Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in 1845 in Germany. When he was 3 years old, his family moved to the Netherlands. He started his studies at the University of Utrecht and completed at Zurich's Polytechnic from which he graduated in 1869 with a PhD in mechanical engineering.
On November 8, 1895 while he was studying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure, the cathode ray tube, he discovered a new kind of rays, he called X-rays. His discovery revolutionised the field of medicine and for his discovery was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The first application in medicine was when he exposed his wife hand, on the same day, in the path of x-rays over a photographic plate and he observed after developing it, the image of his wife hand showing shadows of the bones and soft tissues of the hand and of the ring she was wearing. This was the first "röntgenogram" ever taken.
In spite of the numerous honours, Röntgen was a modest, amiable and polite man who preferred working alone. He built most of the apparatuses he used with great ingenuity and experimental skill. His discovery created the specialty of Radiology (Diagnostic and Therapeutic) a sine qua non in the practice of modern medicine.
