Röntgen whisked his wife, Anna, into the lab and placed her hand between the source of his rays and a photographic plate. The rays penetrated through her hand and left a silhouette of her finger bones and her metallic wedding ring on the photographic plate—the inner anatomy of a hand seen as if through a magical lens. “I have seen my death,” Anna said—but her husband saw something else: a form of energy so powerful that it could pass through most living tissues. Röntgen called his form of light X-rays.
