Well, now everything was really going nuts in the physics world. The discovery of radiation, and the path to The Bomb ![]() Röntgen’s wife’s hand was the first x-ray ever. And so a huge chain of events branches out of the CRT from here, as modern medical diagnostics. ![]() Surgery was guided by x-rays the very next year. The implications were quickly understood, and soon, he had taken the world’s first x-ray radiograph of his wife’s hand. He had been inadvertently producing x-rays, high energy photons that can be generated when a high-speed electron strikes certain materials. As he fiddled around, testing how light-tight his equipment was, he noticed that a nearby phosphorescent sample had already been exposed, even though it wasn’t in place and had opaque material in the way. He was shooting them at phosphorescent material. In 1895, a guy named Röntgen put a thin aluminum window at the end of his CRT so the electrons could shoot out of the vacuum. With so much excitement with CRTs, everyone was shooting electrons around in them. Sir William Crookes, an early pioneer of the Crookes Tube, later called a cathode ray tube The discovery of x-rays, and the birth of modern medical diagnostics Thompson concluded that cathode rays are a new type of negatively charged matter called an electron. The glass tube was then called a cathode ray tube (CRT). As higher voltages (~10kV) and more empty vacuums (~0.01 Pa) were developed, it was found that the glow would move in one direction, so they were called cathode rays. They discovered that the negative terminal (the cathode) could develop a little glow around it. In the late 1800s, a bunch of scientists were pulling vacuums on glass tubes and running high voltage across them, basically studying various aspects of neon lights. It turns out, I realized, that some large fraction of modernity, from the world order to modern health, the environment, politics, and the media passed through a cathode ray tube. After reading and thinking about it, I had another revelation. Pauling continues to mix physical realities with the experiments used to prove them, and doing so, he quickly arrives at the cathode ray tube. ![]() As a nuclear engineer whose job it is to make electricity, this was a fun revelation. For instance, I learned quickly that the Greek word for amber, elekton, forms the base of our word electricity, so named by William Gilbert in the late 1500s because the ancient Greeks knew that rubbing amber with wool would attract feathers and stuff. I was leisurely reading Linus Pauling’s textbook, General Chemistry, the other day, and I found the history he threw in there with the science to be thrilling. Or, why I built a cathode ray tube in a wine bottle.
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