[Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen 1845-1923].

Abstract

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on March 27th 1845 in the small town of Lennep on the lower Rhine. In the year of the revolution 1848 the family moved to Apeldoorn in Holland to be with his mother's family. Here he started school at the Martinus van Doorn's private Institute. In December 1862 he commenced his studies at the Utrecht Technical School, but was expelled for doubtful reasons. As he had no School Leaving Certificate he attended closed lectures in philosophy at the University of Utrecht, and in 1865 he passed the entrance exam to the Polytechnicum in Zürich - despite the lack of a School Leaving Certificate - where the famous August Kundt taught him physics. Röntgen went with Kundt to Würzburg and in 1872 to Strasbourg. In 1875 Röntgen became professor in physics in Hohenheim in 1879 in Giessen and in 1888 he was appointed professor in physics in Würzburg. It was here that Röntgen experimented with the Crookes airfree tube and on the afternoon of November 8th 1895 he by chance saw some crystals of bariumplatincyanid shine behind a screen. He took pictures of his weights in their wooden box and later the first "medical" picture of his wife Bertha's hand. ... Röntgen was the first to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1901. Röntgen died of cancer coli on February 7th, 1923. The world famous Berlin surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch was called to see him but too late to help. ...