History of X-Rays Timeline

A short time after Röntgen's landmark 1895 paper, Brandes reported that after dark adaptation and placing his eye close to an X-ray tube, he saw a faint 'blue-gray' glow which seemed to originate within the eye itself.

Several weeks after Röntgen's discovery, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that the rays 'not only photograph, but also affect the living function.'

Image source: Ivan Tarkhanov (physiologist)

George Albert Boulenger first mentioned Tarkhanov's work on the biological effects of X-rays in a paper delivered before the Zoological Society of London in May 1896; Gardiner's related publication with Boulenger's foreword followed in 1897.

Image source: George Albert Boulenger

John Ambrose Fleming invented the thermionic diode, the first kind of vacuum tube. This idea was quickly applied to X-ray tubes, leading to heated-cathode designs.

Image source: John Ambrose Fleming

Physicist Charles Barkla discovered that X-rays could be scattered by gases and that each element had a characteristic X-ray spectrum, for which he won the 1917 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Image source: Charles Barkla

Max von Laue, Paul Knipping, and Walter Friedrich first observed the diffraction of X-rays by crystals in 1912, founding the field of X-ray crystallography.

Image source: X-ray crystallography

Henry Moseley performed crystallography experiments with X-rays emanating from various metals and formulated Moseley's law, which relates the frequency of X-rays to the atomic number of the metal.

Image source: Henry Moseley

Heated-cathode X-ray tubes, called 'Coolidge tubes', completely replaced the troublesome cold cathode or Crookes X-ray tubes — used since the 1890s — by about 1920, making X-ray generation far more reliable.

Image source: X-ray tube

A child who had been shot in the head was brought to the Vanderbilt laboratory in 1896, where X-rays were used to help locate the bullet, illustrating the technology's emerging diagnostic power.

The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on January 11, 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate.

Image source: John Hall-Edwards

Gilman Frost, professor of medicine, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy to X-rays and collected an image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates.

Image source: X-ray

Live imaging devices were developed by Italian scientist Enrico Salvioni (his 'cryptoscope') and William Francis Magie of Princeton University (his 'Skiascope'), both using barium platinocyanide screens.

Image source: Fluoroscopy

On February 14, 1896, John Hall-Edwards became the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation, demonstrating their practical value in medicine just months after their discovery.

Edison developed the first mass-produced live imaging device, his 'Vitascope', later called the fluoroscope, which became the standard for medical X-ray examinations.

Image source: Thomas Edison

In 1913, a motion picture was made in Detroit showing a hard-boiled egg inside a human stomach, an early example of combining X-rays with cinematography.

Image source: Ray Park

Marie Curie developed radiological cars to support soldiers injured in World War I, bringing mobile X-ray imaging to the front lines and revolutionizing battlefield medicine.

Image source: Marie Curie

In 1918, X-rays were used in association with motion picture cameras to capture the human skeleton in motion, pioneering dynamic imaging of the body.

In 1920, X-ray imaging was used to record the movements of the tongue and teeth in the study of languages by the Institute of Phonetics in England.

Professor John Daniel and William Lofland Dudley of Vanderbilt University reported hair loss after Dudley was X-rayed, one of the earliest documented accounts of harm caused by X-ray exposure.

Image source: William Lofland Dudley

Edison's glassblower Clarence Madison Dally habitually tested X-ray tubes on his own hands, developing tenacious cancer that led to amputation of both arms. He died in 1904, becoming the first known death attributed to X-ray exposure, after which Edison dropped X-ray research around 1903–1904.

Image source: Clarence Madison Dally

Elizabeth Fleischman, an American X-ray pioneer, died in San Francisco, California from complications resulting from her work with X-rays, another tragic casualty among early practitioners.

Image source: Elizabeth Fleischman

Hall-Edwards developed cancer (then called X-ray dermatitis) sufficiently advanced by 1904 to prompt public warnings. His left arm was amputated at the elbow in 1908, four fingers on his right arm soon thereafter, and he died of cancer in 1926.

Canberra proposed a ban on shoe-fitting fluoroscopes in 1957, while Switzerland prohibited the machines in 1989, reflecting growing awareness of unnecessary radiation exposure.

Image source: Shoe-fitting fluoroscope

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched on July 23, 1999, has allowed exploration of the very violent processes in the universe that produce X-rays, opening a new window on astronomy.

Image source: Chandra X-ray Observatory

By 2006, medical procedures in the United States contributed much more ionizing radiation than in the early 1980s, constituting nearly half of total radiation exposure, up from 58% of human-made sources in 1987.

Image source: Medical imaging

Up to 2010, five billion medical imaging examinations had been conducted worldwide, underscoring how thoroughly X-ray-based imaging had become embedded in global healthcare.

As of 2015, early photon tomography (EPT), along with other techniques, is being researched as potential alternatives to X-rays for imaging applications, motivated partly by concerns over CT-related cancer risk estimated at 0.4% of current US cancers.

Image source: Tomography