No other discovery within my lifetime had ever aroused the interest of the world as did the discovery of the X-rays. Every physicist dropped his own research problems and rushed headlong into the research of the X-rays. The physicists of the United States had paid only small attention to vacuum-tube discharges. To the best of my knowledge and belief I was at that time the only physicist here who had had any laboratory experience with vacuum-tube research, and I got it by overtime work in the electrical-engineering laboratory of Columbia College. I undertook it because my intercourse with Mueller, the glass-blower of Berlin, directed my attention to this field of research, and particularly because I did not see that with the equipment of that laboratory I could do anything else. I decided, as mentioned above, to leave the field to Professor J. J. Thomson, of Cambridge, and to watch his work. When, therefore, Roentgen’s discovery was first announced I was, it seems, better prepared than anybody else in this country to repeat his experiments and succeeded, therefore, sooner than anybody else on this side of the Atlantic. I obtained the first X-ray photograph in America on January 2, 1896, two weeks after the discovery was announced in Germany. [Illustration: WILHELM KONRAD RŒNTGEN (1845-1923)] Many interesting stories have been told about the rush to the West during the gold-fever period, caused by the discovery of gold in the far West. The rush into X-ray experimentation was very similar, and I also caught the fever badly. Newspaper reporters and physicians heard of it, and I had to lock myself up in my laboratory, which was in the cellar of President Low’s official residence at Columbia College, in order to protect myself from continuous interruptions. The physicians brought all kinds of cripples for the purpose of having their bones photographed or examined by means of the fluorescent screen. The famous surgeon, the late Doctor Bull of New York, sent me a patient with nearly a hundred small shot in his left hand. His name was Prescott Hall Butler, a well-known lawyer of New York, who had met with an accident and received in his hand the full charge of a shotgun. He was in agony; he and I had mutual friends who begged me to make an X-ray photograph of his hand and thus enable Doctor Bull to locate the numerous shot and extract them. The first attempts were unsuccessful, because the patient was too weak and too nervous to stand a photographic exposure of nearly an hour. My good friend, Thomas Edison, had sent me several most excellent fluorescent screens, and by their fluorescence I could see the numerous little shot and so could my patient. The combination of the screen and the eyes was evidently much more sensitive than the photographic plate. I decided to try a combination of Edison’s fluorescent screen and the photographic plate. The fluorescent screen was placed on the photographic plate and the patient’s hand was placed upon the screen.