X-Ray, Violet Ray, and Other Rays

Chapter V. Ultra-Violet Light in Health and Disease—Sunlight

and Infantile Paralysis 48

INTRODUCTION

Highly important as are the phenomena of Radioactivity from the physical, chemical, medical, and philosophic points of view, they are hardly comparable in their relations to the affairs of our everyday life to the Roentgen or X-rays, and to the invisible violet or ultra-violet rays. The X-rays are utilized today in hundreds of practical ways, and are vastly important also in surgery, medicine, dentistry, and in biological investigations. It is perhaps not too much to say that the discovery of the so-called X-rays should be numbered among the two or three most important revelations of modern science. This will be clearly demonstrated in the course of the chapters to follow.

X-RAY, VIOLET RAY AND OTHER RAYS

CHAPTER I. Everyday Uses of X-Rays

EVERYDAY USES OF X-RAYS

To enumerate and describe all the practical uses of X-rays, apart from medicine and scientific research in general, would require a good many more pages than can be devoted to the subject here. To take a few cases at random, without describing the instruments and methods employed: radiography reveals flaws in the structure of iron and steel building and bridge materials, and in the cylinders of airplane engines, and so avoids accidents. In England a gasoline or petrol tank was shown to have rivet heads on the outside and none on the inside.

Serious defects in the steel axles of railway and automobile “under carriages” have been discovered by radiography. In one case, at least, the axles had been drilled in the wrong position and the holes had been simply filled with metal and covered over. An entire lot was rejected in consequence and probably serious accidents were forestalled.

“Cracks in castings, bad welds and weak places which do not show on the surface of metal are perfectly clear to the searching rays. How much would you give to know that that welded part in your automobile is really solid and perfect, that it contains no flaw to break down some day when you are twenty miles from a machine shop? A well-known mechanical engineer said recently that in ten years a metallurgical X-ray machine will be as vital a part of the equipment in an automobile repair shop, a foundry, or machine shop as it is now in a dentist’s office.”

We are assured by The Iron Trade (73:26) that “the practice of analyzing metals by means of X-rays is only in its infancy. There is every reason to believe that soon great advances will be made in determining the crystallization and therefore the properties of metals. Students of metallurgy are well aware that the properties of metals and other bodies depend on the nature of their crystallization. The microscope has rendered valuable service largely because it enables the form and arrangement of the crystalline grains to be studied. The X-ray carries the same form of inquiry into a region 10,000 times more minute, thereby furnishing new evidence as to crystalline structures, so that it is now possible to see the atoms and the molecules, and the way they form crystals. Every crystal has its characteristic X-ray spectrum and can be identified thereby even when the individual crystals are beyond the resolving power of the microscope and the substance is in danger of being called amorphous. If a specimen contains a mixture of crystalline substances, the spectrum shows the combined effect of all the substances, and provided each individual spectrum is known, the specimen can be analyzed.”

The X-rays are also used to determine the quality of the fabric in automobile tires, and even to detect irregularities in the centers of golf balls, and to reveal why some of them fly straighter and farther than others.

“The professional detective, too,” says Mr. Wilfred S. Ogden (Popular Science Monthly, August, 1923), “will find X-rays useful in his business. Consider the detection of infernal machines, for example. Two or three X-ray plates will tell an investigator just what is in a suspicious-looking box. If it is a bomb the X-ray will show him how to get it apart and render it harmless. Immediate detection of false bottoms in trunks is child’s play with the X-ray. When the government provided its customs inspectors with X-ray machines the gems which smugglers try to hide in the linings of clothes or in hollow-handled hairbrushes might as well be worn openly.

“The X-rays give us one of the easiest ways to detect the alteration of checks and other documents. It is seldom that such an alteration is made with exactly the same ink used on the original. Inks even of the same color, differ in the way they affect the rays. In most cases all that is necessary to detect an alteration is to place the suspected document for a moment under the X-rays and make a photograph of it. The new ink used in the alteration will stand out clearly as different from the old.

“The industrial detective will find X-rays just as useful. The adulteration of foods by sawdust, sand or clay; the adding of too much filler to paper; the presence of grit in lubricating oil, all will be revealed.

“Another use of the rays comes home to every cook and housewife. X-rays constitute the only sure way to tell good eggs from bad. Pass each egg in turn through the X-rays and let its shadow fall on a chemical screen. You will see exactly what is inside each egg. The ones containing hopeful chicks may be rejected.”

One of the most remarkable economic or biological uses of the X-ray so far developed is the study of silk-worms and their diseases. The Silk Association of America has established a laboratory—Department of Sericulture—in the Canton Christian College, presided over by a staff of Chinese and foreign entomologists. Here the silk-worm is X-rayed by powerful microscopes, and all his disorders diagnosed and corrected, says Mr. Philip A. Yountz (Scientific American, September, 1925).

“Numerous autopsies on deceased members of the silk-worm tribe revealed that from 50 to 100 percent of the worms raised in South China were infected with diseases that made the infant mortality rate excessively high and destroyed the value of the silk from those hardy enough to survive. The elimination of these diseases would enable South China to produce four or five times as much silk.”

In Great Britain, X-rays are used in the analysis of coal, the method being an adaptation of the X-ray stereoscope.

In Berlin, S. Nalken, a noted criminologist, has devised an important improvement in finger-print identification. X-ray pictures are obtained of the finger, with the muscles and bones. This is done without the use of any chemicals that could obstruct the delicate furrows of the finger lines. Moreover, the finger bone is shaped so characteristically as to aid identification. Whenever a certain likeness of finger-lines is discovered, the bones are examined to see if further research is necessary.

Picture fakers have been dethroned by application of the X-ray to paintings. Recently painted “old masters” are now easily detected. Modern artists use white-lead, which is more opaque than the “priming” or “sizing” used by the older artists; and the X-ray device “made in Germany” in 1914 by Dr. Faber, and further developed by the French expert, Dr. André Chéron, at once distinguishes the old from the new. One picture by Van Ostade, of men drinking at a table, proved to be a fraud when submitted to the X-ray; it had been painted over a study of dead birds. Another, called “The Royal Child,” a supposed 16th century work, now in the Louvre, was proved to have been painted during the 19th century over a picture of very much earlier date.

During a popular lecture on the X-ray in London, before the Royal Institution, the distinguished physicist, Prof. G. W. C. Kaye, showed a number of radiograph slides, among which were two pictures by Dutch painters, one representing the Madonna and the other the Crucifixion. In the former, the Madonna appeared to be looking at something which was non-existent in the canvas, and a radiograph proved the missing object was a child which some former owner of the picture had painted out. In the second picture, a woman in the attitude of prayer was found to have been painted over what was in the original the figure of a man in monk’s garb.

The first X-ray pictures ever taken of a mummy were completed by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. The pictures showing the skeleton in detail are expected to be a great aid in studying the development of bone formations in the evolution of man. This first subject of the scientists’ X-ray was a South American Indian mummy. Fake mummies, like false gems, are instantly detected by X-ray methods.

One of the methods used for detecting the theft of diamonds at the mines is to examine the workmen with X-rays. Of course, a fluoroscope is used to make the X-ray image visible, and this is the type used in any regular X-ray work.

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