Wilhelm Röntgen

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on 27 March 1845 at Lennep in Prussia (now part of Remscheid, Germany), the only child of a cloth merchant, and grew up in the Netherlands. Expelled from a technical school for a prank he did not commit, he studied mechanical engineering in Zurich and then turned to physics. He became professor of physics at Würzburg in 1888. On 8 November 1895, experimenting with a cathode-ray tube wrapped in black cardboard, he noticed a screen coated with barium platinocyanide glowing across the room. He spent weeks investigating the invisible rays, which he called X-rays because their nature was unknown, and found that they passed through flesh but were stopped by bone and metal. His first report appeared at the end of December 1895, with an image of the bones of his wife Anna Bertha's hand and her ring. Within months doctors around the world were using X-rays to locate fractures and bullets. Röntgen refused to patent the discovery. In 1901 he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics. He died in Munich on 10 February 1923.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Marie Curie · Robert Koch