Early X-rays revealed a hidden world just beneath the skin—and amazed the public
Radical radiography was a turn-of-the-century craze
The “x” in X-ray is meant to sound mysterious. When German physics professor Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen first discovered the unknown wavelength of radiation emitting from a cathode ray experiment on November 8, 1895, he had no idea what it was. Röntgen had noticed that an invisible light was permeating the opaque wall of his laboratory and exposing film on the other side. Further investigation showed the short wavelengths passing through human tissue but not bone or metal, and the medical use of x-rays was born. Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel prize in Physics for his discovery, and kicked off a craze among Victorians for X-ray images as novelties.
Almost immediately, the X-ray was a smash hit among scientific and popular circles alike. The new technology elicited ruminations on the paranormal, telepathy, and mortality. Anna Bertha Röntgen, Wilhelm’s wife, whose left hand was the subject of the first X-ray photo, is said to have remarked, “I have seen my death.”
With the X-ray craze in full swing, hundreds of essays and articles appeared in the press, and various scientists and photographers moved quickly to implement the new technology in their work. Among them were the Austrian photochemists Joseph Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, whose X-ray photographs are among the first and finest examples of human and animal radiography.
The images in Eder and Valenta’s 1896 portfolio Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Experiments on photography by means of the X-ray rays) display a scientific precision combined with an artist’s sensibility. The photographers were clearly enthralled with the new potential afforded them, and they exploited it to visually extract the innards of animals and humans alike. Skeletal images of snakes and rats bringing to light the unseen beauty of vermin must have shocked their Victorian contemporaries even as they delighted in the oddity.
In the late 19th century, when photography of the outside world was already well established and relatively ubiquitous, opportunities to picture the invisible were seen as the medium’s next frontier. Eder, Valenta, and their peers were literally X-raying anything small enough to fit in the apparatus—as of yet they had no understanding of the danger posed by radiation. It would be another 10 years, when X-ray technicians began losing limbs and dying, that practitioners would come to realize the harmful effects of what they were exposing themselves to.
