PulujIvan

In the winter of 1896, fourteen-year-old Eddie McCartney, who lived in Hanover, broke his wrist. Why does anyone remember this more than a hundred years later? Because Eddie became the first guy in America to have an X-rays of the fracture site.

If you have a color film (red, blue, or green), try looking at the picture through them. Or use for this your smartphone.

When Wilhelm Roentgen spoke on December 28, 1895, about the discovery of X-rays while working with an electron-vacuum tube, hundreds and perhaps thousands of scientists around the world rushed to their laboratories to repeat the experiment. Among them was Frank Austen, an assistant at the Dartmouth Physics Laboratory. He put together all the tubes in the lab and began to check which ones would give X-rays. I must say that the collection of vacuum tubes donated to Dartmouth College was then the best in America. Austen checked everything he had, and the only one suitable for this was a tube designed by Ivan Puluj and brought from Austria, where the Ukrainian worked at the time. In early February, Austen asked Dr. Gilman Frost and his brother, physicist Edwin Frost, to take a diagnostic X-rays of a local schoolboy, who turned out to be Eddie McCartney.

At the end of the 19th century, physicists used electron-vacuum tubes to study the cathode rays discovered in 1859, which occurred in them during the passage of current. In the end, the rays turned out to be a stream of electrons, and the atom was not the smallest particle, as previously thought, but then no one knew anything about it. The tubes were of various designs. In some cathode rays forced the platinum plate to glow red, in others rotated an impeller made of thin sheets of mica.

There were others in which these rays forced the aluminum plate to cast a shadow, and miniature figures covered with metal salts — to glow.

In 1881, Puluj presented several electron-vacuum tubes of his own design at the World Electrotechnical Exhibition in Paris. One of them attracted special attention of the participants and organizers of the exhibition. The light she emitted was bright enough to illuminate the entire room. Because of this it was named “Puluj’s Lamp”. For participation in the exhibition the scientist was awarded a diploma. Puluj later wrote that this light was enough even to read, being at some distance from the “lamp”.

Prolonged exposure to X-rays is harmful to the body? No, we haven’t heard anything about it in the 19th century...

In the archives of the Puluj family are memories of his wife Catherine-Joseph-Maria, how one day, reading a morning newspaper reporting on the discovery made by X-ray, Puluj suddenly jumped out of bed and with excited cries “My tubes, my tubes” and ran to his laboratory with a newspaper in his hand.

It is said that Puluj sent a letter to Roentgen asking if he had suddenly used his tube, but never received an answer... In fact, it was unlikely him, because the photos taken by Puluj in his laboratory had a much better angular resolution than pictures obtained by Roentgen.

In 1896, both Puluj and Roentgen published almost simultaneously scientific articles explaining the nature and mechanism of action of rays. Puluj’s statements were correct, but Roentgen made mistake.

Puluj’s tube

Roentgen after the discovery of X-rays did not search practical application for them. But Puluj realized that doctors will be able to “look” inside the body of patients, and in the first year after the invention published many photos of different parts of the human body.

Some say that Roentgen received the Nobel Prize for their discovery undeservedly, and the rays should not be called roentgen. Others think that Roentgen noticed what Puluj did not immediately pay attention to, so the discovery belongs to him fairly.

All that is known for sure is that Roentgen refused to grant a patent for his discovery, believing that it belonged to everyone. He was also against X-rays being called roentgen.