Anna Bertha Ludwig only wanted to accompany her husband in the laboratory. 🔬
It was December 1895 in Germany, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen needed to test his discovery on something alive. He asked his wife to keep her hand still beneath the apparatus for 20 minutes. When he developed the plate, something appeared that no human being had ever seen before: the bones of a living hand, floating in gray shadows, with the wedding ring still on the finger.
Anna Bertha stared at that ghostly image of her own skeleton and could not contain her horror: “I have seen my death!”, she exclaimed. No one before had seen inside themselves without dying first. 💀
That homemade experiment earned Röntgen the first Nobel Prize in Physics in history, in 1901, and gave humanity a way to look inside the body without opening it.
