The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-11-14
V. c. STECHSCHULTE

The prospect seemed bleak in 1895. The nineteenth century was almost gone and during it's pass ing years all the worthwhile, ex- citing and interesting discoveries in physical science had (so some thought already been made. The lightning had been tanned and electricity was mans servant, the laws of it's behavior neatly tabu- lated. Telephone and telegraph speeded our messages around the world. Ampere, Faraday, Max well. Kelvin and many others had written their names large on the pages of scientific history. Now, standing silent, as it were, on the piled-up mountain of past dis coveries, some physicists were looking to the far horizon and weeping, like Alexander of old, because there were no more worlds to conquer. And then, just fifty years ago, a new planet swan up from that horizon.
 On December 28, 1895, the fol- lowing paragraph, very plain and matter of fact, introduced an article in the Sitzungsberichte der Physikalisch medicinischen Ge- sellschaft of Wurzburg. The title of the paper was "On a New Kind of Rays" and its author was Will helm Conrad Roentgen.
 If the discharge from fairly large induction coil is passed through a Hittorf yacuum-tube or through a Lenard or Crookes tube from which the air has been sufficiently exhausted, the tube being covered with a tight fitting cover of black cardboard, one observes in a completely darkened room that, at each discharge, a paper screen, coated with barium platino cyanide and placed in the vicinity of the apparatus, becomes brightly f1ourescent The fioures- cence is still visible when the
 screen is two meters from the apparatus The most strik- ing feature is that some active agent passes through a black cardboard envelope which is opaque to sunlight and to ultra
 violet; an agent, moreover,
 which is able to produce active fourescence Sheets of hard rubber several centimeters
 thick still permit the rays to pass
 through them.
 To the last sentence was ap- pended a note:
 For breVity's sake I shall use
 the expression rays; and to
 distinguish them from others of
 this name, I shall call them
 "X-rays"
 Thus were X-rays announced to the world. The original discovery was made on November 8, 1895, and this day may, perhaps not im- properly, be regarded as the birth day of the new physics" The importance of the announcement was splendidly and widely grasped, and Roentgen's paper was translated into many lang uages. Four days after the dis coyery became known in the Uni ted States, X-rays were used in an attempt to locate a bullet in the leg of a wounded man. Tn the few weeks intervening between his original discovery and the publi- cation of his paper, Roentgen made an extraordinary series of experiments wherein he studied the characteristics and effects of x-rays and opened wide doors to varied paths of investigation, paths along which many a physi- eist since has walked, On March 9, 1896, he communicated a see- ond paper on his further experi- ments. Both papers are models of orderly and clear exposition, set forth with simplicity and
 More or less directly as a re- suit of Roentgen's work there came the early discovery in 1896 of radioactiyity by the French man, II Becquerel, followed quick ly by the Polish Madame Curie and her French husband with what portentous results We are learning more and more in these days of atomic energy. Tn 1897 England's J. J. Thomson found that the cathode rays of Crookes were negatively charged particles (eleetrons) and measured the ra- tio of their charge to their mass. Largely on this bread internation- al foundation of basic discover les there has been built the amaz- ing structure of modern physics, bewildering, perhaps, in it's seem- Ing complexity, but beautiful in the unity and symmetry of its de- sign.
 The property of X-rays which most strongly gripped the imagin- ation was, no doubt, their ability to pass through different sub- stances with different degrees of ease, so that they could be used to photograph the invisible and, in particular, could yield us pictures of the interior of the human body. Roentgen himself won tremend-