How Wilhelm Roentgen Started The X-ray Craze

X-ray was the first scientific discovery that wasn’t made famous through scientific publishing.  In fact, despite the fact that Roentgen wrote a startlingly prophetic and accurate paper about the discovery of this new ray in December of 1895, most scientists learned about it through their morning papers! 

Therefore, the discovery of the x-ray should really be dated not from December of 1895, but instead from a few weeks later January 5th, 1896, the date of the first newspaper account.   Why ...