be claimed and profited on by one man. And that's kind of a refreshing change, it is. Yeah, Now, torek up Runkin discovered X rays. In the following year, Antoine Becquerel identified radio activity, and by nineteen hundred, alpha, beta, and gamma rays had been discovered.

And as James Burke UH, the author and UH television host explored, in the day of the universe changed, even more types of radiation were expected, even more discoveries surely seemed to be just around the bend. And then in nineteen O three Burke rights. Uh. The physicist Renee blonde Lott reported the discovery of a new type of ray, the N ray, and he observed them while looking at polarized X rays and reported that they increased the brightness

of an electric spark. And after he made this observation, uh, other individuals working in the field they backed him up on this said, oh, yeah, we see it too, And within three years hundreds of papers had been written about in rays with all sorts of new properties thrown into the vat here in eluding various connections with muscle activity and the inner workings of the human mind, as if, like you know, uh, intense human thought could create inn in rays. Uh. And in the midst of all of this,

American physicist Robert W. Wood steps in. He was something of a declaim an acclaimed debunker at the time, and he looked into the matter. He observed blonde Let's demonstrations himself like firsthand, and he did not see the increase

in the electric sparks brightness. And then when blonde Lott and his assistance conducted an experiment with the prism, which was another thing that they did to to try and prove the existence of these in rays uh to show how it refracted like light, which of course X rays do not. UM would did a curious thing. He quietly removed the prism while they were from their experiment. While they were conducting it, and the researchers continued to see the in rays or reports seeing the in rays and

so uh so really would just completely discredited this. He reported on it, and after he he he did so, no one saw an N ray again. This was essentially essentially in an illusion that was brought on by just the zeal for discovery and the feeling that there were going to be more rays and uh and and and

that it was just inevitable that they would be found. Well, as we mentioned earlier, this was a time of tremendous discovery, but it was also a time when people believed tons of scientific things that later turned out to be completely wrong. The luminiferous ether that's just gone, there's nothing there, nothing to the theory, but but it was widely accepted at this time. Yeah, Burke rights in the day of the universe changed quote. There was never any suggestion that Blondelt

was a charlatan. He and his colleagues were victims of the expectation that in rays would be discovered, and when they built instruments to see the rays, they saw them for a short time. This non existent phenomenon is did the most stringent tests and methods known to science. So it becomes something of a you know, a cautionary tale about over enthusiasm, uh in scientific research and the dangers

of it potentially outstripping the rigors of science and scientific investigation. Yeah, you can understand why people will be excited, but simmer down, folks. There's also kind of an interesting invention to close out this episode of Invention, the the the instruments that they invented to see the non existent in rays um. Because again, it's not like a pooping duck robot. It's not a it's it's not a work of Charlottan. It is just a work that compounds and illusion. Yeah, well, meaning enthusiasm

can still breed. Gremlin's that it can. That it can. All right, So that you have another episode of Invention, we can file that one away and if you want to check out the files. If you want to see other episodes of the show, head on over to invention pod dot com. That is our website. You'll find the other episodes as well as links out to our social media accounts, and if you want to discuss the show with other listeners, we would recommend going to Stuff to

Blow Your Mind discussion module. That's a Facebook group where you know mostly we've talked about episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we're also happy to discuss episodes of Invention there as well. Huge thanks to our friend Scott Benjamin for research assistants on this show, and to our excellent audio producer Torri Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us, was feedback on this episode or any other, suggest a topic for the future of Invention, or just to say hi let us know

how you found out about the show. You can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.