A quick history of X-Rays.

It all started in...

1877 – Ivan Pulyui, a lecturer in experimental physics, constructed various designs of vacuum discharge tube.

1880s – William Crookes and Johann Hittorf found that photographic plates placed near the Crookes tube became unaccountably fogged or flawed by shadows.

1888 – Philipp Lenard conducted experiments to see whether cathode rays could pass out the Crookes tube into the air.

1891 – Fernando Sanford, a physics professor, generated and detected X-rays.

1895 – Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a physicist and professor at Wuerzburg University in Germany, is credited for discovering X-rays. He was the first to methodically study X-rays, but not the first to observe their effects.

1896 – Ivan Pulyui published high-quality X-ray images in Paris and London journals.

1896 – John-Hall Edwards was the first to use X-rays under clinical conditions in Birmingham, England.

1897 – Military battlefields use X-rays for the first time during the Balkan War to find bullets and broken bones inside patients.

1904 – John Ambrose Fleming invented the first vacuum tube, known as the thermionic diode.

1904 – The death of Clarence Dally, Thomas Edison’s assistant who worked extensively with X-rays, caused scientists to begin taking a closer look at the risks of radiation. He died from skin cancer.

1906 – Charles Barkla, a physicist, discovered that X-rays could be scattered by gases.

1912 – Max von Laue, Paul Knipping, and Walter Friedrich first observed the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. This observation opened the doors to the field of X-ray crystallography.

1913 – William D. Coolidge invented the Coolidge X-ray tube.

1917 – Charles Barkla won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery that X-rays could be scattered by gases and that each elements had a characteristic X-ray.

1950s – The X-ray microscope was developed.

1980s – An X-ray laser device was proposed as part of the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

1999 – The Chandra X-ray Observatory launched, which allowed for the exploration of the very violent processes in the universe, which produce X-rays.