Strange Glow summary

It’s Christmas Day, 1895. In Germany, professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen feels troubled.  Days earlier he made a revolutionary discovery, but it was so disturbing, he hoped it might be a mistake.  His discovery? He found that invisible rays could pass through solid objects. Even seeing it with his own eyes he had his doubts. 

Little did he, nor any other scientist at the time, know about the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, another German scientist. In 1893 Helmholtz had predicted that, if there were rays with wavelengths shorter than visible light, those rays could pass through matter. If Roentgen had known that, he might have relaxed a bit and enjoyed his holiday.

Luckily for Roentgen, he had protected himself from these unknown rays early on. Perhaps because he was a cautious man, or perhaps because the image of bones on a fluorescent screen seemed like an omen of death. Still, not everyone was so cautious.

American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison was quick to pursue X-ray experiments in his own commercial laboratory. Edison’s involvement in bringing electric light to households had been both ruthless and cruel. But it put him at the forefront of innovation. Sadly, it was the experiments with these new waves that showed how dangerous X-ray exposure can be. Edison’s assistant, Clarence Dally, had volunteered to have his hands bombarded with X-Rays again and again to show how X-rays worked. Hand ulcers showed him how high exposure could burn the skin. But these ulcers grew cancerous, and spread from his hands, up the arms and to his chest, and eventually caused his death. 

The discovery of new wavelengths of energy happened at the same time as other discoveries.  In France, scientist Antoine Becquerel was fascinated by Roentgen’s experiments, but more drawn to fluorescence, or light-emitting chemicals. He also loved photography, and wanted to capture fluorescence on film like light. So, he sealed films in dark covers and sprinkled them with minerals coated in fluorescent chemicals. He thought fluorescence was like X-rays and could pass through the covering and expose the film.

Sadly for him, none of his fluorescence experiments worked out until he tried the mineral Uranium. Without exposure to light, but WITH exposure to uranium, the photographic films were exposed and showed an image even without light. Oddly enough, the uranium hadn’t been treated with fluorescent chemicals at all—it seemed to emit an as-yet-undiscovered kind of ray. In 1903, he shared the Nobel Prize for this discovery with the famed scientific team, Marie and Pierre Curie.

Fun fact: until the 1890s you were as likely to be killed by medicine as you were by any disease. Doctors injected mercury or used bloodletting regularly, and killed patients in the process. 

Perhaps no one saw both the benefits and risks of the new nuclear science for medicine as clearly as Chicago physician Emil Herman Grubbe. At only 7, Grubbe was brought along to Edison’s new light bulb demonstration at the McVicker Theatre. At 20, he was working for a lightbulb manufacturer. His company wanted to make special scientific equipment, called Crookes tubes, for commercial sale. These small glass and metal instruments could send streams of electrons through the air, and Grubbe’s work life involved countless experiments with them. He considered his burned and blistered hands from the X-rays they emit to be the cost of discovery.

It’s a warm morning on August 6, 1945, and Dr. Terufumi Sasaki is settling into a day’s work at the Red Cross Hospital, just outside the city centre in Hiroshima, Japan. By 8:15, he’s heading down the hallway to deliver a patient’s blood specimen to the lab. Suddenly, he sees a bright flash of light. 

An atomic bomb just detonated at the center of Hiroshima. At ground zero, the temperature was hotter than the surface of the sun. Heat from the bomb ignites fires, which engulf about 4 square miles of the city center. The blast radius was circular, just under a mile across.