ABSTRACT
A Radiograph of a diamond star and a paste brooch, by Charles Thurston Holland in 1896 is shown here. He later described how after a lantern-slide lecture in 1896, the audience were invited on payment of a fee for charity, to view their hands on a fluorescent screen. One ‘very over-dressed lady’ who found that stones in a large ring were densely opaque, and therefore fake, made quite unprintable and vitriolic remarks, and Thurston Holland observed that ‘he had done someone a very bad turn’.
