Chapter 18
In the late nineteenth century, X-rays set the world’s imagination ablaze. Discovered in November 1895 by physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, the mysterious form of electromagnetic radiation was so named with the X meaning “unknown.”
A week later, Roentgen made an X-ray image of his wife’s hand, showing her wedding ring sheathing a finger bone like a fancy hat adorning a Day of the Dead skeleton’s head. The image hurriedly became a worldwide novelty, as if Roentgen had torn the protective wrapping off reality, and the whole planet could see what was inside. It became perhaps the most famous depiction of human anatomy since Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
X-rays’ ability to glimpse beneath the surface of the ordinary put them in league with a spiritual afterlife, simply considered by many then to be no more unseen than the bone and tissue underneath our veil of skin.
Within three months after the emissions’ discovery, DIY X-ray kits hit the market and engaged couples posed for “bone portraits.” In May 1896, Thomas Edison demonstrated his fluoroscope, whose calcium tungstate screens allowed brighter X-ray images, at New York’s National Electrical Exhibition, where between 3,000 and 4,000 people inspected their own anatomy.
In 1896 alone, roughly 1,044 articles and 49 essays about X-rays were published. The October 1898 issue of Electrical Review referred to a London mummy dealer who planned on using X-rays to thwart an Egyptian salesman who tried to fob off counterfeit mummies on him. The X-ray rage then, like the World Wide Web craze a century later, seemed to have no limit to its acceleration.
Just one year after Roentgen’s discovery, an X-ray machine was displayed at the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in Nashville. Three years later, in 1898, The Roentgen Wonderful Ray of Light pavilion at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, shown here, let attendees glimpse the interiors of everyday objects as well as their own bodies, blissfully unaware that the devices were zapping them with 1,500 times as much radiation as contemporary X-ray machines.
The enlightening pictures were the latest evolution in image production technology, from Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype process to Eadweard Muybridge’s high-speed photographic analysis of a horse in full gallop to the Eastman Kodak Co.’s “You press the button—we do the rest” portable camera that enthralled the public. They broke a kind of fourth wall of reality, revealing an intimate, unseen world of the body previously familiar mostly to anatomists and others practiced at autopsies. The demand for X-rays progressed at such a clip that advertisements in Canadian periodicals appeared for “50 Hustling young men” to run X-ray machines.
But the real reason X-rays could be displayed to clamoring audiences at fairs was twofold.
From the collections of the Omaha Public Library
First, though he eventually won a Nobel Prize in 1901 for his work, Roentgen declined to patent his technology, allowing everyone from the altruistic to the mercenary to generate their own X-rays in the pursuit of medicine or money. Poems and political cartoons extolled X-rays’ wonders. One manufacturer rolled out lead underwear to thwart those who would glimpse the nether regions with X-ray glasses that never quite existed except in the back pages of comic books. Underscoring that fear, there was the (probably apocryphal) account of a Somerset County, New Jersey, assemblyman introducing a bill into the state legislature barring the use of X-rays in theaters’ opera glasses.
Secondly, X-rays became more than a novelty; they became health itself, a fountain of youth worthy of Ponce de Leon. Their popularity matched that of antioxidants, gluten-free foods, and vibrating belts combined. In their lifetime as a health aid, X-rays seemed as innocuous as a Fitbit, appearing to ease cancers, surface lesions, and sundry skin problems. Even when X-ray recipients’ hair fell out, they didn’t avoid the beams but instead embraced them as an effective depilatory.
After Austrian physician Leopold Freund noticed that patients’ “hair begins to fall out in thick tufts when lightly grasped” following X-ray treatments, he endorsed the radiation as an appropriate treatment for hypertrichosis, or excessive body hair. As an indirect result of Freund’s hearty endorsement, “internationally famous X-ray expert” Dr. Albert C. Geyser developed the Tricho System of Treatment marketed through his Tricho Sales Corp.
By 1925, Geyser’s Tricho Sales had placed Tricho machines in more than seventy-five beauty salons, from Milwaukee to Montreal, where women received an average of twenty X-ray treatments on their cheeks and upper lips to permanently expunge surplus hair. One estimate says Geyser’s New York clinic alone irradiated 200,000 clients.
Expositions played a more shadowy role in the machines’ success by granting them legitimacy.
Marketed as a technology that won major awards at international exhibitions, the Tricho reaped honors that were actually produced by one Max Kaiser of London. Starting in 1914, Kaiser began selling international exhibition awards to anyone with $400. After organizing an exhibit for a company at a given international expo, he essentially offered a cast-iron assurance that this exhibit would receive either a “grand prize” or “gold medal.” So certain was the award (which he granted) that no company had to pay Kaiser’s fee until the prize or medal had been bestowed. Thus, Tricho won a Grand Prize at the Paris Exposition Generale Commercial in 1925.
In 1929, the American Medical Association warned its members of accumulating injuries, an assemblage of keratosis, ulcerations, and carcinomas linked to Tricho treatments. Faced with the prospect of being sued for millions of dollars, Tricho Sales collapsed in 1930 under an avalanche of lawsuits. By 1970, at least one-third of radiation-induced cancers in women were linked to hair removal from X-rays.
X-ray machines were still commonly displayed at shows into the 1930s and beyond, like the British Institute of Radiology Annual Congress and Exhibition, where scientists routinely—and safely—wielded the electromagnetic radiation to gaze into the human internal structure and diagnose maladies from broken bones to metastasized tumors. But the earlier exhibitions helped X-rays slink from the clinical to the comical—and the creepy: While shoe stores radiated customers’ feet to “scientifically” determine if the loafers or pumps they tried were pressing on their bones, newspapers in the early part of the twentieth century speciously reported physicians were turning African-Americans into Caucasians by lightening the tint of their skin with repeated X-ray blasts.