Never in the history of medicine, one could argue, has there been a discovery as significant as the x-ray. The achievement, realized on Nov. 8, 1895, earned Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. For the first time in human history, the interior of the body could be seen in a living person. It could be said that Professor Röntgen had a “happy accident.”
Wilhelm Röntgen, a professor of physics in Wurzburg, Germany, serendipitously discovered