X-Screens: Röntgen Architecture
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When Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen first published his very recent discovery of the X-ray in December of 1895 in an article entitled “On a New Kind of Rays, a Preliminary Communication,” he wrote about a new form of transparency in which “bodies behave to the X- rays as turbid media to light.”1 The invisible rays 01/13 are described as a “medium” that penetrates objects and is revealed on screens. A floating technical surface acts as the most intimate witness of the otherwise hidden interior. An architecture is established that inverts the classical relationship between inside and outside, an architecture we still live in today, with our countless screens monitoring endless Beatriz Colomina invisible flows. Architects, historians, and theorists quickly absorbed the new paradigm – developing an entire logic of the invisible in the X-Screens: early decades of the twentieth century that remains largely in place. New medical screens Rntgen are today creating new forms of architecture as the relationship between inside and outside Architecture passes through another twist. New forms of intimacy are emerging. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊEven before he mentions X-rays, Rntgen describes in the second paragraph of his paper a new concept of transparency closely linked to the idea of a “screen.” The screen is actually made of a piece of paper coated with a thin layer of “barium platinum cyanide” that glows fluorescent when exposed to the rays. He marvels at the fact that paper itself is very transparent when seen through such a a “fluorescent screen,” so the screen is really just n i m the thin layer of barium platinum cyanide. But it o l o is not just a sheet of paper that is transparent. C z i Even a thousand-page book placed behind the r t a screen becomes transparent. “Thick blocks of e B Ê wood are still transparent.” Tinfoil needs many 5 1 layers to hardly cast a “shadow” on the screen 0 2 r and it takes a very thick sheet of aluminum to e b e reduce the fluorescence. o r t u c t o c e t — i 1. The New Transparency 6 h 6 c r Rntgen’s screen showed, in the words of his # A n — first report, that “all bodies possess this same e 6 g 2 6 t transparency, but in very varying degrees.” n # l Transparency, therefore, is a property of a R : n r s seemingly opaque bodies, including the human u n o e j e body. In other words, it is not an effect. The X-ray x r u c l S f is not something done to an object. The object is - - e X already transparent and the X-rays allow us to see it. The whole world is now understood to be transparent. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊHaving studied the transparency of many materials, including glass itself, which paradoxically is more opaque (because it contains lead), Rntgen looks through the human body: “If the hand be held before the fluorescent screen,” he writes, “the shadow shows the bones 09.18.15 / 19:33:57 EDT darkly, with only faint outlines of the surrounding hands were made by Rntgen and others soon tissues.”3 The famous X-ray image of the hand of after the article was published. Rntgen his wife Bertha Rntgen, with her wedding ring photographed the hand of Professor Albert von on the third finger, taken only five days before he Kolliker, a famous anatomist and president of the submitted the article for publication, is used as Wurzburg Physical and Medical Society, during an illustration – as proof of the astonishing Rntgen’s first public lecture about the revelation.4 The image was crucial to the popular discovery, delivered on January 13, 1896. success of the invention. 02/13 Summoned to Berlin by the emperor to report on ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAfraid of revealing his stunning discovery to the discovery, he photographed the hands of his colleagues, Rntgen brought his wife to the Wilhelm II and Empress Augusta Victoria. Later laboratory the evening of December 22, 1895, he also X-rayedÊthe hands of the duke and after months of experimentation with inanimate duchess of York and the emperor and empress of objects, and exposed her hand to the X-rays for Russia, among many other notables. The hand X- fifteen minutes, producing the first X-ray image ray had become a new kind of intimate portrait of a human body. Upon seeing the image of her and the icon of a new worldview, a worldview in hand, Bertha Rntgen famously said, “I have which everything, no matter how seemingly seen my death,” anticipating a common popular impervious, becomes intimate. reaction to such images.5 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊRntgen had named the mysterious ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊRntgen’s article stimulated an enormous phenomenon “X-rays” because he didn’t know double reaction. Scientists all around the world what they were. Kolliker had proposed, after seized on the idea and tried to replicate the Rntgen’s Wurzburg lecture, that the new rays be experiment. The popular press ignited intense called “Rntgen rays,” but self-effacing Rntgen speculation about the possible uses and preferred to continue to call them X-rays. The meaning of these images. Newspapers were justification of the term “rays,” he claimed in that galvanized by the idea of an invisible world. The first article, lay in the “shadow pictures” image of Bertha’s hand gave way to a whole produced by interposing a body between the genre of such images in both scientific and source of the X-rays and a photographic plate or popular publications. Countless X-ray images of a screen. Rntgen wrote that in the two months An X-ray image of a hand bearing a wedding ring was featured in the exhibition “Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900,” at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. 09.18.15 / 19:33:57 EDT before he photographed his wife’s hand, he had on the discovery, with an article entitled “Eine “observed and photographed many such shadow Sensationelle Entdeckung” (A Sensational pictures,” including a set of weights inside a Discovery).9 In their haste, they misspelled wooden box and a compass card and needle Rntgen’s name as “Routgen.” The next day, the completely enclosed in a metal case.6 London Standard cabled the following news ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊRntgen considered this ability to make release to the world, repeating the misspelled photographs of the “shadow pictures” on the name: screen of “special interest,” because it made it 03/13 possible to “exhibit the phenomena so as to The noise of war’s alarm should not distract exclude the danger of error.”7 The main attention from the marvellous triumph of advantage for him, therefore, was to provide Science which is reported from Vienna. It is proof, to confirm the observations already made announced that Professor Routgen of multiple times with the fluorescent screen. Soon Würzburg has discovered a light which, for after its initial publication, he sent reprints of the purpose of photography, will penetrate the article together with prints of the X-ray wood, flesh and most other organic images he had taken to many scientists, substances. The Professor has succeeded including Emil Warburg in Berlin and Henri in photographing metal weights which were Poincare in Paris.8 Warburg immediately added in a closed wooden case, also a man’s hand, the X-ray images to an exhibition that was which shows only the bones, the flesh already mounted on the occasion of the being invisible. anniversary of the Berlin Physical Society at Berlin University. This was the first public When the London Standard reported on the story exhibition of X-ray images. in the paper on January 7, 1896, they felt obliged ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWithout these images, the discovery of the to add: “The Presse assures its readers that X-rays would have been of less interest both in there is no joke or humbug in the matter. It is a scientific and lay circles. It was front-page news serious discovery by a serious German in many newspapers worldwide. On January 5, Professor.” The Frankfurter Zeitung published the 1886, Die Presse in Vienna was the first to report news, also on January 7, and was the first A skeleton of a frog is revealed in an X-ray from L. Aubert, La Photographie de l’Invisible: Les rayons X suivi d’un glossaire, les livres d'or de la science (Paris: 1898). 09.18.15 / 19:33:57 EDT ÊX-Ray is used to exposeÊa woman hiding a bottle of liquor under her dress. The glass becomes visible due to its lead. This illustration isÊfrom the book Guy Pallardy, Histoire illustrée de la radiologie. 09.18.15 / 19:33:57 EDT newspaper to print the images. Newspapers mittelst der Rntgen’schen Strahlen (Research on around the world, from Paris Matin, to the Photography with Rntgen Rays), an album of Krakow-based Czas, to the New York Times, St. fifteen photogravures made from X-rays, in which Louis Dispatch, and Sydney Telegraph, among they described in great detail the procedure used many others, continued to sensationalize the and the improvements they had made to discovery and anticipate its medical uses, Rntgen’s apparatus.12 Human hands and feet, something that Rntgen was skeptical about. fish, frogs, a snake, a chameleon, a lizard, a rat, Since only text could be sent by cable telegraphy, 05/13 and a newborn rabbit were among the images in most of these early overseas reports were not the album, a kind of zoo echoing the nineteenth- illustrated – prompting skepticism among century naturalist albums of animals, insects, readers and journalists.