The lesson of the laboratory was
eloquent. Compared, for instance, with the elaborate, expensive, and
complete apparatus of, say, the University of London, or of any of the
great American universities, it was bare and unassuming to a degree.
It mutely said that in the great march of science it is the genius of
man, and not the perfection of appliances, that breaks new ground in
the great territory of the unknown. It also caused one to wonder at
and endeavor to imagine the great things which are to be done through
elaborate appliances with the Roentgen rays--a field in which the
United States, with its foremost genius in invention, will very
possibly, if not probably, take the lead--when the discoverer himself
had done so much with so little. Already, in a few weeks, a skilled
London operator, Mr. A.A.C. Swinton, has reduced the necessary time
of exposure for Roentgen photographs from fifteen minutes to four.
He used, however, a Tesla oil coil, discharged by twelve half-gallon
Leyden jars, with an alternating current of twenty thousand volts'
pressure. Here were no oil coils, Leyden jars, or specially elaborate
and expensive machines. There were only a Rhumkorff coil and Crookes
(vacuum) tube and the man himself.
Professor Roentgen entered hurriedly, something like an amiable gust
of wind.
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