![]() These have faced the added criticism that they are an invasion of privacy, given that operators of some devices are able to see through people’s clothes. Similar concerns have been levelled at millimetre-wave scanners – which use microwaves – now installed at many airports. What’s more, there have been some concerns that increasing use of X-ray devices by law enforcement might carry health risks to the general public. Still, the MINI Z isn’t available to the average consumer and it costs $50,000. There is also a web page where anyone can try a virtual demo of the system. “As an operator scans a target, an image appears in real-time on the system’s dedicated tablet,” boasts manufacturer American Science and Engineering on their website. But now police and military personnel have the option to buy a MINI Z X-ray gun – a handheld, “easy to use” X-ray device that can peer into vehicles, rooms, bags and packages. “The early experiments with this were these huge bulky machines that were not tactically useful if you’re thinking about a military or police operation,” explains Houghton. But he says the “X-ray” capabilities are strictly limited. Vince Houghton, an ex-US army soldier and historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, frequently used night vision and thermal imaging technologies in the army. This, he adds, could make it look, “very different from broadband visible wavelengths used by our eyes”. It might just be that the clothing used in this example reveals more when viewed in infrared, suggests Alistair Brown, product manager at British night vision and thermal imaging firm Thermoteknix. Night vision works by detecting infrared light, which humans can’t normally see, and converting this energy into visible light waves. The video shows how the cover of a book – and even his wife’s bra (which she declined to demonstrate herself) – can be seen through his black t-shirt. One YouTuber has uploaded what appears to be a demonstration of how a Sony camera released in 2002 can be quickly modified with some tape and an infrared filter to achieve the desired “X-ray effect”. A fluorescent screen revealed that Rontgen’s rays were passing through some materials, like muscle, but not others – such as bone.īut night-vision equipment continued to be the subject of hobbyists’ experiments. In the electromagnetic spectrum, it’s the wavelength of photonic waves that defines whether they are, for example, radio waves, visible light waves or – as in this case – X-rays. A tiny portion of the energy from this process is released as photons. Rontgen himself had been experimenting with a Crookes tube – a scientific instrument which accelerates electrons into a beam known as a cathode ray. Practitioners delighted in producing photographs of complete animal skeletons or tweaking the technique to create sharper X-ray images. In reality, though, early experiments with X-rays were confined to medical and scientific applications. One exhibition promised visitors the ability to “see through a sheet of metal” or “count the coins within your purse”. ![]() There were also some more fanciful public demonstrations of X-rays. “And one article about electric waves actually ends with the scientific journalist speculating about the possibility of being able to see through walls into the most intimate spaces and people’s most private actions.” “There’s a lot of X-ray fiction around at that time,” says Keith Williams, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. They gave their hero – what else – X-ray vision. X-rays were both sexy and seen as a sort of superpower – an idea eventually made immortal by the 1940s writers of Superman comics. ![]() And I but whisper, ‘Sweetheart, Je t’adore’,” read the lines in one poem published in Life magazine a year after Röntgen’s discovery. “Around her ribs, those beauteous twenty-four, Her flesh a halo makes, misty in line, Her noseless, eyeless face looks into mine. Soon, X-ray photographs revealing bones and even the shadowy impression of internal organs were being published in newspapers around the world.Īnd it wasn’t long before the fantasy of X-rays entered popular culture. The news that someone had found a way of peering through human skin and flesh to look at the skeleton beneath, without so much as touching the subject, was an international sensation. It was her husband, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895. “I have seen my death!” Anna Bertha Röntgen is said to have exclaimed upon seeing the first X-ray photograph ever made – an image of the bones in her hand. ![]()
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