JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2393

Looking through a (massive, 20-pound!) volume of Electrical World¹ I found that it  contains some of the earliest work published in the United States on Wilhelm Roentgen’s seminal discovery of the X-Ray, which he published on November 8, 1895. And there were a lot of papers–more than 100. One reason why the work was done by so many and so quickly is that Roentgen did not seek to patent his invention (much like the Curies would do so afterwards) and so there was a land-grab by hundreds of physicists and experimenters to do work in this astonishing new field. 

The photograph (“Hand with Ring”)  below is Roentgen’s own, an x-ray of his wife Bertha’s hand–it is one of the iconic images in the history of modern science:

[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Electrical World is the third place that the Roentgen paper was reprinted, this time for the first time in an American journal, one day before the appearance of the The Electrician article, which was one day after the publication of the paper’s first appearance in English, in the journal Nature, on 23 January 1896.  (The Electrician would also publish Roentgen’s second article later in that same year, in March.) The Roentgen article does not seem to be reprinted in full anywhere else in 1896/1897. (See Charles Phillips, Bibliography of X-Ray Literature and Research, (1896-1897), published by The Electrician, 1898.)