January 7, 2019 • 44 mins
Just try to imagine modern medicine without x-rays. How did we ever get by without them and who is responsible for this amazing technological invention? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick for another eye-opening episode of Invention.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick, and I gotta start you off with
a pop quiz today. Robert, Actually, no, this isn't a
pop quiz. Let's not pretend because you already know the
answer to this, It's in the notes. But here's the question.
Would you have known the answer if you didn't do
the research for this episode? The question is do you
know who was the very first person ever to receive
(00:32):
a Nobel Prize in physics? I would not have known
prior to recording this, not off the top of my
head either. No, I wouldn't have been able to come
up with a name. So the very first Nobel Prize
in Physics recipient is a German physicist by the name
of Wilhelm Konrad Rundkin. And in the words of the
Nobel Prize organization, he got the prize quote in recognition
(00:55):
of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery
of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him. So raise
named after him one of these Wilhelm rays. Yeah, we
don't call him that. No, No, these were the Runtkin rays.
And sure enough, if you go back into the eight
ten nineties, and look at the journals of the time.
You can find like articles in the journal Nature by
(01:18):
no less than J. J. Thompson, the guy who's credited
with the discovery of the electron, comparing Runtkin rays with
the radiation emitted by uranium salts. But most people, probably
today do not know what Runtkin rays are because we
call them by a different name. We call them X rays,
and that is going to be the topic for today.
We're gonna be talking about X rays. Now. Of course,
(01:40):
this is a show about invention, and before you get
out all your well, actually's it's quite true that X
rays were never at any point invented. They are not
a human invention. They are part of nature. In fact,
X rays are no more human invention than visible light
is than though what makes X rays special is that
while we've long had the ability to produce copious amount
(02:00):
of visible light, it's only since around the beginning of
the twentieth century, a little bit before the beginning of
the twentieth century, that we understood how to produce and
control X rays. And it's this power, the power of
the X ray machine that we're looking at today and
That's one of the wonderful things though about this episode,
is that this is a case where we can point
to one individual, one scientist, one physicist, and and identify
(02:25):
their key role in this turning point in history. Yeah.
I think a lot of inventions are are kind of murkier, right,
Like a lot of things that we think of as
inventions are actually just like slight modifications of something that
came before. H This is a case where there really
was a tremendous, sudden breakthrough and it had far reaching
(02:45):
effects all over the world. Just try to imagine the
time before X rays, Before say X rays in a
diagnostic medical context. We now know X rays are useful
for a lot more than just medicine. But just think
about going to the doctor and maybe having something wrong
inside you at a time when there were no X rays. Yeah.
This reminds me of the old saying um about how
(03:08):
a book is man's best friend outside of a dog
or was that because inside of a dog is too
dark to see? Yeah, but it is. It is dark
inside the body, and it was it was truly dark
and in many other ways before the X ray, Because
before X rays, the best way to peer inside the
living body. It was to look through a natural aperture
using what you would call the old knifeoscope. Yeah. Basically, yeah,
(03:31):
if you if you didn't have a natural aperture to
look into, you would have to make one, You'd have
to cut one. And it's I think it was really
difficult to overstate the importance of this bit of medical technology,
the ability to see how bones and tissues are aligned,
to see what might be wrong with them, what's broken,
how are they healing. But to use a very basic
example that comes up a lot discussing the X ray
(03:54):
and the advent of x ray technology is, Uh, you
have an individual who is say shot with a with
a by a gun. A bullet enters their body. Now,
sometimes the bullet exits the body, but other times it
does not. How do you find the bullet? Well, today
we can x ray, somebody find the foreign map matter
and you know, hone in on where we need to
remove it from. But prior to this, one might have
(04:15):
to do a bit of searching and sometimes the bullet
couldn't be found at all, which can have dire results.
In one for instance, a US President James Garfield was
shot and subsequently died in large part because they could
not find the bullet. That story is actually weird and
worth reading about in depth if you ever get a chance.
The the assassin was a guy named Charles Julius Gatteaux.
(04:37):
Who he was, this dude who thought that he had
helped James Garfield get elected, and so he thought that
God was telling him that he had like a special
appointment coming to him, like that he deserved a console
ship or something, and he ended up shooting James Garfield.
But it's often been said that Garfield's death was not
(04:57):
caused directly by the assassin's bullet, but by the failures
of medicine at the time, because he didn't die until
eleven weeks after he was shot, and not only could
the doctors not find the bullet inside him, they had
to keep digging around looking for it with like the
unsterilized equipment and dirty hands of the time, probably leading
to the infections of the wound which ended up killing him. Now,
(05:20):
I don't I don't want to imply that the X ray,
of course, is our only way of understanding what's going
on inside the body or diagnosing illnesses, but it is
tremendously important, and that was one of the reasons that
X rays are taken so often. That is why I
venture to say everyone listening to this podcast has received
an X ray in their life. I'm sure you've received
(05:41):
multiple X rays. I would be I would be shocked
if there was anyone out there who has never received
an X ray. And you should be thankful that X
rays are so much safer today than they were when
they were first invented. But even when, even back at
that time, when they were dangerous, they could be a
life saving intervention. Um so a bit more, I guess
on Mr Runchkins So. He was born in Prussia now
(06:02):
Germany March five. He died in February of nineteen twenty
three in Munich. And in the mid eighteen nineties, Runtgan
was working as a professor of physics at Wurzburg University
in Bavaria, and around this time, the behavior of discharge
known as cathode rays was extremely hot stuff in science.
(06:24):
Lots of physics researchers around the world that they were
pushing the limits of science working with cathode ray tube experiments.
So what's a cathode ray tube? Here's the simple version.
You get an enclosed glass tube and use a vacuum
to suck most of the air out of it. You
want to try to create like a partial vacuum, a
rarefied gas environment inside the tube. And then inside this tube,
(06:47):
you have two metal electrodes known as a cathode and
an anode, And imagine you connect those two electrodes separately
to the terminals of a battery. The cathode is connected
to the negative terminal. The anode is connected to the
positive terminal. Now, obviously the current wants to flow, right,
it wants to flow from the negative to the positive.
And if you apply a great enough voltage to this tube,
(07:09):
you will actually begin to see the tube glow as
a result of electrons flying off of the cathode and
jumping to the anode, jumping across the gap. And so
different forms of the anode can create different effects. Like
if you use an anode that's the receptive terminal with
a hole in the middle, so it's kind of a
ring that's attracting these electrons, you can essentially create a
(07:30):
kind of beam of electrons that flows through the anode
and projects against the inside wall of the tube on
the far side. And if you use an anode in
a particular shape. You can kind of cast a shadow
in that shape of the two against the back of
the two wall, surrounded by the glow of the streaming
electron flow. Now, of course, at the time, physicists did
(07:51):
not know what was happening in the tube right. The
electron was not even formally discovered until when the physicist J. J.
Thompson used Catherine Cathode ray tube experiments to prove the
existence of this tiny sub atomic particle with a negative charge,
which we would later come to call the electron. In
the years before this, there was still a lot of mystery,
what's happening, what's causing this glow? So a little bit
(08:14):
earlier in the eighteen nineties, Wilhelm Rundkin was performing experiments
with Cathode ray tubes. Specifically, it was on one day
in November of eight that he was doing experiments on
a kind of tube called a Crooks tube, named after
the English physicist William Crooks, and while performing experiments with
the tube in a completely darkened room, Rundkin noticed out
(08:36):
of the corner of his eye that a screen of
barium platinum cyanide in the room with him began to glow.
When the cathode ray was powered up. Now, this barium
platinum cyanide, this is a material that was used in
photographic plates that we now know fluoresces. It glows in
the presence of ionizing radiation like X rays and gamma rays,
(08:58):
and so in this dark room it was glowing. He
found that the screen was being excited by some kind
of energy that was emitted from the tube every time
he turned it on, and the screen glowed as if
it were being illuminated by light. But whatever caused it
to glow was completely invisible to the naked eye. It
was as if he had discovered a form of invisible light,
(09:20):
which sounds pretty freaky to the Halloween music, and it
it is essential though in understanding what's going on here,
because they did not understand what this was. No, they
did not originally understand that this was a higher energy
form of the same type of radiation that that causes
visible light. So he was doing experiments trying to figure
out what was going on here. He immediately started all
(09:43):
these different tests, like he found that the rays left
images on photographic plates, so that's one thing you could
use them to essentially expose a photograph, And he also
experimented with placing different objects between the tube and the
photographic plates, and he found that this unknown energy which
started calling X rays seemed to pass right through some
(10:04):
objects like wood and paper, while being stopped by others
that would leave a dark spot on the exposed photographic plate.
In his most famous experiment, Runt again extended this this
idea of the variable opacity or transparency of of solid
matter to his own wife's hand. His wife, Anna Bertha.
(10:25):
He asked her, he was like, honey, come in, and
he had her hold her hand over a photographic plate
while he bombarded it with X rays for about fifteen minutes.
And there's a story not not known for sure, if
it's true that, upon seeing the X ray of her
own hand, uh Anna Bertha said, I have seen my death.
And when you've seen the skeleton, yeah, when you look
(10:46):
at the image, it's not hard to see why it
is so spooky. You can see the bones within the
palm reaching up. I mean it looks like these like
long ghoulish fingers, because what you're actually seeing is that
the poem is composed of of long bones that connect
to the fingers at the knuckles, and so it makes
the X ray of the hand look like a hand
with like freakishly long fingers, and then her wedding ring
(11:09):
is in there, so it's this huge black lump on
the third finger. Uh, it's it's it's creepy. You know this.
I can't help but think of the scene and David
Cronenberg's The Fly where he wants to drag Gina Davis,
his character, his his his former lover into the telepod
with him as part of the ongoing experiment. But another
(11:32):
comparison I want to draw here between fictional mad science
and real science and real innovation is something we've already
touched on that he was not acting alone in all
of this research. There were other people engaging with the
same sort of technology, uh, sort of reaching after some
of the same ideas, and he was the first person
to really put things together. Yeah, so right after he
(11:54):
discovered this, he immediately pretty much began to publicize his findings.
It was the same year, and other researchers replicated them.
So other people did they you know, like, it wasn't
all that hard to put together the apparatus he had.
It wasn't like he had some special materials or something.
He was just like, hey, try this, and people pretty
easily could and they did, and so another scientist named
(12:16):
Arthur Schuster soon discovered that X rays were, in fact
the same type of radiation is visible light, just in
a much higher energy form, higher frequency, shorter wavelengths. And
so it's almost like, you know, the the keys to
discovering the X rays had been lying around. Yeah, but
like with the fly, though, we just see this one
(12:37):
vision of this. Uh, this mad sign is working on
his own as if no one else has has really
any access to the same ideas or technology, when in
reality they would probably be like six other additional films
in which someone did not successfully teleport themselves or did
not wind up being turned into a monster, that sort
(12:58):
of thing, I mean, I guess also like the fly, Uh,
this story has some lessons about informed consent right where
he I don't think that runtgen meant to cause his
wife harm, but people at the time did not understand
that overexposure to X rays would be extremely dangerous, even lethal,
And so you have the idea here of like of
(13:20):
runt again inviting his wife into this experiment when she
didn't really know what the risks were, and he didn't either. Now,
so we've touched on before. Runtken, is this turning point
because there's no real reason why someone else couldn't have
technically made the same discovery sooner uh as As. Then
this was pointed out in Early History of X rays
by Alexei Asthmus. First of all, cathode ray tubes and
(13:43):
fluorescent screens were the only required technology, and they've been
around for decades. Some researchers had even observed a fluorescence
in the tubing or fogged photographic plates. But prior to
the work of German physicist Nobel Prize winner and al
toly total Nazi um like seriously joined up early and
(14:04):
despised any non German science, including the quote Jewish fraud
of relativity um Philip Lennard who lived eighteen sixty two seven.
Prior to his work, everyone was focused on what was
going on inside the tube, not the effects of the
ray outside the tube, and Leonard was the was actually
the first to do this, and Runkin made the key
(14:25):
connections using equipment that came from Leonard and others as well,
including that Nicola tesla oh I didn't know that, but again,
it's just it's helpful to to look at at a
key innovation, key discoveries taking place, you know, not in
a vacuum like that. There is something that that there
is something kind of storybook special about that, that that
(14:46):
one person who is the first to make the ultimate
connection that leads to these new discoveries. Well, there were
so much going on with physics discoveries around the turn
of the twentieth century, in those decades surrounding it, I mean,
must have been such an exciting time to be working
in a field like this. All Right, we're gonna take
a break, and when we come back, we're going to
(15:06):
talk some more about the kind of energy the kind
of uh innovations that come in the wake of this discopion.
All right, we're back. So you remember the story We
don't know if it's true, but the story that in
a Bertha will Holm, Rundkin's wife, after she saw the
(15:29):
X ray of her hand, she said, I have seen
my death. And that's interesting in multiple ways because it
sort of unknowingly portends the risks the dangers of X rays.
But also I think what she would have meant by
that is that she could see her skeleton, she could
see inside her own body, and this was something so
unusual to people at the time, right, I mean, and
(15:49):
in many cases, essentially what a doctor is able to
do is take the X ray and say, oh, I
see your death right here. Um, but we can remove it.
Don't worry about it, right, I Mean that's not always. Uh,
this is an over simplification and doesn't apply to all
medical scenarios, but it again, it does give us this
phenomenal ability to look inside the body and see in
(16:09):
some cases things that should not be their conditions that
should not be there, or the evidence of injury. And
soon after the discovery of X rays, in fact, very
soon after, it was almost immediately picked up for medical uses. Yeah,
everything from examining broken bones to as we mentioned, finding
lost bullets in a body. Now, as with pretty much
(16:31):
any cutting edge medical technology found at the dawn of
the twentieth century. Uh, you can find a terrific look
at at at X ray technology in the Steven Soderberg
medical drama The Nick, which I think I've mentioned on
this show before. I definitely mentioned on Stuff to Blow
your mind before. Uh, there's just a fabulous drama that
(16:53):
wasn't seen by enough people. In the two seasons that
it ran highly recommend anyone pick it up because in
season one, episode six, the hospital at the center of
this drama they acquire a second hand X ray machine
and the whole time there's just there's just reckless use
of X rays in this episode because again we're in
a period of time where there's all this enthusiasm about
(17:15):
the about the technology and there's this this just revelation
about what it can be used for, and at the
same time, uh, the dangers of the technology are only
just beginning to be made evident. But in in the
Nick there's a there's a scene where the salesman UH
and UH members of the hospital staff are are trying
(17:35):
it out without any regard for the dangers of radiation exposure.
There's a scene where the salesman boasts that the machine
works just fine. He says, quote, my children were taking
dozens of X rays for the of themselves the other day.
They had the thing running for hours. That's some dark
humor it is. It's it's a wonderful show, but it's
like it's like in Madmen, when you know the kids
(17:55):
are always playing with like a plastic bag over their
heads and stuff from the don't care. Yeah, there are
a lot of moments like that that the show itself
is particularly good because it has this minimal electronic score.
It has this there's a way that they do the
cinematography that Soderbrook shoots it, you know, in which it
doesn't feel like a period piece it is. It's you know,
(18:17):
obviously a period said in a historic period, but it's
displayed bright and almost futuristic because it was a time
when all these amazing discoveries were being made and all
of these technologies that are explored in this episode and
and others were the cutting the bleeding edge of our
understanding of human physiology but also the physical nature of
(18:39):
the world. But it's also got this dark, retrospective irony. Yeah,
why why is it that we love stuff like that?
I've noticed that's a thing that lots of historical TV
shows and movies do now and generally audiences tend to love.
Is that kind of thing like that my kids were
playing with the X ray machine, or that you know,
this little girls playing with plastic bag overhead. Like people
(19:02):
just really love the like, oh, they don't understand the
danger yet. Well, in a way, I think a show
like The Nick is kind of reverse science fiction. Like
science fiction look looks to the future but deals with
contemporary anxieties about science and technological advancement and the cultural
response to all of that. And the nick especially looks
(19:24):
to the past, but I think you can you can
see ways in which it is also speaking to the
definitely speaking to the modern viewer. So it is kind
of a reverse science fiction. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, I
mean it's interesting in a different way than looking at
the science fiction of the past, is because we different things.
Seems significant to us in retrospect then seemed then, I
(19:47):
guess seemed interesting to them in prospect exactly. Now, certainly
as we've we've touched on the danger was not recognized yet.
Rather than radiation, the prevailing idea was that this was
essentially a type of photography it was being demonstrated with
the X ray machine, and that the rays involved were
were more akin to harmless light visible light. Yes, and
(20:09):
Runkin accepted Leonard's view that the cathode rays were quote
vibrations of the ether uh and that it was ethereal
and didn't and you know, therefore did not reflect or refract. Uh.
They were He suggested longitudinal vibrations of the ether. The ether,
I guess this was the day of the luminiferous ether, right,
(20:30):
the idea that there was a substance through which light
had to propagate, and this was one thing that people
would often continue to think basically until Einstein. Right. But
part of Einstein's achievement was showing, like, you don't need
an ether theory to show how light travels by the way.
This is another thing it's interesting about Runkin is that
he himself only published three papers on X rays during
(20:52):
his life, But again, there were just so many people
that were just ready to jump in on this research.
I know one of his papers I was looking at
an article that talked about how I think it was
his very last paper on X rays was about how
to make them visible? And I think it was like
that they could be perceived directly by the eye at
a very high intensity or certain circumstances. Interesting, it doesn't
(21:14):
sound safe, but but again, yeah, it was. It was
all these other researchers and innovators and inventors that came
in the aftermath of his initial discovery that really made
all of this difference. Um. And then there were those
two that dismissed it as mere novelty, and this is
actually reflected in that episode of The Nick as well.
(21:34):
But other people saw its appeal. Dr Henry W. Ktell,
demonstrator of morbid anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. It
sounds like a Hogwarts position, doesn't, But he told The
New York Times in quote, the surgical imagination can pleasurably
lose itself and devising endless applications of this wonderful process.
(21:56):
And that is in contrast to other individuals who thought
this was a fad, that this was just a you know,
a side show, and that clearly wasn't going to be
a major part of medical diagnosis or treatment. Now it can't.
We were talking at the beginning about how it wasn't
immediately clear how dangerous it was. But it can't have
taken too long for people to catch on, right, because
(22:19):
they would start to see the effects, right. That's and
and that's was that was driven home in a couple
of different resources I looked at here for this. The
dangers apparently became clear too many of these individuals who
were working with radiation pretty early by seven for instance,
hair loss and skin burns, were already being reported because
(22:39):
you have these researchers working without protection, exposing themselves to
to these rays way too much, and they're beginning to
notice damage to their own tissues. Yeah, and if you
if you want to see something really horrible, you can
look up what X ray burns look like. It is
a nasty business. Now. Throughout this time, researchers continued to
weigh in on just what it was. You know, what
(23:01):
was this this a vorta of vortex in the ether
that I'm looking at here high frequency light? Of course
that's the correct answer. Longitudal waves. That was the original idea.
Transverse impulses of the ether and similar properties were also
of course observed in uranium. But it was also really
ultimately going to be a thirty year journey for scientists
(23:21):
to really gain like a kind of a bedrock understanding
of what they were dealing with. Another thing that modern
audiences might not understand is that because if you've had
an X ray at the dentist recently or something like that,
it probably did not take all that long. You know,
they just flash it on and off and there you go. Uh,
The older X ray machines took a lot longer. Well,
(23:44):
you mentioned earlier a fifteen minute exposure and some of
the original experiments, uh, and it would require you would
need even longer periods of time for certain parts of
the end of the anatomy, such as the head. There's
another scene in that episode of The Nick where he's
testing it out on the hospital administrator character and he says,
what part of your body do you want to see?
(24:05):
And he said, oh, I want to see my head.
So he has him hold up the plate and it
sets up the machine and says, all right, this should
take about an hour. Yeah, because the head and the
brain were extremely difficult to image at the time. But
as we said, there there was a lot of danger
in the early days of radiation experimentation and usage. UH.
(24:27):
Dr Walter James Dodd, for instance, who lived eighteen sixty
nine through nineteen through nineteen sixteen. He was one of
the United States first radiologists. He made some very key
early innovations, but he also suffered numerous radiation burns and
had to have several appendages amputated, and he eventually died
of cancer from radiation exposure at the age of fifty three.
(24:50):
Thomas Edison actually abandoned his own research into X ray
technology after his assistant, a glassblower by the name of
Clarence Madison Dally suffered, you know, an identical fate to
Dodd due to radiation exposure. Yeah, that's something to hammer
home that, um. I mean a lot of the risk
at the time was obviously if you were being imaged
a lot and having a lot of exposure to X
(25:11):
rays that way, it was risky for you. But it's
especially risky for the people who were operating the machines
because they're around them all the time. They're not just
there when they're being image they're they're all day. Yeah.
I was looking at one source here, early clinical use
of the X ray by Joel D. Howell, m d,
pH d, published in and the Transactions of the American
(25:33):
Clinical and Climatological Association, and the author pointed out the following.
He says, quote, early X ray users would test to
see if the tube was putting out an adequate amount
of X ray by looking for a glow in their
hand when they put it in front of the beam.
Method of testing that would soon reveal itself to have
delaterious consequences. But he also adds that evidence seems to
(25:55):
indicate that many of them knew way more about the
dangers than they let on, and that he says that
there was this zeal uh you know, this really this
idea that there was a valor and pushing this amazing
and life saving technology, um, even though there were these
ever more apparent risks. Oh, I want to talk about
a very clear example of that in a minute with
(26:17):
with Marie Curie. Actually, he also points out another thing
that's very interesting. They says that it's it's very about
how we we can't quite look at the X ray
machine in isolation to understand the changes that came about
because of it. I'm going to read a longer quote
from that paper, he says, quote, one must study how
the machine is used with a specific social, political, and
(26:40):
economic system. The technology to be considered is not only
a machine, it is also the system within which that
machine is used. In the case of the X ray machine,
that would include the organizational structure of the institution, the
people designated to run the machine, and the forums on
which such use was recorded. Even though the published medical
literature would suggest that the case for using X rays
(27:02):
to diagnose fractured bones was firmly established by nineteen hundred,
it was not a regular part of patient care for
decades to come. What was required for it to become
a part of routine patient care included changes in the
type of person who was running the machine, changes in
the payment mechanism, and changes in the way that data
were conceptualized. Yeah. I mean it's introducing a whole new
(27:26):
paradigm to medical care. Yeah. And again this is just
another reason that it it's difficult to to overstate, uh,
the impact of of X ray technology on medicine. Absolutely,
and I want to talk about an example of that
also in early early twentieth century wartime medicine. So there's
(27:47):
a fantastic article I read by Timothy J. Jorgenson, who's
the director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate
program at Georgetown University. And the article is on the Conversation.
It's called Marie Curry and her X ray vehicles contribution
to World War One battlefield medicine. And so this is
a story I actually somehow I had never read about before. Um,
(28:10):
but this was fascinating. So we all know Marie Cury,
the Polish born French physicist and chemist and She's best
known probably for the discovery and isolation of the elements
radium and polonium, and for her work on radioactivity spontaneous radiation,
for which she received two different Nobel Prizes in nineteen
oh three and nineteen eleven. Uh So, Curie was doing
(28:32):
her work. She was conducting her research in Paris with
the Radium Institute when World War One broke out in Europe,
and in one of the early maneuvers of the war
in nineteen fourteen, German troops clearly had set their sights
on the city of Paris, on the French capital, and
they eventually they invaded France through Belgium, and we're trying
to march towards Paris to take the capital city. Obviously,
(28:54):
Cury knew that she couldn't continue her research if the
city was attacked, so she packed up her fly of radium,
like literally packed it up in a leadlined case and
fled to the southwest towards Bordeaux, which I think is
also where the French government were moved to. But she
went to Bordeaux and she hid her radium in a
safe deposit box in a bank vault. Yeah, but having
(29:16):
safely stored France's supply of radium her radioactive treasures. She
did not just continue to flee the war. Instead, Curie
was determined to help with the war effort and defend
France against the German assault. But she couldn't, of course,
pick up a rifle and go to the front lines.
But she had another idea. Instead, she used her knowledge
about physics and radiation to create an invention that would
(29:38):
go on to save the lives of thousands of injured
French and Allied soldiers on the front lines. And this
would all be with the help of X rays. So,
by the time of World War One, X rays were
known to be a life saving medical technology. Like we've
been talking about, they were useful for diagnosing internal injuries.
But you had the big, clunky X ray machines of
the day that were usually cooped up in the high
(30:00):
tech urban hospitals. Right, So if a French soldier was
filled with bullets or shrapnel along the front, these hospitals
would have been many miles away. You can't like take
the soldier all the way back to the hospital. A
lot of times they'll often die on the way to
take a long time to get there. Um, so what
do you do? How do you bring the life saving
power of X rays to the injured fighters on the front.
(30:23):
So Marie Curry's invention was the radiological car. It's a
car on the bottom, but outfitted with a compartment containing
an X ray machine and a dynamo to generate the
electricity to power it, as well as dark room equipment
for the development of radiological photographs. And these radiological cars
were nicknamed by the soldiers petite curies, and Curry oversaw
(30:46):
the creation of the first car, which was used to
treat wounded soldiers at the Battle of Marne later in
nineteen fourteen, a battle which the Allies won. But obviously
one car was not enough to put a serious dint
in this problem, so Cury herself petition donations of cars
from rich French women to be turned into petite curies,
(31:06):
and with the help of her daughter Irene, Currie trained
female volunteers to operate the X ray machines on the
front lines, and by the end of the war they
had trained a hundred and fifty women as front line radiographers.
Now Currie also oversaw the creation of more fixed facilities
like X ray diagnostic stations at field hospitals behind the
(31:27):
front and drove and she actually drove and operated a
radiological car for the war effort herself. Of course, repeated
exposure to X rays which Curry and her technicians experienced
come that comes with a lot of associated health risks,
like we've been talking about. And Currie understood this, like
she knew that she was putting herself and her health
and her life at risk by exposing herself to these
(31:49):
X rays. But I think she saw it as part
of the risk of aiding in the war effort, just
like a soldier would put his life on the line
going out over the trenches. And actually later in her
life when he suffered from a plastic anemia, which can
of course result from radiation exposure, some people thought, well,
maybe it was her experiments with radium and stuff that
caused that condition, but Curie actually believed it was her
(32:11):
repeated exposure to X rays during the war that were
more likely to have caused the condition. And all told,
it's been estimated that Curi's efforts contributed to more than
a million wounded soldiers receiving X rays during the war,
a huge fraction of which likely had their lives saved.
By the procedure. It is interesting in retrospected, you know,
to see how this technology came online in time, just
(32:34):
in time for the two World Wars, times of such
injury and loss of life. Yeah, I mean often when
you think about the nightmare of the First World War
in particular, it seems like it's a time of such
terrifying chaos and confusion, largely brought about by new technology, right,
new warfare technology. Uh, that it was almost like an
(32:58):
experimental labor to worry for ways to kill and harm
one another. And so it's kind of interesting also seeing
going on in the background at being a laboratory of
ways to save lives. Indeed. All right, on that note,
we're going to take another break, and when we come back,
we're going to discuss the legacy of the X ray.
(33:21):
So X ray has changed the world in other ways,
as Richard Gunderman, Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy
at Indiana University, pointed out in an article that he
wrote for The Conversation, UH, this discovery of X ray
and the advent of X ray technology led to X
ray crystallography, which allows us to see the world at
a very small scale. To image molecules, and in fact,
(33:45):
the father son team of William H. And William L.
Bragg shared in the nineteen fifteen Nobel Prize in Physics
for this advancement, and without it, James Watson and Francis
Crick wouldn't have been able to discover the chemical structure
of DNA. Oh Yeah, and always got a shout out
Franklin and Wilkins as well. Now, additionally, X ray astronomy
(34:06):
allowed us to understand the greater cosmos. Yeah, and X
ray astronomy is an interesting case. It's worth putting in
the context to the broader ecosystem of technology like astronomy
saw such an explosion of new techniques after the nineteen
sixties once we could put observatories in space, and this
is largely because Earth's atmosphere blocks many kinds of radiation
(34:28):
that we now use to image the universe. And this
obviously is a very good thing, right. The atmosphere lets
most visible light through while stopping a lot of ionizing
radiation from space like X rays, and by adding space
based telescopes that could see other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum,
not just visible light, we greatly expanded astronomical capabilities. For example,
(34:49):
X ray astronomy in particular has helped us detect and
understand some of the most extreme and energetic objects in
the universe, like it played a role in the detection
and understanding of neutron on stars and black holes. Like
we often detect black holes from the X rays them,
not necessarily from the body itself, but when a black
hole has material spiraling into it, it spews jets of
(35:12):
X rays out into space as the black hole superheats
the gases that are swirling into it. Not on a
much smaller scale. Um Gunderman doesn't mention this in his article,
but airport security X rays, no matter how much they
make irritatus, that they do help keep commercial flights safe
in this day and age. Can you imagine if they
couldn't X ray your bags and they had to like
open up everybody's bag and look through it, or just
(35:35):
like just looking in eyes and just it's just like
a trust system or gosh, yeah, you can just imagine
all the myrroad complications that would arise from not being
able to perform that scan. Yeah, I'm gonna say I'm
open to being argued otherwise, but as annoying as airport
security is, it would be infinitely worse and infinitely more
(35:56):
annoying without X rays. But it's it's kind of like said,
this is part of the broader ecosystem of the technology.
And of course there were also additional changes in the
way we used X rays for medical purposes. Uh, not
only to find bullets in boken broken bones, but you know,
spot pneumonia's swallowed objects, cavities, and even cancer. And then
you get more advanced versions of X ray scans that
(36:19):
became possible, uh, CT scans, for instance, being X ray
X rays through the body at different angles to create
a superior image. Yeah, and people who are outside the
medical professions might not realize how absolutely essential CT scans
are these days, like how how frequently they're used and
how many lives they save. Gunderman points to a study
(36:40):
in the journal Radiology that looked into the use of
CT scans in the emergency department of hospitals, and the
authors they're just wanted to see how often a CT
scan changes the doctor's primary diagnosis of a patient. Right,
doctor sees you, examines you externally, they think one thing,
so they order us CT scan. How often does the
(37:01):
CT scan change what they think is wrong with you?
And the study found, quote, the leading diagnosis changed in
two hundred and thirty five of four hundred and sixty
patients with abdominal pain, and that's about fifty one hundred
and sixty three of three and eighty seven with chest
pain and or dispania, which is difficulty breathing, and that's
(37:21):
forty two and a hundred and three out of four
hundred and thirty three with headache, which is so we
can't compare this directly with the time before CT scans,
because it's just it's kind of apples and oranges. But
if you take it as a very rough estimate, just
think about what it means that CT scans change what
a doctor thinks is wrong with you fifty one percent
(37:45):
or forty two percent of the time, and then think
about what that meant before we had these technologies. Right,
Just imagine going to the doctor with chess pain or
trouble breathing in the eighteen hundreds, before there is any
any of this kind of internal imaging, when even doctors
today change their primary diagnosis about forty two percent of
the time after looking at a CT scan, Gunderman writes, quote,
(38:08):
Thanks to CTS wide availability and great speed, doctors can
determine within minutes whether or not a patient's abdominal pain
is due to impendicitis, chest pain reflects a tear in
the order, or a severe headache is due to the
rupture of a blood vessel in the brain. It is
no wonder that about eighty million CT scans are performed
(38:28):
each year in the US. And it also turned out
that the same radiation that could detect cancer could also
destroy it. Radiotherapy. Yeah, radiation oncology has its roots actually
in the years immediately following Ruigan's discovery, when doctors discovered
this peculiar power. Now and to be sure, X rays
were used to treat a lot of illnesses before its
(38:50):
dangers were discovered. Um again, you just have to think
to this, the zealous use of radiation and just the
idea that this new technology could do just about anything.
But looking broadly at these and the zeroing in on
on some of the treatment details. X rays to treat
cancer may have occurred as early as eighteen, which, if
you'll recall from earlier, that's the year right after Runkin
(39:14):
discovered X rays and it was like at the end
of eighteen that he discovered them. Now I want I
want to stress though used in an attempt to treat
this was This was certainly extremely early days. Now. One
thing that's interesting and worth noting is that Runkin actually
did not seek riches from his discovery, like he did
not file for a patent on the production of X
(39:37):
rays through his method UH, and he even donated the
cash component of his Nobel prize to the university worked for.
He believed that scientific discoveries like X rays that were
useful in helping people in medicine were the common property
of humankind, not something to be claimed and profited on
by one man. And that's kind of a refreshing change,
(39:57):
it is. Yeah, Now, torek up Runkin discovered X rays.
In the following year, Antoine Becquerel identified radio activity, and
by nineteen hundred, alpha, beta, and gamma rays had been discovered.
And as James Burke UH, the author and UH television
host explored, in the day of the universe changed, even
(40:20):
more types of radiation were expected, even more discoveries surely
seemed to be just around the bend. And then in
nineteen O three Burke rights. Uh. The physicist Renee blonde
Lott reported the discovery of a new type of ray,
the N ray, and he observed them while looking at
polarized X rays and reported that they increased the brightness
(40:42):
of an electric spark. And after he made this observation, uh,
other individuals working in the field they backed him up
on this said, oh, yeah, we see it too, And
within three years hundreds of papers had been written about
in rays with all sorts of new properties thrown into
the vat here in eluding various connections with muscle activity
and the inner workings of the human mind, as if,
(41:05):
like you know, uh, intense human thought could create inn
in rays. Uh. And in the midst of all of this,
American physicist Robert W. Wood steps in. He was something
of a declaim an acclaimed debunker at the time, and
he looked into the matter. He observed blonde Let's demonstrations
himself like firsthand, and he did not see the increase
(41:28):
in the electric sparks brightness. And then when blonde Lott
and his assistance conducted an experiment with the prism, which
was another thing that they did to to try and
prove the existence of these in rays uh to show
how it refracted like light, which of course X rays
do not. UM would did a curious thing. He quietly
(41:48):
removed the prism while they were from their experiment. While
they were conducting it, and the researchers continued to see
the in rays or reports seeing the in rays and
so uh so really would just completely discredited this. He
reported on it, and after he he he did so,
no one saw an N ray again. This was essentially
(42:10):
essentially in an illusion that was brought on by just
the zeal for discovery and the feeling that there were
going to be more rays and uh and and and
that it was just inevitable that they would be found. Well,
as we mentioned earlier, this was a time of tremendous discovery,
but it was also a time when people believed tons
of scientific things that later turned out to be completely wrong.
(42:33):
The luminiferous ether that's just gone, there's nothing there, nothing
to the theory, but but it was widely accepted at
this time. Yeah, Burke rights in the day of the
universe changed quote. There was never any suggestion that Blondelt
was a charlatan. He and his colleagues were victims of
the expectation that in rays would be discovered, and when
(42:53):
they built instruments to see the rays, they saw them
for a short time. This non existent phenomenon is did
the most stringent tests and methods known to science. So
it becomes something of a you know, a cautionary tale
about over enthusiasm, uh in scientific research and the dangers
of it potentially outstripping the rigors of science and scientific investigation. Yeah,
(43:16):
you can understand why people will be excited, but simmer down, folks.
There's also kind of an interesting invention to close out
this episode of Invention, the the the instruments that they
invented to see the non existent in rays um. Because again,
it's not like a pooping duck robot. It's not a
it's it's not a work of Charlottan. It is just
(43:37):
a work that compounds and illusion. Yeah, well, meaning enthusiasm
can still breed. Gremlin's that it can. That it can.
All right, So that you have another episode of Invention,
we can file that one away and if you want
to check out the files. If you want to see
other episodes of the show, head on over to invention
pod dot com. That is our website. You'll find the
(43:58):
other episodes as well as links out to our social
media accounts, and if you want to discuss the show
with other listeners, we would recommend going to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind discussion module. That's a Facebook group where
you know mostly we've talked about episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, but we're also happy to discuss episodes
of Invention there as well. Huge thanks to our friend
Scott Benjamin for research assistants on this show, and to
(44:20):
our excellent audio producer Torri Harrison. If you would like
to get in touch with us, was feedback on this
episode or any other, suggest a topic for the future
of Invention, or just to say hi let us know
how you found out about the show. You can email
us at contact at invention pod dot com.
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick, and I gotta start you off with
a pop quiz today. Robert, Actually, no, this isn't a
pop quiz. Let's not pretend because you already know the
answer to this, It's in the notes. But here's the question.
Would you have known the answer if you didn't do
the research for this episode? The question is do you
know who was the very first person ever to receive
(00:32):
a Nobel Prize in physics? I would not have known
prior to recording this, not off the top of my
head either. No, I wouldn't have been able to come
up with a name. So the very first Nobel Prize
in Physics recipient is a German physicist by the name
of Wilhelm Konrad Rundkin. And in the words of the
Nobel Prize organization, he got the prize quote in recognition
(00:55):
of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery
of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him. So raise
named after him one of these Wilhelm rays. Yeah, we
don't call him that. No, No, these were the Runtkin rays.
And sure enough, if you go back into the eight
ten nineties, and look at the journals of the time.
You can find like articles in the journal Nature by
(01:18):
no less than J. J. Thompson, the guy who's credited
with the discovery of the electron, comparing Runtkin rays with
the radiation emitted by uranium salts. But most people, probably
today do not know what Runtkin rays are because we
call them by a different name. We call them X rays,
and that is going to be the topic for today.
We're gonna be talking about X rays. Now. Of course,
(01:40):
this is a show about invention, and before you get
out all your well, actually's it's quite true that X
rays were never at any point invented. They are not
a human invention. They are part of nature. In fact,
X rays are no more human invention than visible light
is than though what makes X rays special is that
while we've long had the ability to produce copious amount
(02:00):
of visible light, it's only since around the beginning of
the twentieth century, a little bit before the beginning of
the twentieth century, that we understood how to produce and
control X rays. And it's this power, the power of
the X ray machine that we're looking at today and
That's one of the wonderful things though about this episode,
is that this is a case where we can point
to one individual, one scientist, one physicist, and and identify
(02:25):
their key role in this turning point in history. Yeah.
I think a lot of inventions are are kind of murkier, right,
Like a lot of things that we think of as
inventions are actually just like slight modifications of something that
came before. H This is a case where there really
was a tremendous, sudden breakthrough and it had far reaching
(02:45):
effects all over the world. Just try to imagine the
time before X rays, Before say X rays in a
diagnostic medical context. We now know X rays are useful
for a lot more than just medicine. But just think
about going to the doctor and maybe having something wrong
inside you at a time when there were no X rays. Yeah.
This reminds me of the old saying um about how
(03:08):
a book is man's best friend outside of a dog
or was that because inside of a dog is too
dark to see? Yeah, but it is. It is dark
inside the body, and it was it was truly dark
and in many other ways before the X ray, Because
before X rays, the best way to peer inside the
living body. It was to look through a natural aperture
using what you would call the old knifeoscope. Yeah. Basically, yeah,
(03:31):
if you if you didn't have a natural aperture to
look into, you would have to make one, You'd have
to cut one. And it's I think it was really
difficult to overstate the importance of this bit of medical technology,
the ability to see how bones and tissues are aligned,
to see what might be wrong with them, what's broken,
how are they healing. But to use a very basic
example that comes up a lot discussing the X ray
(03:54):
and the advent of x ray technology is, Uh, you
have an individual who is say shot with a with
a by a gun. A bullet enters their body. Now,
sometimes the bullet exits the body, but other times it
does not. How do you find the bullet? Well, today
we can x ray, somebody find the foreign map matter
and you know, hone in on where we need to
remove it from. But prior to this, one might have
(04:15):
to do a bit of searching and sometimes the bullet
couldn't be found at all, which can have dire results.
In one for instance, a US President James Garfield was
shot and subsequently died in large part because they could
not find the bullet. That story is actually weird and
worth reading about in depth if you ever get a chance.
The the assassin was a guy named Charles Julius Gatteaux.
(04:37):
Who he was, this dude who thought that he had
helped James Garfield get elected, and so he thought that
God was telling him that he had like a special
appointment coming to him, like that he deserved a console
ship or something, and he ended up shooting James Garfield.
But it's often been said that Garfield's death was not
(04:57):
caused directly by the assassin's bullet, but by the failures
of medicine at the time, because he didn't die until
eleven weeks after he was shot, and not only could
the doctors not find the bullet inside him, they had
to keep digging around looking for it with like the
unsterilized equipment and dirty hands of the time, probably leading
to the infections of the wound which ended up killing him. Now,
(05:20):
I don't I don't want to imply that the X ray,
of course, is our only way of understanding what's going
on inside the body or diagnosing illnesses, but it is
tremendously important, and that was one of the reasons that
X rays are taken so often. That is why I
venture to say everyone listening to this podcast has received
an X ray in their life. I'm sure you've received
(05:41):
multiple X rays. I would be I would be shocked
if there was anyone out there who has never received
an X ray. And you should be thankful that X
rays are so much safer today than they were when
they were first invented. But even when, even back at
that time, when they were dangerous, they could be a
life saving intervention. Um so a bit more, I guess
on Mr Runchkins So. He was born in Prussia now
(06:02):
Germany March five. He died in February of nineteen twenty
three in Munich. And in the mid eighteen nineties, Runtgan
was working as a professor of physics at Wurzburg University
in Bavaria, and around this time, the behavior of discharge
known as cathode rays was extremely hot stuff in science.
(06:24):
Lots of physics researchers around the world that they were
pushing the limits of science working with cathode ray tube experiments.
So what's a cathode ray tube? Here's the simple version.
You get an enclosed glass tube and use a vacuum
to suck most of the air out of it. You
want to try to create like a partial vacuum, a
rarefied gas environment inside the tube. And then inside this tube,
(06:47):
you have two metal electrodes known as a cathode and
an anode, And imagine you connect those two electrodes separately
to the terminals of a battery. The cathode is connected
to the negative terminal. The anode is connected to the
positive terminal. Now, obviously the current wants to flow, right,
it wants to flow from the negative to the positive.
And if you apply a great enough voltage to this tube,
(07:09):
you will actually begin to see the tube glow as
a result of electrons flying off of the cathode and
jumping to the anode, jumping across the gap. And so
different forms of the anode can create different effects. Like
if you use an anode that's the receptive terminal with
a hole in the middle, so it's kind of a
ring that's attracting these electrons, you can essentially create a
(07:30):
kind of beam of electrons that flows through the anode
and projects against the inside wall of the tube on
the far side. And if you use an anode in
a particular shape. You can kind of cast a shadow
in that shape of the two against the back of
the two wall, surrounded by the glow of the streaming
electron flow. Now, of course, at the time, physicists did
(07:51):
not know what was happening in the tube right. The
electron was not even formally discovered until when the physicist J. J.
Thompson used Catherine Cathode ray tube experiments to prove the
existence of this tiny sub atomic particle with a negative charge,
which we would later come to call the electron. In
the years before this, there was still a lot of mystery,
what's happening, what's causing this glow? So a little bit
(08:14):
earlier in the eighteen nineties, Wilhelm Rundkin was performing experiments
with Cathode ray tubes. Specifically, it was on one day
in November of eight that he was doing experiments on
a kind of tube called a Crooks tube, named after
the English physicist William Crooks, and while performing experiments with
the tube in a completely darkened room, Rundkin noticed out
(08:36):
of the corner of his eye that a screen of
barium platinum cyanide in the room with him began to glow.
When the cathode ray was powered up. Now, this barium
platinum cyanide, this is a material that was used in
photographic plates that we now know fluoresces. It glows in
the presence of ionizing radiation like X rays and gamma rays,
(08:58):
and so in this dark room it was glowing. He
found that the screen was being excited by some kind
of energy that was emitted from the tube every time
he turned it on, and the screen glowed as if
it were being illuminated by light. But whatever caused it
to glow was completely invisible to the naked eye. It
was as if he had discovered a form of invisible light,
(09:20):
which sounds pretty freaky to the Halloween music, and it
it is essential though in understanding what's going on here,
because they did not understand what this was. No, they
did not originally understand that this was a higher energy
form of the same type of radiation that that causes
visible light. So he was doing experiments trying to figure
out what was going on here. He immediately started all
(09:43):
these different tests, like he found that the rays left
images on photographic plates, so that's one thing you could
use them to essentially expose a photograph, And he also
experimented with placing different objects between the tube and the
photographic plates, and he found that this unknown energy which
started calling X rays seemed to pass right through some
(10:04):
objects like wood and paper, while being stopped by others
that would leave a dark spot on the exposed photographic plate.
In his most famous experiment, Runt again extended this this
idea of the variable opacity or transparency of of solid
matter to his own wife's hand. His wife, Anna Bertha.
(10:25):
He asked her, he was like, honey, come in, and
he had her hold her hand over a photographic plate
while he bombarded it with X rays for about fifteen minutes.
And there's a story not not known for sure, if
it's true that, upon seeing the X ray of her
own hand, uh Anna Bertha said, I have seen my death.
And when you've seen the skeleton, yeah, when you look
(10:46):
at the image, it's not hard to see why it
is so spooky. You can see the bones within the
palm reaching up. I mean it looks like these like
long ghoulish fingers, because what you're actually seeing is that
the poem is composed of of long bones that connect
to the fingers at the knuckles, and so it makes
the X ray of the hand look like a hand
with like freakishly long fingers, and then her wedding ring
(11:09):
is in there, so it's this huge black lump on
the third finger. Uh, it's it's it's creepy. You know this.
I can't help but think of the scene and David
Cronenberg's The Fly where he wants to drag Gina Davis,
his character, his his his former lover into the telepod
with him as part of the ongoing experiment. But another
(11:32):
comparison I want to draw here between fictional mad science
and real science and real innovation is something we've already
touched on that he was not acting alone in all
of this research. There were other people engaging with the
same sort of technology, uh, sort of reaching after some
of the same ideas, and he was the first person
to really put things together. Yeah, so right after he
(11:54):
discovered this, he immediately pretty much began to publicize his findings.
It was the same year, and other researchers replicated them.
So other people did they you know, like, it wasn't
all that hard to put together the apparatus he had.
It wasn't like he had some special materials or something.
He was just like, hey, try this, and people pretty
easily could and they did, and so another scientist named
(12:16):
Arthur Schuster soon discovered that X rays were, in fact
the same type of radiation is visible light, just in
a much higher energy form, higher frequency, shorter wavelengths. And
so it's almost like, you know, the the keys to
discovering the X rays had been lying around. Yeah, but
like with the fly, though, we just see this one
(12:37):
vision of this. Uh, this mad sign is working on
his own as if no one else has has really
any access to the same ideas or technology, when in
reality they would probably be like six other additional films
in which someone did not successfully teleport themselves or did
not wind up being turned into a monster, that sort
(12:58):
of thing, I mean, I guess also like the fly, Uh,
this story has some lessons about informed consent right where
he I don't think that runtgen meant to cause his
wife harm, but people at the time did not understand
that overexposure to X rays would be extremely dangerous, even lethal,
And so you have the idea here of like of
(13:20):
runt again inviting his wife into this experiment when she
didn't really know what the risks were, and he didn't either. Now,
so we've touched on before. Runtken, is this turning point
because there's no real reason why someone else couldn't have
technically made the same discovery sooner uh as As. Then
this was pointed out in Early History of X rays
by Alexei Asthmus. First of all, cathode ray tubes and
(13:43):
fluorescent screens were the only required technology, and they've been
around for decades. Some researchers had even observed a fluorescence
in the tubing or fogged photographic plates. But prior to
the work of German physicist Nobel Prize winner and al
toly total Nazi um like seriously joined up early and
(14:04):
despised any non German science, including the quote Jewish fraud
of relativity um Philip Lennard who lived eighteen sixty two seven.
Prior to his work, everyone was focused on what was
going on inside the tube, not the effects of the
ray outside the tube, and Leonard was the was actually
the first to do this, and Runkin made the key
(14:25):
connections using equipment that came from Leonard and others as well,
including that Nicola tesla oh I didn't know that, but again,
it's just it's helpful to to look at at a
key innovation, key discoveries taking place, you know, not in
a vacuum like that. There is something that that there
is something kind of storybook special about that, that that
(14:46):
one person who is the first to make the ultimate
connection that leads to these new discoveries. Well, there were
so much going on with physics discoveries around the turn
of the twentieth century, in those decades surrounding it, I mean,
must have been such an exciting time to be working
in a field like this. All Right, we're gonna take
a break, and when we come back, we're going to
(15:06):
talk some more about the kind of energy the kind
of uh innovations that come in the wake of this discopion.
All right, we're back. So you remember the story We
don't know if it's true, but the story that in
a Bertha will Holm, Rundkin's wife, after she saw the
(15:29):
X ray of her hand, she said, I have seen
my death. And that's interesting in multiple ways because it
sort of unknowingly portends the risks the dangers of X rays.
But also I think what she would have meant by
that is that she could see her skeleton, she could
see inside her own body, and this was something so
unusual to people at the time, right, I mean, and
(15:49):
in many cases, essentially what a doctor is able to
do is take the X ray and say, oh, I
see your death right here. Um, but we can remove it.
Don't worry about it, right, I Mean that's not always. Uh,
this is an over simplification and doesn't apply to all
medical scenarios, but it again, it does give us this
phenomenal ability to look inside the body and see in
(16:09):
some cases things that should not be their conditions that
should not be there, or the evidence of injury. And
soon after the discovery of X rays, in fact, very
soon after, it was almost immediately picked up for medical uses. Yeah,
everything from examining broken bones to as we mentioned, finding
lost bullets in a body. Now, as with pretty much
(16:31):
any cutting edge medical technology found at the dawn of
the twentieth century. Uh, you can find a terrific look
at at at X ray technology in the Steven Soderberg
medical drama The Nick, which I think I've mentioned on
this show before. I definitely mentioned on Stuff to Blow
your mind before. Uh, there's just a fabulous drama that
(16:53):
wasn't seen by enough people. In the two seasons that
it ran highly recommend anyone pick it up because in
season one, episode six, the hospital at the center of
this drama they acquire a second hand X ray machine
and the whole time there's just there's just reckless use
of X rays in this episode because again we're in
a period of time where there's all this enthusiasm about
(17:15):
the about the technology and there's this this just revelation
about what it can be used for, and at the
same time, uh, the dangers of the technology are only
just beginning to be made evident. But in in the
Nick there's a there's a scene where the salesman UH
and UH members of the hospital staff are are trying
(17:35):
it out without any regard for the dangers of radiation exposure.
There's a scene where the salesman boasts that the machine
works just fine. He says, quote, my children were taking
dozens of X rays for the of themselves the other day.
They had the thing running for hours. That's some dark
humor it is. It's it's a wonderful show, but it's
like it's like in Madmen, when you know the kids
(17:55):
are always playing with like a plastic bag over their
heads and stuff from the don't care. Yeah, there are
a lot of moments like that that the show itself
is particularly good because it has this minimal electronic score.
It has this there's a way that they do the
cinematography that Soderbrook shoots it, you know, in which it
doesn't feel like a period piece it is. It's you know,
(18:17):
obviously a period said in a historic period, but it's
displayed bright and almost futuristic because it was a time
when all these amazing discoveries were being made and all
of these technologies that are explored in this episode and
and others were the cutting the bleeding edge of our
understanding of human physiology but also the physical nature of
(18:39):
the world. But it's also got this dark, retrospective irony. Yeah,
why why is it that we love stuff like that?
I've noticed that's a thing that lots of historical TV
shows and movies do now and generally audiences tend to love.
Is that kind of thing like that my kids were
playing with the X ray machine, or that you know,
this little girls playing with plastic bag overhead. Like people
(19:02):
just really love the like, oh, they don't understand the
danger yet. Well, in a way, I think a show
like The Nick is kind of reverse science fiction. Like
science fiction look looks to the future but deals with
contemporary anxieties about science and technological advancement and the cultural
response to all of that. And the nick especially looks
(19:24):
to the past, but I think you can you can
see ways in which it is also speaking to the
definitely speaking to the modern viewer. So it is kind
of a reverse science fiction. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, I
mean it's interesting in a different way than looking at
the science fiction of the past, is because we different things.
Seems significant to us in retrospect then seemed then, I
(19:47):
guess seemed interesting to them in prospect exactly. Now, certainly
as we've we've touched on the danger was not recognized yet.
Rather than radiation, the prevailing idea was that this was
essentially a type of photography it was being demonstrated with
the X ray machine, and that the rays involved were
were more akin to harmless light visible light. Yes, and
(20:09):
Runkin accepted Leonard's view that the cathode rays were quote
vibrations of the ether uh and that it was ethereal
and didn't and you know, therefore did not reflect or refract. Uh.
They were He suggested longitudinal vibrations of the ether. The ether,
I guess this was the day of the luminiferous ether, right,
(20:30):
the idea that there was a substance through which light
had to propagate, and this was one thing that people
would often continue to think basically until Einstein. Right. But
part of Einstein's achievement was showing, like, you don't need
an ether theory to show how light travels by the way.
This is another thing it's interesting about Runkin is that
he himself only published three papers on X rays during
(20:52):
his life, But again, there were just so many people
that were just ready to jump in on this research.
I know one of his papers I was looking at
an article that talked about how I think it was
his very last paper on X rays was about how
to make them visible? And I think it was like
that they could be perceived directly by the eye at
a very high intensity or certain circumstances. Interesting, it doesn't
(21:14):
sound safe, but but again, yeah, it was. It was
all these other researchers and innovators and inventors that came
in the aftermath of his initial discovery that really made
all of this difference. Um. And then there were those
two that dismissed it as mere novelty, and this is
actually reflected in that episode of The Nick as well.
(21:34):
But other people saw its appeal. Dr Henry W. Ktell,
demonstrator of morbid anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. It
sounds like a Hogwarts position, doesn't, But he told The
New York Times in quote, the surgical imagination can pleasurably
lose itself and devising endless applications of this wonderful process.
(21:56):
And that is in contrast to other individuals who thought
this was a fad, that this was just a you know,
a side show, and that clearly wasn't going to be
a major part of medical diagnosis or treatment. Now it can't.
We were talking at the beginning about how it wasn't
immediately clear how dangerous it was. But it can't have
taken too long for people to catch on, right, because
(22:19):
they would start to see the effects, right. That's and
and that's was that was driven home in a couple
of different resources I looked at here for this. The
dangers apparently became clear too many of these individuals who
were working with radiation pretty early by seven for instance,
hair loss and skin burns, were already being reported because
(22:39):
you have these researchers working without protection, exposing themselves to
to these rays way too much, and they're beginning to
notice damage to their own tissues. Yeah, and if you
if you want to see something really horrible, you can
look up what X ray burns look like. It is
a nasty business. Now. Throughout this time, researchers continued to
weigh in on just what it was. You know, what
(23:01):
was this this a vorta of vortex in the ether
that I'm looking at here high frequency light? Of course
that's the correct answer. Longitudal waves. That was the original idea.
Transverse impulses of the ether and similar properties were also
of course observed in uranium. But it was also really
ultimately going to be a thirty year journey for scientists
(23:21):
to really gain like a kind of a bedrock understanding
of what they were dealing with. Another thing that modern
audiences might not understand is that because if you've had
an X ray at the dentist recently or something like that,
it probably did not take all that long. You know,
they just flash it on and off and there you go. Uh,
The older X ray machines took a lot longer. Well,
(23:44):
you mentioned earlier a fifteen minute exposure and some of
the original experiments, uh, and it would require you would
need even longer periods of time for certain parts of
the end of the anatomy, such as the head. There's
another scene in that episode of The Nick where he's
testing it out on the hospital administrator character and he says,
what part of your body do you want to see?
(24:05):
And he said, oh, I want to see my head.
So he has him hold up the plate and it
sets up the machine and says, all right, this should
take about an hour. Yeah, because the head and the
brain were extremely difficult to image at the time. But
as we said, there there was a lot of danger
in the early days of radiation experimentation and usage. UH.
(24:27):
Dr Walter James Dodd, for instance, who lived eighteen sixty
nine through nineteen through nineteen sixteen. He was one of
the United States first radiologists. He made some very key
early innovations, but he also suffered numerous radiation burns and
had to have several appendages amputated, and he eventually died
of cancer from radiation exposure at the age of fifty three.
(24:50):
Thomas Edison actually abandoned his own research into X ray
technology after his assistant, a glassblower by the name of
Clarence Madison Dally suffered, you know, an identical fate to
Dodd due to radiation exposure. Yeah, that's something to hammer
home that, um. I mean a lot of the risk
at the time was obviously if you were being imaged
a lot and having a lot of exposure to X
(25:11):
rays that way, it was risky for you. But it's
especially risky for the people who were operating the machines
because they're around them all the time. They're not just
there when they're being image they're they're all day. Yeah.
I was looking at one source here, early clinical use
of the X ray by Joel D. Howell, m d,
pH d, published in and the Transactions of the American
(25:33):
Clinical and Climatological Association, and the author pointed out the following.
He says, quote, early X ray users would test to
see if the tube was putting out an adequate amount
of X ray by looking for a glow in their
hand when they put it in front of the beam.
Method of testing that would soon reveal itself to have
delaterious consequences. But he also adds that evidence seems to
(25:55):
indicate that many of them knew way more about the
dangers than they let on, and that he says that
there was this zeal uh you know, this really this
idea that there was a valor and pushing this amazing
and life saving technology, um, even though there were these
ever more apparent risks. Oh, I want to talk about
a very clear example of that in a minute with
(26:17):
with Marie Curie. Actually, he also points out another thing
that's very interesting. They says that it's it's very about
how we we can't quite look at the X ray
machine in isolation to understand the changes that came about
because of it. I'm going to read a longer quote
from that paper, he says, quote, one must study how
the machine is used with a specific social, political, and
(26:40):
economic system. The technology to be considered is not only
a machine, it is also the system within which that
machine is used. In the case of the X ray machine,
that would include the organizational structure of the institution, the
people designated to run the machine, and the forums on
which such use was recorded. Even though the published medical
literature would suggest that the case for using X rays
(27:02):
to diagnose fractured bones was firmly established by nineteen hundred,
it was not a regular part of patient care for
decades to come. What was required for it to become
a part of routine patient care included changes in the
type of person who was running the machine, changes in
the payment mechanism, and changes in the way that data
were conceptualized. Yeah. I mean it's introducing a whole new
(27:26):
paradigm to medical care. Yeah. And again this is just
another reason that it it's difficult to to overstate, uh,
the impact of of X ray technology on medicine. Absolutely,
and I want to talk about an example of that
also in early early twentieth century wartime medicine. So there's
(27:47):
a fantastic article I read by Timothy J. Jorgenson, who's
the director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate
program at Georgetown University. And the article is on the Conversation.
It's called Marie Curry and her X ray vehicles contribution
to World War One battlefield medicine. And so this is
a story I actually somehow I had never read about before. Um,
(28:10):
but this was fascinating. So we all know Marie Cury,
the Polish born French physicist and chemist and She's best
known probably for the discovery and isolation of the elements
radium and polonium, and for her work on radioactivity spontaneous radiation,
for which she received two different Nobel Prizes in nineteen
oh three and nineteen eleven. Uh So, Curie was doing
(28:32):
her work. She was conducting her research in Paris with
the Radium Institute when World War One broke out in Europe,
and in one of the early maneuvers of the war
in nineteen fourteen, German troops clearly had set their sights
on the city of Paris, on the French capital, and
they eventually they invaded France through Belgium, and we're trying
to march towards Paris to take the capital city. Obviously,
(28:54):
Cury knew that she couldn't continue her research if the
city was attacked, so she packed up her fly of radium,
like literally packed it up in a leadlined case and
fled to the southwest towards Bordeaux, which I think is
also where the French government were moved to. But she
went to Bordeaux and she hid her radium in a
safe deposit box in a bank vault. Yeah, but having
(29:16):
safely stored France's supply of radium her radioactive treasures. She
did not just continue to flee the war. Instead, Curie
was determined to help with the war effort and defend
France against the German assault. But she couldn't, of course,
pick up a rifle and go to the front lines.
But she had another idea. Instead, she used her knowledge
about physics and radiation to create an invention that would
(29:38):
go on to save the lives of thousands of injured
French and Allied soldiers on the front lines. And this
would all be with the help of X rays. So,
by the time of World War One, X rays were
known to be a life saving medical technology. Like we've
been talking about, they were useful for diagnosing internal injuries.
But you had the big, clunky X ray machines of
the day that were usually cooped up in the high
(30:00):
tech urban hospitals. Right, So if a French soldier was
filled with bullets or shrapnel along the front, these hospitals
would have been many miles away. You can't like take
the soldier all the way back to the hospital. A
lot of times they'll often die on the way to
take a long time to get there. Um, so what
do you do? How do you bring the life saving
power of X rays to the injured fighters on the front.
(30:23):
So Marie Curry's invention was the radiological car. It's a
car on the bottom, but outfitted with a compartment containing
an X ray machine and a dynamo to generate the
electricity to power it, as well as dark room equipment
for the development of radiological photographs. And these radiological cars
were nicknamed by the soldiers petite curies, and Curry oversaw
(30:46):
the creation of the first car, which was used to
treat wounded soldiers at the Battle of Marne later in
nineteen fourteen, a battle which the Allies won. But obviously
one car was not enough to put a serious dint
in this problem, so Cury herself petition donations of cars
from rich French women to be turned into petite curies,
(31:06):
and with the help of her daughter Irene, Currie trained
female volunteers to operate the X ray machines on the
front lines, and by the end of the war they
had trained a hundred and fifty women as front line radiographers.
Now Currie also oversaw the creation of more fixed facilities
like X ray diagnostic stations at field hospitals behind the
(31:27):
front and drove and she actually drove and operated a
radiological car for the war effort herself. Of course, repeated
exposure to X rays which Curry and her technicians experienced
come that comes with a lot of associated health risks,
like we've been talking about. And Currie understood this, like
she knew that she was putting herself and her health
and her life at risk by exposing herself to these
(31:49):
X rays. But I think she saw it as part
of the risk of aiding in the war effort, just
like a soldier would put his life on the line
going out over the trenches. And actually later in her
life when he suffered from a plastic anemia, which can
of course result from radiation exposure, some people thought, well,
maybe it was her experiments with radium and stuff that
caused that condition, but Curie actually believed it was her
(32:11):
repeated exposure to X rays during the war that were
more likely to have caused the condition. And all told,
it's been estimated that Curi's efforts contributed to more than
a million wounded soldiers receiving X rays during the war,
a huge fraction of which likely had their lives saved.
By the procedure. It is interesting in retrospected, you know,
to see how this technology came online in time, just
(32:34):
in time for the two World Wars, times of such
injury and loss of life. Yeah, I mean often when
you think about the nightmare of the First World War
in particular, it seems like it's a time of such
terrifying chaos and confusion, largely brought about by new technology, right,
new warfare technology. Uh, that it was almost like an
(32:58):
experimental labor to worry for ways to kill and harm
one another. And so it's kind of interesting also seeing
going on in the background at being a laboratory of
ways to save lives. Indeed. All right, on that note,
we're going to take another break, and when we come back,
we're going to discuss the legacy of the X ray.
(33:21):
So X ray has changed the world in other ways,
as Richard Gunderman, Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy
at Indiana University, pointed out in an article that he
wrote for The Conversation, UH, this discovery of X ray
and the advent of X ray technology led to X
ray crystallography, which allows us to see the world at
a very small scale. To image molecules, and in fact,
(33:45):
the father son team of William H. And William L.
Bragg shared in the nineteen fifteen Nobel Prize in Physics
for this advancement, and without it, James Watson and Francis
Crick wouldn't have been able to discover the chemical structure
of DNA. Oh Yeah, and always got a shout out
Franklin and Wilkins as well. Now, additionally, X ray astronomy
(34:06):
allowed us to understand the greater cosmos. Yeah, and X
ray astronomy is an interesting case. It's worth putting in
the context to the broader ecosystem of technology like astronomy
saw such an explosion of new techniques after the nineteen
sixties once we could put observatories in space, and this
is largely because Earth's atmosphere blocks many kinds of radiation
(34:28):
that we now use to image the universe. And this
obviously is a very good thing, right. The atmosphere lets
most visible light through while stopping a lot of ionizing
radiation from space like X rays, and by adding space
based telescopes that could see other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum,
not just visible light, we greatly expanded astronomical capabilities. For example,
(34:49):
X ray astronomy in particular has helped us detect and
understand some of the most extreme and energetic objects in
the universe, like it played a role in the detection
and understanding of neutron on stars and black holes. Like
we often detect black holes from the X rays them,
not necessarily from the body itself, but when a black
hole has material spiraling into it, it spews jets of
(35:12):
X rays out into space as the black hole superheats
the gases that are swirling into it. Not on a
much smaller scale. Um Gunderman doesn't mention this in his article,
but airport security X rays, no matter how much they
make irritatus, that they do help keep commercial flights safe
in this day and age. Can you imagine if they
couldn't X ray your bags and they had to like
open up everybody's bag and look through it, or just
(35:35):
like just looking in eyes and just it's just like
a trust system or gosh, yeah, you can just imagine
all the myrroad complications that would arise from not being
able to perform that scan. Yeah, I'm gonna say I'm
open to being argued otherwise, but as annoying as airport
security is, it would be infinitely worse and infinitely more
(35:56):
annoying without X rays. But it's it's kind of like said,
this is part of the broader ecosystem of the technology.
And of course there were also additional changes in the
way we used X rays for medical purposes. Uh, not
only to find bullets in boken broken bones, but you know,
spot pneumonia's swallowed objects, cavities, and even cancer. And then
you get more advanced versions of X ray scans that
(36:19):
became possible, uh, CT scans, for instance, being X ray
X rays through the body at different angles to create
a superior image. Yeah, and people who are outside the
medical professions might not realize how absolutely essential CT scans
are these days, like how how frequently they're used and
how many lives they save. Gunderman points to a study
(36:40):
in the journal Radiology that looked into the use of
CT scans in the emergency department of hospitals, and the
authors they're just wanted to see how often a CT
scan changes the doctor's primary diagnosis of a patient. Right,
doctor sees you, examines you externally, they think one thing,
so they order us CT scan. How often does the
(37:01):
CT scan change what they think is wrong with you?
And the study found, quote, the leading diagnosis changed in
two hundred and thirty five of four hundred and sixty
patients with abdominal pain, and that's about fifty one hundred
and sixty three of three and eighty seven with chest
pain and or dispania, which is difficulty breathing, and that's
(37:21):
forty two and a hundred and three out of four
hundred and thirty three with headache, which is so we
can't compare this directly with the time before CT scans,
because it's just it's kind of apples and oranges. But
if you take it as a very rough estimate, just
think about what it means that CT scans change what
a doctor thinks is wrong with you fifty one percent
(37:45):
or forty two percent of the time, and then think
about what that meant before we had these technologies. Right,
Just imagine going to the doctor with chess pain or
trouble breathing in the eighteen hundreds, before there is any
any of this kind of internal imaging, when even doctors
today change their primary diagnosis about forty two percent of
the time after looking at a CT scan, Gunderman writes, quote,
(38:08):
Thanks to CTS wide availability and great speed, doctors can
determine within minutes whether or not a patient's abdominal pain
is due to impendicitis, chest pain reflects a tear in
the order, or a severe headache is due to the
rupture of a blood vessel in the brain. It is
no wonder that about eighty million CT scans are performed
(38:28):
each year in the US. And it also turned out
that the same radiation that could detect cancer could also
destroy it. Radiotherapy. Yeah, radiation oncology has its roots actually
in the years immediately following Ruigan's discovery, when doctors discovered
this peculiar power. Now and to be sure, X rays
were used to treat a lot of illnesses before its
(38:50):
dangers were discovered. Um again, you just have to think
to this, the zealous use of radiation and just the
idea that this new technology could do just about anything.
But looking broadly at these and the zeroing in on
on some of the treatment details. X rays to treat
cancer may have occurred as early as eighteen, which, if
you'll recall from earlier, that's the year right after Runkin
(39:14):
discovered X rays and it was like at the end
of eighteen that he discovered them. Now I want I
want to stress though used in an attempt to treat
this was This was certainly extremely early days. Now. One
thing that's interesting and worth noting is that Runkin actually
did not seek riches from his discovery, like he did
not file for a patent on the production of X
(39:37):
rays through his method UH, and he even donated the
cash component of his Nobel prize to the university worked for.
He believed that scientific discoveries like X rays that were
useful in helping people in medicine were the common property
of humankind, not something to be claimed and profited on
by one man. And that's kind of a refreshing change,
(39:57):
it is. Yeah, Now, torek up Runkin discovered X rays.
In the following year, Antoine Becquerel identified radio activity, and
by nineteen hundred, alpha, beta, and gamma rays had been discovered.
And as James Burke UH, the author and UH television
host explored, in the day of the universe changed, even
(40:20):
more types of radiation were expected, even more discoveries surely
seemed to be just around the bend. And then in
nineteen O three Burke rights. Uh. The physicist Renee blonde
Lott reported the discovery of a new type of ray,
the N ray, and he observed them while looking at
polarized X rays and reported that they increased the brightness
(40:42):
of an electric spark. And after he made this observation, uh,
other individuals working in the field they backed him up
on this said, oh, yeah, we see it too, And
within three years hundreds of papers had been written about
in rays with all sorts of new properties thrown into
the vat here in eluding various connections with muscle activity
and the inner workings of the human mind, as if,
(41:05):
like you know, uh, intense human thought could create inn
in rays. Uh. And in the midst of all of this,
American physicist Robert W. Wood steps in. He was something
of a declaim an acclaimed debunker at the time, and
he looked into the matter. He observed blonde Let's demonstrations
himself like firsthand, and he did not see the increase
(41:28):
in the electric sparks brightness. And then when blonde Lott
and his assistance conducted an experiment with the prism, which
was another thing that they did to to try and
prove the existence of these in rays uh to show
how it refracted like light, which of course X rays
do not. UM would did a curious thing. He quietly
(41:48):
removed the prism while they were from their experiment. While
they were conducting it, and the researchers continued to see
the in rays or reports seeing the in rays and
so uh so really would just completely discredited this. He
reported on it, and after he he he did so,
no one saw an N ray again. This was essentially
(42:10):
essentially in an illusion that was brought on by just
the zeal for discovery and the feeling that there were
going to be more rays and uh and and and
that it was just inevitable that they would be found. Well,
as we mentioned earlier, this was a time of tremendous discovery,
but it was also a time when people believed tons
of scientific things that later turned out to be completely wrong.
(42:33):
The luminiferous ether that's just gone, there's nothing there, nothing
to the theory, but but it was widely accepted at
this time. Yeah, Burke rights in the day of the
universe changed quote. There was never any suggestion that Blondelt
was a charlatan. He and his colleagues were victims of
the expectation that in rays would be discovered, and when
(42:53):
they built instruments to see the rays, they saw them
for a short time. This non existent phenomenon is did
the most stringent tests and methods known to science. So
it becomes something of a you know, a cautionary tale
about over enthusiasm, uh in scientific research and the dangers
of it potentially outstripping the rigors of science and scientific investigation. Yeah,
(43:16):
you can understand why people will be excited, but simmer down, folks.
There's also kind of an interesting invention to close out
this episode of Invention, the the the instruments that they
invented to see the non existent in rays um. Because again,
it's not like a pooping duck robot. It's not a
it's it's not a work of Charlottan. It is just
(43:37):
a work that compounds and illusion. Yeah, well, meaning enthusiasm
can still breed. Gremlin's that it can. That it can.
All right, So that you have another episode of Invention,
we can file that one away and if you want
to check out the files. If you want to see
other episodes of the show, head on over to invention
pod dot com. That is our website. You'll find the
(43:58):
other episodes as well as links out to our social
media accounts, and if you want to discuss the show
with other listeners, we would recommend going to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind discussion module. That's a Facebook group where
you know mostly we've talked about episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, but we're also happy to discuss episodes
of Invention there as well. Huge thanks to our friend
Scott Benjamin for research assistants on this show, and to
(44:20):
our excellent audio producer Torri Harrison. If you would like
to get in touch with us, was feedback on this
episode or any other, suggest a topic for the future
of Invention, or just to say hi let us know
how you found out about the show. You can email
us at contact at invention pod dot com.
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.