Röntgen Memorial — Seeing Through Matter
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
In 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was working at the University of Würzburg when he discovered a new kind of radiation capable of passing through soft tissue and exposing bones on a photographic plate. He called them X-rays because their nature was unknown.
The discovery spread with extraordinary speed because its medical value was immediately obvious. Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. This stop changes the scale of the guide. Würzburg was not only a city shaped by bishops and Baroque architects. It was also a modern university city capable of producing a discovery that changed medicine worldwide.