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that during the discharge of _one_ kind of rays of force from the cathode pole in a Crookes tube _another kind_ of rays are set free, which differ totally in their nature and effects from anything hitherto known. It is this fact which has indissolubly connected the name of Konrad Roentgen with that great bound in scientific knowledge which seems likely to modify nearly all the other scientific knowledge of mankind. Everywhere, in the first months of 1896, the experimenters went to work to verify and apply the discovery of the German philosopher. It was at once discerned that the new force, since it would freely traverse opaque bodies and produce afterward chemical changes on sensitized surfaces similar to those ordinarily produced _by_ light, might be used for delineating (we can hardly say _photo_ graphing) the interior outlines and structure of opaque bodies! On this line of experimentation the work at once began, and with remarkable success. Roentgen himself was the first man in the world to obtain, as _if_ by photography, the invisible outline of objects through opaque materials. He soon obtained a delineation of the bones of a living hand through the flesh, which was only dimly traced in the resulting picture. In like manner coins were delineated through the leather of pocketbooks. Other objects were pictured through intervening plates of metal or boards of wood. The possibility of discovering the visible character of invisible things, and even _of seeing directly through_ opaque materials into parts where neither light nor electricity can penetrate, was fully shown. The work of picture taking in the interior of bodies and through opaque materials was quickly taken up by philosophers in England, France and the United States. Almost everywhere the physical laboratories witnessed daily this form of experimentation. Swinton, of London; Robb, of Trinity College, Dublin; Morton, of New York; Wright, of Yale University, and in particular Thomas A. Edison, of Menlo Park, attacked the new problem with scientific zeal, and with startling results. It remained for Edison to discover that the new force acted in some respects in the manner of _sound_ rather than in the manner of _light_. Thus, for example, he showed that the invisible rays not only _pass through_ substances that are opaque to light and non-conductors of electricity, but that the invisible rays _run around the edges and sides_ of plates, then proceeding
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