They gave their hero – what else – X-ray vision. X-rays were both sexy and seen as a sort of superpower – an idea eventually made immortal by the 1940s writers of Superman comics. And I but whisper, ‘Sweetheart, Je t’adore’,” read the lines in one poem published in Life magazine a year after Röntgen’s discovery. “Around her ribs, those beauteous twenty-four, Her flesh a halo makes, misty in line, Her noseless, eyeless face looks into mine. Soon, X-ray photographs revealing bones and even the shadowy impression of internal organs were being published in newspapers around the world.Īnd it wasn’t long before the fantasy of X-rays entered popular culture. The news that someone had found a way of peering through human skin and flesh to look at the skeleton beneath, without so much as touching the subject, was an international sensation. It was her husband, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895. “I have seen my death!” Anna Bertha Röntgen is said to have exclaimed upon seeing the first X-ray photograph ever made – an image of the bones in her hand.
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