At first, he almost didn’t believe it himself.
Brief, tantalizing tales about what Wilhelm Röntgen saw in his Würzburg laboratory on Nov. 8, 1895 began popping up across the Atlantic the first week of January 1896.
There had been a blurb in the Sunday, Feb. 2 edition of the Atlanta Constitution, and McKissick had laughed. It had to be a mistake, a joke, maybe a misprint or miscalculation. It wasn’t.
The following Sunday’s edition carried an abridged account of a Harvard professor’s recreation of the newly famous German mechanical engineer’s experiments under the headline: “A Giant Stride in Science: How Objects Are Photographed Through Opaque Bodies – The Cathode Ray.