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Whether it be that the press and general public are growing more enlightened in matters of science, or that Professor Rontgen's discovery appeals in a peculiar way to the popular imagination, it has certainly evoked a livelier and more sudden interest than either the telephone, microphone, or phonograph.
To-day, four weeks after the announcement, Röntgen's name is apparently in every scientific publication issued this week in Europe; and accounts of his experiments, of the experiments of others following his method, and of theories as to the strange new force which he has been the first to observe, fill pages of every scientific journal that comes to hand.
The Physical Institute, Professor Röntgen's particular domain, is a modest building of two stories and basement, the upper story constituting his private residence, and the remainder of the building being given over to lecture rooms, laboratories, and their attendant offices.
Already, in the few weeks since Röntgen's announcement, the results of surgical operations under the new system are growing voluminous. In Berlin, not only new bone fractures are being immediately photographed, but joined fractures, as well, in order to examine the results of recent surgical work.
The news was soon flashed all over the world, and scientific men in every civilized country began at once to experiment with the cathode light if light that might be called that lighted nothing. In Röntgen's announcement he stated that there had been by the scientists Hertz and Lenard, in 1894, certain antecedent discoveries from which his own might in some sense be deduced.
Perhaps the uncanny and mysterious results of Rontgen's discovery, which seem to link it with the "black arts," have something to do with the quickness of its reception by all manner of people. Like most, if not all, discoveries and inventions, it is the outcome of work already done by other men.
In fact, all those qualities which have lent a sensational character to the discovery of Röntgen's rays were mainly absent from these of Lenard, to the end that, although Röntgen has not been working in an entirely new field, he has by common accord been freely granted all the honors of a great discovery.
Röntgen's rays have rearranged some of the older ideas of matter, while radium has revolutionised them, and is leading science beyond the borderland of ether into the astral world. The boundaries between animate and inanimate matter are broken down. Magnets are found to be possessed of almost uncanny powers, transferring certain forms of disease in a way not yet satisfactorily explained.
Shortly after Röntgen's discovery, Edison, with that wonderful power of finding practical applications for nearly all discoveries, had invented the fluoroscope, a screen covered with a peculiar chemical substance that becomes luminous when exposed to the Röntgen rays.
All who have expressed themselves in print have admitted, with more or less frankness, that, in view of Röntgen's discovery, science must forth-with revise, possibly to a revolutionary degree, the long accepted theories concerning the phenomena of light and sound.
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