tube and a Ruhmkorff coil to produce and reproduce the effect he’d detected. Sometimes his wife, Bertha, would ask why he was spending so much time in his laboratory, and he would answer that he was working on something that, if word got out, would have people saying, “Der Röntgen ist wohl verruckt geworden” (“Röntgen has probably gone crazy”).
At last Röntgen satisfied himself that his discovery was legitimate—that he hadn’t somehow misinterpreted the data. On December 22, he invited Bertha to join him in the laboratory, where he asked her to insert her hand, for fifteen minutes, between the tube and a photographic plate. As she did so, something happened—something he’d witnessed for himself numerous times now, something he still couldn’t explain. A substance passed between the tube and the plate—must have passed, because even though the substance itself was invisible, the effect was undeniable. An image of his wife’s hand, to her horror, was slowly burning itself into existence. On New Year’s Day, Röntgen went for a walk with Bertha, during which he mailed to colleagues copies of this photograph as well as his preliminary report, “Eine neue Art von Strahlen” (“A New Kind of Ray“)—what Röntgen, in a footnote, christened “X rays,” because of their mysterious nature. On the way to the mailbox, Röntgen turned to Bertha, whose hand—more or less, and complete (so to speak) with wedding ring—would soon be immortalized, and said, “Now the devil will have to be paid.”
The first public news account appeared on January 5, after a professor of physics at the University of Vienna received a copy of the paper and photograph and passed them along to colleagues, who in turn contacted the editor of the Wiener Presse. From there the news spread rapidly: the London Daily Chronicle on January 6, the Frankfurter Zeitung on January 7. “Men of science in this city,” began an article in The New York Times a few days later, “are awaiting with the utmost impatience the arrival of European technical journals”; when an English translation of Röntgen’s report arrived, the Times printed it on the front page almost in its entirety. By January 13 Röntgen had been summoned to Berlin, where he gave a demonstration of X-rays before Kaiser Wilhelm II. Röntgen granted only one substantive interview, to a particularly enterprising journalist from McClure’s Magazine, then withdrew from public scrutiny. “In a few days I was disgusted with the whole thing,” he later recalled. “I could not recognize my own work in the reports anymore.”
It was entirely coincidence that Röntgen had conducted what proved to be his decisive research at the same historical moment, and possibly even the same literal moment, that the sixteen-year-old Albert Einstein was pacing the grounds of a school in Aarau, trying to reconcile the properties of a beam of light with the concept of absolute space. It was similarly a coincidence that Röntgen made his discovery on the very day that the thirty-nine-year-old Sigmund Freud was writing to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he was thinking of abandoning his attempt to render human thoughts strictly in terms of the motions of neuroanatomic matter. But it was no coincidence that speculation about the implications of Röntgen’s discovery led in the same direction that Einstein and Freud were already heading.
If X-rays were a “longitudinal vibration in the ether,” Thomas Edison pointed out to a journalist visiting his New Jersey laboratory, “then Professor Röntgen has found out at least one method of investigating [the ether’s] properties, and the gain to men of science in estimating the behavior of light and electricity through the medium of ether will probably be immense, causing many changes in our present theories.” Meanwhile, Science magazine reported that the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City had used the rays “to reflect anatomic diagrams directly into the brains of advanced medical students, making a much more enduring impression than ordinary teaching methods of learning anatomic details.” And whatever went into a skull presumably could also come out: A Mr. Ingles Rogers informed a San Francisco newspaper that he had “produced an impression on the photographic plate by simply gazing at it in the dark,” while a Dr. Baraduc attracted worldwide attention by sending an official communication to the Paris Académie de Médecin that he had succeeded in photographing thoughts, and he mounted an exhibition in Munich as proof. Or, as one early account regarding X-rays cautioned readers who would fool themselves into thinking that if they “go inside the house and pull down the blinds and wait till it is dark,” they might “feel quite safe in sinning”: “There are the x-rays, you know—and nobody knows what other invisible pencils may be registering all our actions or even thoughts—or what’s worse, the desires that we don’t dare think. They, too, must leave their mark somewhere.”
Nobody knew quite what X-rays were—not even Röntgen, though he did tentatively guess that they might indeed be longitudinal vibrations in the ether. And nobody knew quite what X-rays did—though the medical applications were apparent enough that by the following autumn The New York Times reported “no hospital in the land can do justice to its patients if it does not possess a complete X-ray outfit.” And nobody could have known what impact X-rays eventually would have on the history of science—revolutionary, but that’s getting ahead of the story. What anybody who cared about science did know by now, though, following more than two centuries of investigation, was that in the properties of the ether or the pathways of the brain the scientific method had reached the frontiers of the outer and inner universes.
In which case: Was the store of knowledge finite? And if so, was the history of science now nearing its end?
The idea of science’s even having a history was a novel concept. History, in its modern interpretation, was still a fairly recent addition to Western thought. Before the dawn of the modern era of science, time had seemed—to the extent it had seemed anything—unchanging or, at most, cyclical. People lived and died; civilizations rose and fell. The particular circumstances of such a world might change, but not its essence.
Not so the essence of a world that placed a premium on the acquisition of new knowledge—on change itself. When Western scholars of the fifteenth century began resurrecting texts from antiquity and rediscovering ancient knowledge, they would have had no reason to believe that these sources were inaccurate or in any way incomplete. On the contrary: They had every reason to assume the texts they were inheriting were correct and comprehensive. Didn’t these writings, whether in the original Greek or in Arabic translation, represent the cumulative knowledge of a civilization at the zenith of its intellectual powers? True, that particular civilization had risen, and it had fallen. And true, civilization itself had lain dormant for the following thousand years. But the essence of civilization itself didn’t change: the understanding of the way the world works.
Yet that’s what the understanding of the way the world works was doing now: changing. Ptolemy of Alexandria, writing in the second century A.D., had compiled such a seemingly thorough catalogue of the workings of the heavens that some seven centuries later his Arabic translators honored his work with the title of “The Greatest Composition,” or Al-mageste (later shortened to Almagest). Galen of Pergamum, also writing in the second century A.D., had described the human anatomy in more than a hundred texts that survived the ages, a volume of output that alone must have intimidated succeeding generations into accepting his word as gospel on all matters medical. Yet in 1610, Galileo looked through a telescope and determined to his own satisfaction that much of what Ptolemy had written was inaccurate, while in the 1630s Descartes surveyed the current state of medical knowledge and concluded, “I am confident that there is no one, even among those whose profession it is, who does not admit that all at present known in it is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered.”
So the acquisition of knowledge was only now just beginning, right? Wrong. Just ask Galileo. “It was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to nobody else,” he wrote of what he’d observed through the telescope. Such was Galileo’s authority that his assessment was echoed, a generation after his death, by no less an eminence than Christopher Wren: “All celestial mysteries were at once disclosed to him. His successors are envious because they believe that there can scarcely be any new worlds left.”
Galileo,
