Today is World Radiography Day and to celebrate, we thought you might like some facts on its history. Did you know…
- X-Rays were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. Roentgen was a Professor at Wuerzburg University, Germany.
- One of the first Radiography experiments Roentgen conducted was on his wife, Bertha’s hand in late 1895.
- The first use of X-rays was for industrial purposes and not medical. To show his colleagues his discovery, Roentgen showed a radiograph of weights in a box.
- Radiographs were being made by Surgeons throughout Europe and the United States within a month of the discovery. Several months later, battlefield physicians were using X-rays to find bullets in wounded soldiers.
- Radiography was almost discovered in the United States! In 1890, just five years before Roentgen’s discovery, two University of Pennsylvania Professors produced an x-ray using two coins and a photographic plate by accident. They were only able to understand the incident after Roentgen became famous.
- The CT scan was invented in 1972, quite some time after the discovery of X-rays, by Godfrey Hounsfield (a British engineer) and Allan Cormack (a South African physicist). The first scanners would take hours to produce an image…now they take minutes!
- MRI technology was used in medicine for the first time in 1977, shortly after CT scans were created.
- X-rays are used for more than just an insight into the human body. NASA uses its Chandra x-ray to take pictures of outer space. Visitors on the NASA website can see these images today!
- Practical uses for ultrasound technology weren’t developed until the 1950s.
- There is now a machine that creates both a CT and nuclear medicine scan in one…what would the founders of radiography and medical imaging make of that!?
A big thank you to our hardworking radiography workforce and all medical imaging professionals across the globe. This day is all about you!
