X-ray Politics: Lenard vs. Röntgen and Einstein
The first X-ray photograph, 1895 (Mrs. Röntgen's hand). Courtesy National Library of Medicine, NIH.
No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known, even that of the electric arc…I did not think. I investigated.
Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen, 1896 (1)
German physics? one asks. I might rather have said Aryan physics or the physics of the Nordic species of man… But, I shall be answered, “Science is and remains international.” It is false. Science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.
Phillip Lenard, “German Physics,” 1936 (2)
People who could not spell the word “vote” or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama. The revolution has come. It was led by the cult of multiculturalism aided by leftist liberals all over who don't have the same ideas about America as we do.
Congressman Tom Tancredo, 2010 (3)
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen (1845–1823; Nobel Prize, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Medicine, NIH.
JUDGMENT AT MESSELHAUSEN
It's not often that an article in an old Radiology journal evokes the stuff of movie drama. It's even rarer when it touches a raw nerve in the body politic of today. But an article in the August 1946 issue of American Journal of Roentgenology and Radium Therapy reminds me of Burt Lancaster in the dock in Judgment at Nuremberg, a film based on the Nazi war-criminal trials. (5) It also reminds me of the nasty, nativist sentiments bandied about by ultra-patriots in our own country today.
The Radiology article casts a real-life American doctor, Lt. Col. Lewis E. Etter USAMC, in the role of an Army prosecutor (Richards Widmark) out to show what the Nazis were all about. In September of 1945, a month after V-E day, Colonel Etter conducted two interviews with the wizened dean of “Aryan physics,” Philipp Lenard. (6) Dodging the entry of American troops in March, 85 year old Lenard had fled from Heidelberg to Messelhausen, a tiny village in Bavaria. With Munich in ruins and Dachau exposed, Lenard's main worry was that the American occupation had slowed republication of his text. “But alien conquerors [die Eroberer] have now deprived Gutenberg's fine invention completely of all nobler uses.” (7)
Philipp Lenard (1862–1947), was born in Hungary, where he was known as Lénárd Fülöp Eduárd Antal. Like other folks—then and now—who have been raised far from the center of national life, he became an ultranationalist. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1905 for extending Hittorf's 1869 work on cathode rays, and spent a lifetime knocking the work of Jewish, French, and Polish Nobelists (Albert Einstein, Jean Baptiste Perrin, and Marie Curie). He went so far as to write a proud history of German science, Deutsche Physik, that omitted Röntgen and Einstein entirely. (2) Not to include Einstein? No surprise. But Röntgen, the man who had won the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901? There must have been another reason. “Was Röntgen Jewish?” Etter asked. Lenard replied “No, but he was a friend of Jews and acted like one.” (6)
I am the mother of X-rays, Just as the mid-wife is not responsible for the mechanism of birth, so was Röntgen not responsible for the discovery of x-rays since all the groundwork had been prepared by me. Without me, the name of Röntgen would be unknown today. (6)
THE SMOKING GUN
Pursuing this point, Etter confronted Lenard with several letters found in a safe at the Physics Institute in nearby Würzburg, an Institute founded by Röntgen. The letters were hidden there under the terms of Röntgen's will. In the early 20s, the National Socialists were already beating the drums of prejudice: it was clear to Röntgen that the nationalists were out to get him and to support one of their own, Philipp Lenard, in his claim to be the “mother of X-rays.” In the summer of 1922 Lenard had written to the Nobel committee that Einstein was a “publicity-seeking Jew whose approach was alien to the true nature of German physics.” (7)
Because your great discovery caused such swift attention in the farthest circles, my modest work also came into the limelight, which was of particular luck for me, and I am doubly glad to have had your friendly participation. (6)
In his Messelhausen interview, Lenard tells Colonel Etter that he had expected a reply from Röntgen “confessing” that X-rays were really their joint discovery: he couldn't have found them without Lenard's cathode ray tube. Etter discounts that explanation and dismisses Lenard's claims. Etter had been scouting around Würzburg and environs, aided in his quest by Dr. Harms, director of the Institute, and by two non-Aryan GIs of the 115th Field Hospital, Bernard Berger and Joel Schwab, who served as interpreters during the interviews. With their help, Etter found physical evidence in Würzburg that Röntgen had not relied on Lenard's aluminum window tube (1893) in the critical experiments. Instead, he had used the earlier vacuum tubes devised by Hittorf and Crookes (1869–1875). (6)
The Nobel committee agreed: on the evening of November 8, 1895, Röntgen took a Hittorf cathode ray tube covered with black cardboard to prevent light from entering. At some distance from his tube was a sheet of paper treated with the barium platinum-cyanide, ready for use as a screen in later experiments. As the current sparked in the vacuum tube, he noted that the paper was glowing in his darkened lab. He had moved it as far as six feet from the tube, much further than Lenard thought of placing a like target in his experiments. Röntgen realized that rays escaping from the Hittorf tube could not be the short-range rays that Lenard had explored, but a new kind of emanation, the “X-rays.” These rays could penetrate human tissue and leave images on photographic films. (8) Etter explains that when Lenard missed emanations from his tube at distances greater than 8cm, “he missed the discovery of X-rays.”
THEY’VE EVEN TAKEN HIS VIOLIN
Etter concluded that after Röntgen's death Lenard's animosity to Röntgen's reputation increased and “climaxed during the time of his lofty and commanding position in the Nazi hierarchy of scientists.” (6) Lenard, an early party member, was the Nazi's point-man in the purge of non-Aryan scientists from German universities. He had a trial run for his place in the hierarchy of Nazi science over a decade before Hitler came to power. After a 1920 physics meeting in Bad Nauheim, when he instigated a vigorous anti-Einstein campaign, first against Einstein's theories (Einsteinismus), then against his person. The campaign escalated to death threats, mobs of brown-shirts around Einstein's home and violent disruptions of his lectures. The demagogue Rudolph Leibus offered a reward to anyone who would assassinate the hated “Jew scientist.” (9)
By 1929, Lenard and his gang issued an anti-relativity book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein (10) on which Einstein later commented, “If I were wrong, one would have been enough (11)!” But, by then it was 1933 and Einstein had fled to England where he had been offered refuge in a vacation cottage on the Norfolk broads. The Conservative MP, Godfrey Locker-Lamson, who owned the cottage, told parliament: “Germany has turned out her most glorious citizen, Albert Einstein. The Huns have stolen his savings, plundered his place of residence, and even taken his violin… How proud this country must be to have offered him shelter.” But the Nazi threat unleashed by Lenard was felt all the way to East Anglia, Einstein remained “guarded by two women secretaries, a farm laborer armed with rifles, and two detectives who questioned all visitors,” until he was free to sail to America. (12)
As a thinker Professor Leonard taught us that science is not equal to science, that racial souls alien to each other create quite different scientific worlds. (13)
ROENTGEN RAYS WITHOUT BORDERS
A decade later, Hauptwissenschafftler Rosenberg was hanged after Judgment at Nüremberg. Philipp Lenard was excused by the Allies by virtue of his age and died in Messelhausen two years after war's end. Hitler and Göbbels met their end in a Berlin bunker. And on a happier note, Einstein became an American sage, beloved by all at Princeton and beyond. Dr. Etter returned to Pittburgh where he became a respected professor of Roentgenology. (6)
And Röntgen? The affinity of “racial souls” had nothing to with the spread of X-ray science. The history of Röntgen rays provides firm evidence, instead, that science is indeed equal to science the world over. Within a year of its discovery, Röntgen rays went from lab bench to medical imaging; within a decade they were used to treat diseases from lupus to cancer. In simple refutation of the Hauptwissenschafftler's racial notions, this rapid progress can be traced to scientists and clinicians in France and England; America and Japan; Jew and Gentile; White and Black; Slav, Pole, and Magyar. Almost all of these breakthroughs were dependent on the general use of Hittorf/Crookes tubes—not those devised by the proud “mother of X-rays,” Philipp Lenard. (15–24)
The First Trial of X-Ray Therapy for the Treatment of Cancer by Dr. Chicotot (self-portrait, 1908). The glowing tube is a Crooke's tube. Image courtesy Art Resource.
On January 31, the New York Tribune reported that in Berlin Röntgen's rays had shown a human hand, and a compass in a metal case. The paper predicted that “In a similar manner a bullet in the human body light be located photographically; also the conditions of the internal organs could be photographed as an aid to medical diagnosis.” (18) And by February 9th the paper reported that in New Jersey, “EDISON WILL TRY TO PHOTOGRAPH A MAN’S BRAIN TOMORROW—THE APPLICATION OF THE ROENTGEN DISCOVERY TO MEDICINE REGARDED AS A MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE!” (19)
Two early applicants of Röntgen's discovery deserve particular mention. In June of 1896, six months after Röntgen's discovery, Leopold Freund (1868–1943) of the University of Vienna effected the first cure of skin cancer in a 5 year-old patient by means of X-rays generated by a Hittorf tube. He also wrote the first textbook in the field, but after the Nazis were welcomed to power in Austria, he was dismissed from his professorship and died miserably in exile. His country now recognizes that he “innaugurated radiotherapy as a new scientific speciality.” (24) And then there's Georges Chicotot; a physician with credentials in both painting and Roentgenology. In 1910, he painted a self portrait that documents a historic moment in radiotherapy: the first attempt to treat breast cancer with X-rays. In his left hand he holds a watch to time the exposure, in his right he holds a sort of extended Bunsen burner that spouts flames from its tip. He is heating the vessel that warms the vacuum tube. And that object glowing from the center of this painting? Well, it's a Crookes tube.” (25)
Philip Lenard was wrong on all counts. Science is and remains international, from Würzburg to Pittsburgh, Paris to Princeton, Vienna to Menlo Park. Let's try to keep it that way: a community of kindred spirits, rather than a pack of “racial souls.”
Acknowledgment
My attention was drawn to Dr. Etter's article by a good friend of this Journal, Dr. Ervin G. Erdös (University of Illinois, Chicago). (26) He wrote that he heard about Etter's encounter with Lenard, “a flaming Nazi,” from Etter himself when, as a colonel in the US Army, “He opened a safe containing various documents. Among them were letters from Lenard to Professor Roentgen congratulating him for the discovery of X-ray imaging…”
