William Conrad Roentgen

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (German: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, March 27, 1845 - February 10, 1923) was a German physicist who became the winner of the first Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of X-rays. On November 8, 1895, when he was the president of the University of Würzburg in Germany, he observed a faint light emitted from a screen coated with barium platinocyanate placed near the ray tube while conducting experiments on cathode rays. Finally, he was convinced that this was a new type of ray that was not yet known. Some people proposed to name the new rays he discovered "Roentgen rays", but Roentgen insisted on using the name "X-rays", and the machine that produced X-rays was called an X-ray machine. Roentgen's name is generally written as Roentgen in English (another spelling of the German name Röntgen), and many English documents and materials use this spelling. In 1901, the first Nobel Prize was awarded, and Roentgen won the Nobel Prize in Physics.