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After years of doing this kind of
research, I’ve learned that all new
fields of scientific endeavor will go
through periods of utter chaos before
they settle into a regular discipline
with well-defined terms, stable categories,
and general methods. The task
of any researcher is to work through
the early literature and find that key
moment when ideas begin to solidify.
THE CHAOS OF
RÖNTGEN’S XfiRAYS
The early days of physics produced
many fields that began in chaos and
moved quickly into order. Few present
a more dramatic story than the discovery
of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen
in late 1895. To both scientists and the
public, X-rays seemed to be an entirely
new phenomenon that didn’t exactly
fit into the theories of electricity and
magnetism that had been maturing
over the prior 50 years.
Röntgen discovered X-rays in
early November and was mystified
by them. Being a careful scientist, he
attempted to identify the basic nature
of this radiation. He assembled his
notes from this work into an article
that is little more than a list of observations.
“A Discharge from a large
induction coil is passed through a
Hittorf’s vacuum tube,” he begins.
This apparatus will cause a piece of
paper covered with barium platinocyanide
to glow. “The fluorescence is
still visible at two meters distance,”
he wrote. “It is easy to show that the
origin of the fluorescence lies within
the vacuum tube.”
In the last paragraphs of the article,
Röntgen admitted that he didn’t have
a theory that explained the properties
of X-rays. He rejected as “unlikely” the
idea that they were a form of electromagnetic
radiation and hence related
to visible light. Instead, he speculated
that his discovery was an entirely new
form of energy. “Should not the new
rays,” he asked, “be ascribed to longitudinal
waves in the ether?”
Had X-rays been less novel, had
they not been able to a pass through
soft human tissue and reveal the
hidden bones, then Röntgen’s speculations
about the luminiferous ether
and longitudinal waves would have
percolated through the community
of physicists and would have been
tested in a relatively systematic way.
However, X-rays were indeed novel,
and they could reveal the inner parts
of the human body, so Röntgen’s
ideas quickly moved into the laboratory
and living room.
All new fields of
scientific endeavor
will go through
periods of utter
chaos before they
settle into a regular
discipline with welldefined
terms, stable
categories, and
general methods.
THE EXCITEMENT
OF THE POPULAR PRESS
Barely four weeks after the original
article appeared, news of this
strange new ray reached all the
capitals of Europe. “The invention of
neither the telephone nor the phonograph
has stirred up such scientific
excitement as this Röntgen discovery
in photography,” reported the London
correspondent for The New York
Times. “The papers everywhere are
full of reports of experiments, and of
reproductions of more or less ghastly
anatomical pictures.”
In general, the Times and other
newspapers offered accurate descriptions
of the experiments and the
phenomena that had been observed.
Yet, the papers weren’t scholarly
journals and couldn’t distinguish
well-conceived theory from rampant
assumption. They speculated about
what Röntgen meant when he mentioned
“longitudinal waves in the
ether” and listened to everyone who
claimed credit for the discovery. “A
French savant is said to have been
securing similar results for several
years by the use of an ordinary kerosene
lamp,” offered the Times, which
also claimed that it had found “that
this discovery was not only made by
a Prague professor in 1885” and that
“a full report of the achievement was
made to the Austrian Academy of Sciences
in 1885.”
ORGANIZING IGNORANCE
Surprisingly, the popular press
wasn’t alone in publishing speculation.
The discovery of X-rays
created a massive wave of papers
that crashed on the scholarly community
that winter. More than 125
appeared before the first anniversary
of the discovery. Some were good.
Some were poorly conceived and ill
written. Some identified the major
applications for the waves. Some
wandered into strange and unsupported
speculations.
The articles appeared so quickly
that few could have been reviewed
only by an editor and not an outside
referee. Researchers would read a
description of X-rays in a newspaper,
conduct an experiment, and see their
results published in fewer than six
weeks. Many of these articles were
part of a growing chain of work, in
which one article spawns new experiments,
which in turn spawn new
work. Unfortunately, most of these
researchers were engaged in speculation
that was no better informed
than the newspapers. On 14 February
1896, Columbia physicist Michael
Pupin published a simple framework
for studying these waves, but his
ideas had limited influence in those
first months.
Less than two weeks after Pupin’s
paper appeared, a pair of researchers
built a simple X-ray apparatus and
started applying it to everything that
they could find. A colleague asked
them to “undertake the location of a
bullet in the head of a child that had
been accidentally shot.” They agreed
APRIL 2010
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