Advances in Medical Linear Accelerator Technology

Technological inventions and developments have created new possibilities and breakthroughs in medical era. The classic example is the discovery of X-rays by W.C. Roentgen, one hundred years ago. The first dawning rays appeared quite literally just before the beginning of the 20th century. In 1895 a German physicist named Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen accidentally discovered a form of radiation that could penetrate opaque objects and cast ghostly images on a photographic plate. Roentgen called his discovery X-radiation (the X was for "unknown"), and to prove its existence he took a picture of his wife's hand by exposing it to a beam of its rays. The result showed the bones of her hand and a ring on her finger as dark shadows on the photographic plate. It was the first x-ray image ever deliberately recorded.