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The news of these X-rays roused the world physics to a furor not seen

By: fandy


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If you break your arm or leg, the doctor will probably send you to hospital to have an X-ray photograph taken to find out just where the fracture is and what kind of break it is. If a small child swallows a coin or some other hard thing, as sometimes happens, the doctor will take an X-ray photograph to find out just where the object has got to in the child's body. Every hospital has an X-ray department, and doctors now depend on these photographs for giving them information about their patients. Dentists also take X-rays of people's jaws to find out if there is anything wrong with a tooth which can not be detected by external examination.

X-rays were first discovered by a German scientist, Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen, in 1895, almost by accident. He and several other scientists were experimenting with passing electric currents through certain gases in a special glass tube from which the air had been removed. One day Rontgen noticed that, even when the tube was covered with black paper, some strange kind of radiation was coming through and making a screen nearby glow. Rontgen could not see anything coming out of the tube, but then he discovered that if he put the screen in the next room on the other side of a closed door, the rays still seemed to affect it. The glowing screen showed that the rays could pass not only through black paper but also through wood.

The next thing he found out was that if he put his hand between the rays and a photographic plate, the rays would print a shadow of the bony framework of his hand on the plate. In fact, the rays could pass as easily through the fleshy part of his hand as through the black paper, but hardly at all through the bone. So Rontgen made the first X-ray picture of a hand, showing just how the bones in the hand fit together. When Rontgen wrote an account of what he had discovered, he called these new rays X-rays, for X is a symbol often used for something which is not yet understood. Other scientists called them Routgen rays in honors of the man who first found them, but X-ray is the name always used now.

Rontgen went on to try to find out more about these strange invisible rays. It appeared that they travel in a straight line, as light rays travel; but that they are not bent, as light is, when passing through glass or water. He gradually came to realize that X-rays, light waves are electromagnetic radiations but that their wave lengths are extremely short. This is why they are invisible to our eyes.

As well as being used for taking photographs. X-rays are also used for treating diseased parts of the body in order to kill the disease. So today doctors can find out by X-rays whether a patient has tuberculosis, for example', or cancer, in time to be able to cure it, and then they also use X-rays to destroy the cancer. X rays can be used for studying many other things well as human bodies. Engineers use them, for example, to find out how metal objects are internally structured in order to check whether there are any flaws in them, and whether they will be strong enough for purpose.

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He published his findings Rubber Gloves on December 18,1895.The news of these X-rays roused the world physics to a furor not seen since Danish physicist Hans Christian Orsted had discovered electromagnetism. So much work was done, and so many revolutionary findings Tattoo Clean were made that Routgen is often vie

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