The original 1896 x-ray machine was dug up (out of storage) and restarted by some curious doctors in the Netherlands. They looked at the differences between that and today’s technology in the journal Radiology, including the fact that an x-ray that would take .021 seconds today would’ve taken an hour and a half back then.
We worry a lot about radiation from medical imaging now, but the radiation dose to a patient back then would’ve been 1,500 times greater. Plus, the first radiologists used to give themselves leukemia all the time because they didn’t know you weren’t supposed to be constantly standing in the x-ray field. I still do it today, but only because the other guys seem to get a kick out of it.
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