Today is World Radiography Day and to celebrate, we thought you might like some facts on its history. Did you know…

1. X-Rays were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. Roentgen was a Professor at Wuerzburg University, Germany.
2. One of the first Radiography experiments Roentgen conducted was on his wife, Bertha’s hand in late 1895.
3. The first use of X-rays was for industrial purposes and not medical. To show his colleagues his discovery, Roentgen showed a radiograph of weights in a box.
4. Radiographs were being made by Surgeons throughout Europe and the United States within a month of the discovery. Several months later, battlefield physicians were using X-rays to find bullets in wounded soldiers.
5. Radiography was almost discovered in the United States! In 1890, just five years before Roentgen’s discovery, two University of Pennsylvania Professors produced an x-ray using two coins and a photographic plate by accident. They were only able to understand the incident after Roentgen became famous.
6. The CT scan was invented in 1972, quite some time after the discovery of X-rays, by Godfrey Hounsfield (a British engineer) and Allan Cormack (a South African physicist). The first scanners would take hours to produce an image…now they take minutes!
7. MRI technology was used in medicine for the first time in 1977, shortly after CT scans were created.
8. X-rays are used for more than just an insight into the human body. NASA uses its Chandra x-ray to take pictures of outer space. Visitors on the NASA website can see these images today!
9. Practical uses for ultrasound technology weren’t developed until the 1950s.
10. There is now a machine that creates both a CT and nuclear medicine scan in one…what would the founders of radiography and medical imaging make of that!?

A big thank you to our hardworking radiography workforce and all medical imaging professionals across the globe. This day is all about you!