Explanation And History Of X-Rays

Within a year of German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of x-rays in 1895, people throughout the world knew about Roentgen's work and had seen his first x-ray picture — his wife Bertha's hand, showing her bones, wedding ring, and all. Even before Roentgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901 for his discovery, x-ray studios were popping up that sold bone portraits for display in the home.

As their popularity grew, some publications contained inflated claims about x-rays — they could restore vision to the blind, they could raise the dead. Other people expressed a far more skeptical view: "I can see no future in the field," the head of one x-ray clinic reportedly proclaimed. "All the bones of the body and foreign bodies have been demonstrated."
But x-ray was far from a dead-end technology. Instead, it marked the start of a revolution in medical diagnosis. Like other medical imaging technologies that followed, including ultrasound, computed tomography ( or Cat Scan ) scanning, and magnetic resonance imaging ( or MRI ), x-ray can help doctors narrow down the causes of a patient's symptoms without surgery and sometimes diagnose an illness before symptoms even appear. X-rays imaging can be a useful first step in treating a range of problems, from a simple broken bone to a cancerous tumor.

Roentgen labeled the rays he discovered with the scientific symbol "X," meaning unknown, because he didn't understand their makeup at first. x-rays are actually electromagnetic waves. When they are passed through a patient's body to a photographic film on the other side, they create a picture of internal body structures called a radiograph.

You can view many broken bone x-rays and bone fracture x-rays by doing a search on the web. There are many good sites out there.

The less dense a structure of the body is, the more radiation passes through it and reaches the film. The x-rays expose the film, changing its color after it is developed to gray or black, much like light would darken photographic film. Bones, as well as tumors, are more dense than soft tissues. They appear white or light on the x-ray film because they absorb much of the radiation, leaving the film only slightly exposed. Structures that are less solid than bone, such as skin, fat, muscles, blood vessels, and the lungs, intestines, and other organs, appear darker on the film because they let more of the x-rays pass through. Likewise, a break in a bone allows the x-ray beams to pass through, so the break appears as a dark line in the otherwise white bone.