Spectaculaire vondst

NVMG-lid Frans W. Zonneveld schreef een artikel over de vondst in 2018 van originele foto’s van W.C. Röntgen in het archief van het Teylers Museum.

U kunt de Nederlandse versie van het artikel hier vinden, zoals deze is gepubliceerd in Memorad, jaargang 24, nr. 3.

Het artikel is ‘open acces’ gepubliceerd op SpringerOpen, waar u het artikel, inclusief afbeeldingen, voetnoten en bibliografie, in het Engels kunt lezen. U vindt hieronder de inleiding van het Engelstalige artikel.

Introduction
Since Hendrik Antoon Lorentz passed away (February 4th, 1928), part of his scientific heritage has been kept at Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands, where Lorentz was the director (since 1909) of the Physics Laboratory of the Teylers Foundation. As this heritage consisted of many books, papers and thousands of reprints, it had never been studied in detail. In the course of 2018, museum workers embarked on this enormous undertaking. Between the pages of an 1896 catalogue of the Leybold Company (Cologne, Germany), they encountered, near the letter L, a folder containing 13 prints of radiographs.
Nine of these radiographs presumably formed the original set that Roentgen had sent to about half a dozen of his scientific colleagues on January 1st, 1896. The other four prints of radiographs did not originate from Roentgen and were of later dates. Two of these prints could be traced back to an X-ray demonstration by a local high school teacher in the city of Tilburg (The Netherlands) on March 18th 1896. Near the letter R in the catalogue, the original reprint of Roentgen’s first publication, which he had sent along with the prints of radiographs, was found. It contained Roentgen’s handwritten note: ‘W.C. Röntgen. Vom Verfasser überreicht mit 9 Photographien’ (W.C. Roentgen. Presented by the author with nine photographs).

Het NRC Handelsblad publiceerde op 13 juni 2019 over de vondst: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/06/13/de-eerste-set-rontgenfotos-ligt-in-haarlem-a3963610