Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/728

 of his show-rooms and his personal belongings, and after that date he appears neither to have done business in Paris nor to have visited it. Five years later the invasion of Neuwied led to the closing of his workshops; prosperity never returned, and he died half ruined at Wiesbaden on the 12th of February 1807.

Rontgen was not a great cabinet-maker. His forms were often clumsy, ungraceful and commonplace; his furniture lacked the artistry of the French and the English cabinet-makers of the great period which came to an end about 1790. His bronzes were poor in design and coarse in execution—his work, in short, is tainted by commercialism. As a marqueteur, however, he holds a position of high distinction. His marquetry is bolder and more vigorous than that of Riesener, who in other respects soared far above him. As an adroit deviser of mechanism he fully earned a reputation which former generations rated more highly than the modern critic, with his facilities for comparison, is prepared to accept. On the mechanical side he produced, with the help of Kintzing, many long-cased and other clocks with ingenious indicating and registering apparatus. Röntgen delighted in architectural forms, and his marquetry more often than not represents those scenes from classical mythology which were the dear delight of the 18th century. He is well represented at South Kensington. 

'''RÖNTGEN. WILHELM KONRAD''' (1845–). German physicist, was born at Lennep on the 27th of March 1845. He received his early education in Holland, and then went to study at Zurich, where he took his doctor's degree in 1869. He then became assistant to Kundt at Würzburg and afterwards at Strassburg, becoming privat-dosent at the latter university in 1874. Next year he was appointed professor of mathematics and physics at the Agricultural Academy of Hohenheim, and in 1876 he returned to Strassburg as extraordinary professor. In 1879 he was chosen ordinary professor of physics and director of the Physical Institute at Giessen, whence in 1885 he removed in the same capacity to Würzburg. It was at the latter place that he made the discovery for which his name is chiefly known, the Röntgen rays. In 1895, while experimenting with a highly exhausted vacuum tube on the conduction of electricity through gases, he noticed that a paper screen covered with barium platinocyanide, which happened to be lying near, became fluorescent under the action of some radiation emitted from the tube, which at the time was enclosed in a box of black cardboard. Further investigation showed that this radiation had the power of passing through various substances which are opaque to ordinary light, and also of affecting a photographic plate. Its behaviour being curious in several respects, particularly in regard to reflection and refraction, doubt arose in his mind whether it was to be looked upon as light or not, and he was led to put forward the hypothesis that it was due to longitudinal vibrations in the ether, not to transverse ones like ordinary light; but in view of the uncertainty existing as to its nature, he called it X-rays. For this discovery he received the Rumford medal of the Royal Society in 1896, jointly with Philip Lenard, who had already shown, as also had Hertz, that a portion of the cathode rays could pass through a thin film of a metal such as aluminum. Röntgen also conducted researches in various other branches of physics, including elasticity, capillarity, the conduction of heat in crystals, the absorption of heat-rays by different gases, piezo-electricity, the electromagnetic rotation of polarized light, &c.

 RÖNTGEN RAYS. W. K. Rontgen discovered in 1895 (Wied. Ann. 64, p. 1) that when the electric discharge passes through a tube exhausted so that the glass of the tube is brightly phosphorescent, phosphorescent substances such as potassium platinocyanide became luminous when brought near to the tube. He found that if a thick piece of metal, a coin for example, were placed between the tube and a plate covered with the phosphorescent substance a sharp shadow of the metal was cast upon the plate; pieces of wood or thin plates of aluminium cast, however, only partial shadows, thus showing that the agent which produced the phosphorescence could traverse with considerable freedom bodies opaque to ordinary light. He found that as a general rule the greater the density of the substance the greater its opacity to this agent. Thus while this effect could pass through the flesh it was stopped by the bones, so that if the hand were held between the discharge tube and a phosphorescent screen the outline of the bones was distinctly visible as a shadow cast upon the screen, or if a purse containing coins were placed between the tube and the screen the purse itself cast but little shadow while the coins cast a very dark one. Rtintgen showed that the cause of the phosphorescence, now called Rontgen rays, is propagated in straight lines starting from places where the cathode rays strike against a solid obstacle, and the direction of propagation is not bent when the rays pass from one medium to another, i.e, there is no refraction of the rays. These rays, unlike cathode rays or Canalslrahlen, are not deflected by magnetic force; Riintgen could not detect any deflection with the strongest magnets at his disposal, and later experiments made with stronger magnetic fields have failed to reveal any effect of the magnet on the rays. The rays affect a photographic plate as well as a phosphorescent screen, and shadow photographs can be readily taken. The time of exposure required depends upon the intensity of the rays, and this depends upon the state of the tube, and the electric current going through it, as well as upon the substances traversed by the rays on their journey to the photographic plate. In some cases an exposure of a few seconds is sufficient, in others hours may be required. The rays coming from different discharge tubes have very different powers of penetration. If the pressure in the tube is fairly high, so that the potential difference between its electrodes is small, and the velocity of the cathode rays in consequence small, the Rontgen rays coming from the tube will be very easily absorbed; such rays are called " soft rays." If the exhaustion of the tube is carried further, so that there is a considerable increase in the potential differences between the cathode and the anode in the tube and therefore in the velocity of the cathode rays, the Rontgen rays have much greater penetrating power and are called " hard rays." With a highly exhausted tube and a powerful induction coil it is possible to get appreciable effects from rays which have passed through sheets of brass or iron several millimetres thick. The penetrating power of the rays thus varies with the pressure in the tube; as this pressure gradually diminishes when the discharge is kept running through the tube, the type of Rontgen ray coming from the tube is continually changing. The lowering of pressure due to the current through the tube finally leads to such a high degree of exhaustion that the discharge has great difficulty in passing, and the emission of the rays becomes very irregular. Heating the walls of the tube causes some gas to come off the sides, and by thus increasing the pressure creates a temporary improvement. A thin-walled platinum tube is sometimes fused on to the discharge tube to remedy this defect; red-hot platinum allows hydrogen to pass through it, so that if the platinum tube is heated, hydrogen from the flame will pass into the discharge tube and increase the pressure. In this way hydrogen may be introduced into the tube when the pressure gets too low. When liquid air is available the pressure in the tube may be kept constant by fusing on to the discharge tube a tube containing charcoal; this dips into a vessel containing liquid air, and the charcoal is saturated with air at the pressure which it is desired to maintain in the tube. Not only do bulbs emit different types of rays at different times, but the same bulb emits at the same time rays of different kinds. The property by which it is most convenient to identify a ray .is the absorption it suffers when it passes through a given thickness of aluminium or tin-foil. Experiments made by McClelland and Sir J. J. Thomson on the absorption of the rays produced by sheets of tin-foil showed that the absorption by the first sheets of tin-foil traversed by the rays was much greater than that by the same number of sheets when the rays had already passed through several sheets of the foil. The effect is just what would occur if some of the rays were much more readily absorbed by the tin-foil than others, for the first few layers would stop all the easily absorb able rays while the ones left would be those that were but little absorbed by tin-foil.