Hello and welcome back to the Curious Kid podcast. Have you ever discovered something by accident and been really happy about that discovery?

I love discovering new things in nature and adding them to my nature collection.

That's a great example. Sometimes I'll discover a shirt at the bottom of a pile of shirts in my closet that I haven't worn in a long time and I

want to wear again. Or I'll find a dollar bill somewhere I had completely forgotten that I'd put it.

Accidental discoveries can be so much fun.

This week, we are going to discuss one of the most important discoveries in science history,

and it was discovered totally by accident.

This week, we are getting curious about x-rays.

X-rays are so much fun and they are super interesting.

The best part is that we have a radiology technician as a guest today,

and he knows a ton about x-rays because he's performed thousands of them before.

He's also going to answer our question of the week.

The question of the week is, why do I need to wear a lead apron when getting a dental x-ray?

Interesting question. Let's learn about the history of x-rays.

The x-ray was discovered by a German scientist in the year 1895.

His name was Wilhelm Runken.

He had no idea he was going to discover x-rays.

He was examining how electricity would act in a special tube

after all the air had been removed from the tube.

The tube he was using had a cathode and an anode, just like a battery. If you want to learn more about cathodes, anodes, and batteries,

we covered them way back in episode 11, curious about batteries, which was one of our favorite episodes to record.

Well, when the electricity came into contact with the anode in the tube, a special kind of light was created that had not been discovered yet.

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