{"id":281387,"date":"2025-10-06T09:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T09:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/281387\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T09:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T09:18:10","slug":"earliest-known-x-rays-taken-by-upenn-physicist-donated-to-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/281387\/","title":{"rendered":"Earliest known X-rays taken by UPenn physicist donated to university"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

The box was small and looked worn, with a faded logo from the Wanamaker department store on the lid. Descendants of University of Pennsylvania physicist Arthur Goodspeed<\/a> stumbled upon it among various family heirlooms and artifacts.\n<\/p>\n

Inside were two old, thin glass plates, with black and white images printed on them. They were a bit fuzzy, but showed the upside-down U-shape of metal in the frame of a coin purse and two dark circles at the center, perhaps silver dollars or quarters.
\n\"UniversityUniversity of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine faculty snap photos of two \u201cx-ray\u201d images printed on glass plates in 1896 by Penn physicist Arthur Goodspeed showing coins inside a purse. Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025. (Nicole Leonard\/WHYY)\n<\/p>\n

The glass plates, authenticated by archivists and conservationists at Penn, were taken in Philadelphia by Goodspeed in 1896. They are believed to be among the earliest X-ray images in the world, an immediate precursor to medical X-rays of human bones and body parts and the birth of academic radiology departments in the United States.\n <\/p>\n

Goodspeed\u2019s family has now donated the plates back to the university and its archives, which were recently on display for staff.\n<\/p>\n

While Goodspeed quickly realized the potential for this new technology, Dr. Pari Pandharipande, chair of the Perelman School of Medicine\u2019s Department of Radiology, said it\u2019s unlikely he could have known this would lead to a whole field of practice and other types of medical imaging like ultrasounds, MRIs, CT scans and more.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe field has become incredibly important in medicine, but also in other areas,\u201d she said. \u201cOne of the things that\u2019s interesting to think about is, what is the X-ray of today? That is a really exciting thing to think about, it\u2019s also a really intimidating thing to think about at the same time.\u201d
\n\"Dr.Dr. Pari Pandharipande, chair of the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, attends an event on Tues., Sept. 30, 2025 revealing some of the earliest known \u201cx-ray\u201d images taken by Penn physicist Arthur Goodspeed in 1896. (Nicole Leonard\/WHYY)\n<\/p>\n

How an accident led to a scientific discovery<\/p>\n

In a lecture room at the University of Pennsylvania in 1890, Goodspeed and photographer William Jennings<\/a> were experimenting and trying to create images<\/a> of coins and brass weights using electrical charges.\n<\/p>\n

When the two men were done, they put their work to the side, stacking several photographic plates atop each other and leaving a couple stray coins laying on the top.\n<\/p>\n

Goodspeed then showed Jennings a collection of Crookes tubes<\/a>, which are glass vacuum-like cylinders used to demonstrate how cathode rays, or electron beams, behave. When high voltage is applied and the beams bounce off the glass, they emit a florescent, glowing discharge.\n<\/p>\n

While they were figuring out how to photograph the glow, the Crookes tube was giving off radiation, which traveled through space and other objects to reach the nearby stack of photographic plates and the discarded coins.\n<\/p>\n

When the plates were later developed, Goodspeed and Jennings couldn\u2019t explain the faint small circular marks, or shadows, that appeared on the images. They didn\u2019t spend too much time fretting over it, but Goodspeed kept the images, said University Archivist John Bence.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cHe knew something happened and \u2018I might want to look at this someday\u2019 sort of thing,\u201d Bence said.\n<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, German scientist Wilhelm Conrad R\u00f6ntgen<\/a> was exploring this process with more intentionality in a laboratory nearly 4,000 miles away.\n<\/p>\n

Using dark rooms, Crookes tubes and electric currents, R\u00f6ntgen discovered a way to capture images of rays that could pass through objects and materials of one kind, and reveal objects of another underneath.\n<\/p>\n

He used this method to take an image of his wife\u2019s hand, which showed dark shadows of her finger bones and a ring she was wearing surrounded by a more transparent or translucent outline of her flesh.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":281388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,1448,2830,1311,67,586,132,5230,24003,26396,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-281387","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-pa","10":"tag-pennsylvania","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-university-of-pennsylvania","17":"tag-upenn","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115326479618341963","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}