About this artwork
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered x-rays on November 8, 1895, and announced his surprising find in a scientific paper at the end of that year. Within days, newspapers everywhere had picked up the story, and the x-ray’s manifold applications to science and society began to be explored. Just a few months later, the Austrian chemists Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta replicated Röntgen’s experiments and made improvements to his apparatus, publishing their research in a booklet accompanied by fifteen photogravure images depicting objects and animals. In this image, they showed the responsiveness of a variety of materials (metals, glass, bone, wood, rubber, and more) to the x-ray, showing a range of permeability that is represented as different shades of gray. This elegant arrangement of samples from the darkest black to nearly white suggests a fundamental compatibility between scientific and aesthetic ordering principles in the nineteenth century.
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Status
- Currently Off View
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Department
- Photography and Media
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Artist
- Josef Maria Eder
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Title
- Table of the Permeability of Various Substances to Roentgen Rays
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Place
- Austria (Artist's nationality:)
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Date
- Made 1896
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Medium
- Photogravure, plate No. 5 from "Research on Photography with Röntgen Rays (Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen)"
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Dimensions
- Image: 23 × 17.8 cm (9 1/16 × 7 1/16 in.); Paper: 25.8 × 20.6 cm (10 3/16 × 8 1/8 in.); Mount: 48.9 × 34.1 cm (19 5/16 × 13 7/16 in.)
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Credit Line
- The Mary and Leigh Block Endowment Fund
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Reference Number
- 2010.513
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IIIF Manifest
- https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/205246/manifest.json
Extended information about this artwork
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