1845-1923

German Physicist

Wilhelm Röntgen wasn't allowed to graduate from high school because he got into trouble with a friend over a caricature of one of his teachers. But he won the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 and had a very distinguished career in German universities. With a German father and Dutch mother, Röntgen grew up in Holland. Later, he went to a polytechnical school in Zurich, Switzerland, where he got a diploma in mechanical engineering. He married Anna Bertha Ludwig and was head of his department at the University of Würzburg when he noticed something important about the cathode rays with which he was working.

Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) had developed the Crookes tube in 1876 in which the pressure in a vacuum was reduced to the point that cathode rays shot straight across the tube...