Roentgen Ray Tube

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The early development of x-ray technology, beginning with the Roentgen Ray Tube in 1895, can be characterized as a new way of engaging with problematic boundaries between the material and representation, as well as between the inside and the outside of an enclosed body. The ability to project the inside of the body out onto a screen was given by a tube that emitted radiation as a side-effect. This side effect would become central to subsequent technical developments of the tube, eventually leading to the development of the high-vacuum tube. While experimenting with a partially evacuated gas tube, a German professor named Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen saw a luminescence in the darkened room outside of the tube. He realized that this "side effect" was caused by an unknown form of radiation (hence the denotation he gave it, "X") emitted by an electrical current passing through the tube and hitting the anode, or the positive electrode. Röntgen and the people for whom he demonstrated his discovery were amazed not only that the rays could pass through glass, but also that they had passed through a piece of blackened cardboard with which Röntgen had surrounded the tube. between the interior and the exterior of a partially evacuated gas tube. confronted a previously unknown kind of radiation that could pass through objects opaque to light, and impermeable to air molecules. Presumably in an effort to keep light out of the tube, he had surrounded the tube in cardboard that was painted black. When he saw a faint shimmer on a piece of photo paper that happened to be Previous experimentation with Geisler and Crookes Tubes relied on the tube's ability to contain the experiment; specifically, the tubes were used to study the passage of electrical currents through gases comprised of isolated elements. considering that radiation could travel through this boundary. The Roentgen Ray Tube is the mechanism through which x rays were first discovered. In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was experimenting with a Crookes Tube [1], a partially evacuated gas tube used to study electricity and various elements

Through radiation, x rays materially connect the inside of the body with an external representation of it.

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An x ray of Bertha Röntgen's hand.
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Picture taken during the demonstration of the Röntgen Rays at the meeting of the American Philosophical Society held February 7, 1896. The picture is of a key and coins inside a pocketbook. (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1896)

A Material Act of Representation

From a critical perspective, the entrance of x rays into medical history can be read as an intrusion of the scientific gaze into the body, or, alternatively, as an impingement of technology onto the body that functions to bring the body's interior, hidden space, to an external space exposed to vision. To view it in this second way, as a technical externalization of the body's insides, is to address the materiality of the act of representation. This is a useful way to think of x-ray technology in which electromagnetic radiation (a form of energy) goes through solid matter in order to produce a picture. Unlike in photography, which is based on the reflection of light off a solid object, skin subjected to an x ray transducts the radiation. The materiality of the act of representation becomes clearer when one considers radiation's effects on the body. While these effects were first viewed as an unfortunate side effect.

Outside/inside. Bullets in the body v. guns in the luggage.

The Mechanical, the Chemical, the Optical

There are problematics specific to the different material aspects of the Roentgen Ray Tube and the x rays it produced. Useful conceptual categories for analyzing the device are the mechanical, the chemical, and the optical. The tube itself and its construction A separation between physical/chemical changes in matter, and representation. The physical and chemical are used for healing illness, or for maintaining health, but not as much for the production of representations. For example, a patient may be given chemicals in the form of medicine. In this case the chemicals are intended to alter the chemistry of the body. More importantly, radiation, which was at first a side effect of the act of representation

Mechanical: Current travels through gas, or excites gas within tube, moving it. (Problematic: how to excite electrons, how to avoid wearing down tube, how to make image clear. The death of material.)

Chemical: The x rays affect the chemical coating the paper. (As opposed to digital.) Also affect body with radiation. (Problematic: how to get a clear image. The movement of the chemical away from representation, where it permanently alters a piece of paper, to the inside of the body.) Movement of radiation away from representation. Now used to purposely manipulate material.

Optical: Clarity of image, semiotics, how to read it. One guy argues that they could only read it by comparing it to skeletons of the dead.

The death of diagnostic touch, replaced by representation, and then modeling.

Technical Concerns

The Temperamental Tube Much discussion of gas tubes focuses on their unreliability. "Because the early tubes were highly erratic in their production of x-rays, research became centered upon their improvement. With these gas tubes there was a constant tendency for the gas to be absorbed into the solid parts of the tube; the tube might leak; it required as much art to produce x-rays as to read the resulting x-ray films. Some method was needed to make a stable tube whose output could be relied upon and would permit standardization in exposure technique" (Bleich, 19)

Maxwell's Demon In addition to its "temperamental" ability to represent clear images, the gas tube easily ran out of gas. Extra side tube that would replenish gas.

The High Vacuum Tube

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A gas x-ray tube with a side tube for regenerating gas. "The regeneration mechanism D was activated when the gas pressure in the tube became so low that a spark jumped between E and F" (Arns, 862).

Enframing

Taking an x ray picture is an act of enframing. Not only does it zero in on and frame a specific part of the skeleton, but it also brings forth the skeletal frame from the rest of the body. In other words, it is an observation that engages in analysis. Even before a human radiologist interprets and analyzes the picture, the actual x-ray machine performs an act of analysis by capturing only the bones in the picture, thereby extracting the skin, blood, and muscle from the image. In a paper presented at the 2008 Eastern Sociology Society Meeting, Sam Han discussed Heidegger's understanding of enframing “But for Heidegger specifically, to call something a ‘world’ is to identify a process of binding and cohesion; thus it is a normative claim” (Han 2008).

X-ray technology is still used in medicine, but many medical sociologists cite a shift in focus in medical technology from representational images to statistical modeling. "The digital image is obviously a computer-generated image, which Stiegler often calls the 'calculated image,' in that it models the real, yet imitates it quasi-perfectly" (Han 2008). The calculated image might alternatively be understood to imitate the real "hyper-perfectly," or, in other words, to create a representation that better resembles the statistical norm. "By suggesting that the discrete image serves an an epokhe, Stiegler is arguing that what is produced an image by digital technologies is not necessarily "captured" (Han 2008).

The Technical Invasion of Privacy

Lentle, 513: “The apparel of a well-to-do Victorian lady seems to us today to have been used to deny the reality of flesh and blood. The idea that it might be made transparent by the use of x-rays may have been the first intimation of what we now consider the sexual revolution of the 20th century. The established social order, as well as public morality, had come under technological “threat.”

Cultural references to Roentgen Rays demonstrated an understanding of Roentgen Rays as an invasion of privacy. The following poem from the magazine, Photography, playfully refers to this:

"The Roentgen Rays, the Roentgen Rays,/ What is this craze:/ The town's ablaze/ With the new phase/ Of x-ray's ways./ I'm full of daze,/ Shock and amaze,/ For now-a-days/ I hear they'll gaze/ Thro' cloak and gown-- and even stays,/ These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays."/ (Bleich, 6).

This poem equates Roentgen Rays with a voyeuristic, lascivious gaze. The idea that the Rays could see through clothes seemed to be a source of titillation, perhaps associated with anxiety about female sexuality. The following poem by Lawrence K. Russel, published in Life Magazine, March 12, 1896, comically describes a woman's skeleton as beautiful and sexually appealing:

She is so tall, so slender; and her bones-- Those frail phosphates, those carbonates of lime-- Are well produced by cathode rays sublime; By oscillations, amperes and by ohms, Her dorsal vertebrae are no concealed By epidermis, but are well revealed.

Around her ribs, those beauteous twenty-four, Her flesh a halo makes, misty in lime, Her noseless, eyeless face looks into mine, And I but whisper, "Sweetheart, je t'adore." Her white and gleaming teeth at me do laugh, Ah! lovely, cruel, sweet cathodagraph!

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Advertisement of "the perfect dress interlining" from The Globe, Toronto, Feb. 27, 1896 (Lentle, 513).
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Life Magazine, 1896

Reading Images

The Monopoly on Reading: Pasveer, 364: “In the first years after Rontgen’s discovery the very question of who should be considered a competent and skilled Rontgenologist was not under discussion; neither was there a clear boundary between what we now call radiologists and radiographers. Every interested person who had access to the apparatus could and in fact did work with the rays in the early days, and no explicit rules were developed for the making and interpreting of the images.” Radiology societies sprung up. Pasveer, 365: “The Societies functioned as platforms for discussions of the rays, and as a basis for the professionalization of radiology; they also functioned as regulatory organs: regulating practices and membership, and thereby competence. Once important concern both inside and outside these Societies was the question of competence in the production and interpretation of the images.”

Entrance of Death into Life: Interpreting the images depended upon knowledge of the skeletal frame drawn from autopsies. When Wilhelm Rontgen x-rayed his wife, Bertha's, hand, she said that she had glimpsed her death. Popular jokes and cartoon references to Rontgen Rays also spoke to the association between x rays and death. Shadow Images. Foucault, Birth of Clinic. Monopoly on knowledge. Death. 144- "It is from the height of death that one can see and analyze organic dependences and pathological sequences." 145- "death was the only possibility of giving life a positive truth."

In recent years some aspects of the role of reader have passed from the human observer to technology. The job of interpreting the image became subsumed by computer imaging technologies, which are able to sharpen images and increase contrasts, thereby removing some of the vagueness that requires a skilled human reader to decipher.

References

Arns, Robert G. The High-Vacuum X-Ray Tube: Technological Change in Social Context. Technology and Culture vol. 38, no. 4: 852-890.

Bleich, Alan R. 1960. The Story of X-Rays from Röntgen to Isotopes. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Golan, Tal. 2004. The Emergence of the Silent Witness: The Legal and Medical Reception of X-rays in the USA. Social Studies of Science vol. 34, no. 4: 469-499.

Han, Sam. 2008. Is the Global Really Glo-bile? Image-ing the 'World Picture' in an Age of Mobile Onto-Aesthetics. Paper presented at Eastern Sociological Society Meeting, February 24th, in New York.

Lentle, Brian. 2000. X-rays and technology as metaphor. Canadian Medical Association Journal 162 (4): 512-514.

Pasveer, Bernike. 1989. Knowledge of shadows: the introduction of X-ray images in medicine. Sociology of Health & Illness 11(4): 360-383.

"Remarks Made at the Demonstration of the Rontgen Ray, at Stated Meeting, February 21, 1896." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 35 (150): 17-36.