Who discovered X-rays in 1895?

Wilhelm Röntgen, who noticed that a screen coated in fluorescent material glowed across the room while his cathode ray tube was covered in black cardboard - something was getting through that should not have. He worked in secret for seven weeks before telling anyone, and called them X because he did not know what they were.

The first medical image was of his wife's hand, showing her bones and her wedding ring; she is reported to have said she had seen her own death. Within months X-ray machines were being built worldwide - the transmission from discovery to clinical use was almost instantaneous, and had no equivalent before or since.

He refused to patent it, saying the discovery belonged to humanity, and donated his Nobel Prize money to his university. The early enthusiasm also killed a great many people: shoe shops used X-ray fitting machines into the 1950s, operators and radiologists lost hands and developed cancers, and the dose from a single early exposure could take twenty minutes where a modern one takes milliseconds. The damage had to be learned from the people who did it first.