The x-ray was discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen, by accident, which is cool. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to just trip over. I know I would have noticed if someone turned into a bag of bones in the course of a casual conversation. Wilhelm was excited enough about it that he took pictures of his wife’s hand and sure enough all the hard parts including her wedding ring showed up. She freaked the hell out and subsequently he had to take pictures of other people’s hands. Within a few weeks of the announcement of his discovery, someone used x-rays to locate a bullet in someone’s leg. It wasn’t as random as it sounds; they probably had a good idea it was in there.

Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel prize for his discovery and also had an element named after him, #111, right when they were starting to run out. These days physicists have to totally make up particles, like quarks and bosons and gluons, just to get their names on anything, which explains the popularity of quantum theory. (Quark nomenclature, though, borrows heavily from the world of bondage and discipline, and dwarves.)

It was a little more likely that Röntgen would discover x-rays than your average nineteenth-century tinkerer, because he was playing around with vacuum tubes and sending rays through them just to see what would happen, so when a skeletal image appeared in the background and lumbered his way, he noticed. That’s not what really happened. Instead a mysterious green light appeared outside the tube, and he was too science-y to attribute it to ghost activity as a normal person would.

He named his discovery the x-ray, in which “x,” of course, means an unknown quantity. He figured he could fill the “x” in later, but it never happened. I guess nobody knows what it is to this day.

In the early days x-ray technology was so promising, showing us things we used to have to slice people open to see, that a number of people went in for treatments of radiation lasting for hours and hours, after which their heads blew up, and their skin crackled up and fell off, and in some cases they turned into lizards. Connections were made. Numerous intelligent people such as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla reported various injuries they attributed to playing around with x-rays. Early clinical practitioners, keen to promote this new discovery, tried to downplay the dangers, but people could see right through them.

Still, x-rays were used for absurd reasons well after their dangers had been exposed, including for the x-ray of feet in shoe stores to “assure proper fit.” This was still being done in my own lifetime, although some experts were beginning to counsel against it, noting that it is possible to tell if shoes fit by looking at them with your eyeballs or asking how they feel. Shoe marketers resisted but eventually discarded the foot fluoroscopes, reverting to the old-school Brannock measuring device like cavemen. I have fond memories of standing on the metal device with the sliding calipers and having my feet measured. It was pleasant in a way I can’t quite account for. There might be a fetish involved.

But evidence piled up that the early wanton use of Röntgen radiation was bad for the health. In fact, virtually nobody born before 1910 is alive today.