ABSTRACT
The history of medical X-rays has been treated before by numerous authors and from a multitude of perspectives. X-rays obviously emerged from the area on the glass wall that showed the brightest green fluorescence, where cathode rays, later identified by Thomson as jets of electrons, interacted with the glass. X-ray tubes were far from perfect; most of them imploded sooner or later, overheated, or leaked air. Technical enthusiasm initially concealed the hazardous downside of X-rays. The use of two pulse generators gave birth to the metric “Heat Units” meant to characterize the quality of heat management in X-ray tubes. The earliest electron sources for X-ray generation were electrodes bombarded with ions from gas discharges. The collimation of the X-ray beam could be widened such that more photons were captured by the detection system. The average energy throughput per patient went down, and power and tube current went up.
