IT鈥橲 not often that cannons get used for target practice. These images show some of the first machines built to emit X-rays, now given a taste of their own medicine.
The stark, ghostly quality of X-ray scans have transfixed us for over a hundred years. When you shine an ordinary beam of light at an opaque object, it casts a shadow. But if the light鈥檚 frequency is sufficiently high, the beam can pass through tissue as though it were transparent.
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Devices such as those shown here, commonly known as X-ray tubes, generate these high-frequency waves by accelerating electrons into a solid target. If the collision is sufficiently violent, the target atoms can be made to emit X-rays as a way of dissipating the excess energy.
Tubes similar to the megaphone-shaped Crookes-Hittorf tube (above) were used by Wilhelm R枚ntgen to discover X-rays in 1895. In the following decades, improvements to the technology resulted in Gundelach tubes (top) and Coolidge tubes (below), which still form the basis of X-ray sources today.
These images, taken by Herminso Villarraga-G脫mez with a modern-day Nikon X-ray machine, give us a glimpse at the inner workings of these historical devices. After visiting R枚ntgen in 1896, one journalist wrote: 鈥淭here is no doubt that he much prefers gazing at a Crookes tube to beholding a visitor.鈥� Imagine what he would make of these.
Photographer
Herminso Villarraga-G脫mez, Nikon Metrology, Inc, Americas
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淕hosts in the machine鈥�
