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How did X-Rays gain mass adoption?

https://www.aditharun.com/p/how-did-x-rays-gain-mass-adoption
12•tinymagician•6h ago

Comments

JohnMakin•6h ago
Otherwise interesting post that caused a little bit of confusion for me, as the dates listed at the start of the article are in the mid 1980's, when I think it meant to be the mid 1890's.
dhosek•5h ago
It kind of makes me wonder whether this person used ChatGPT or something along those lines to create it. I stopped reading when it was clear that they had let such glaring errors be published in the first paragraph.
bawolff•4h ago
Otoh, reversing digits in numbers is a super common mistake that humans make. If anything i feel like this type of error points to human authorship.

Or at least it would be if they did it once, but they made the same mistake multiple times which is bizarre. I dont know what to think about that.

auserisme•4h ago
This seems very clearly written by AI to me. There are multiple grammatical or flow errors (see the references to "bullet"). There is a very ChatGPT "in summary" point section.
lawlessone•6h ago
>The expense of the machine costs only about $400 while a good coil is valued at from $200 to $600. But, of course, this need not be considered by physicians, since all are wealthy

This is interesting. Would doctors build/assemble their own machines?

Definitely not the case with newer forms of imaging.

retrac•5h ago
As the quote says, you only really need two components: an induction coil and a Crookes tube. If connecting the two counts as building their own machine, then yes many early doctors did build their own. An induction coil was an off-the-shelf part (as much as anything electrical was in the 1890s). The Crookes tube was initially a custom piece, but workshops started turning them out as soon as the Roentgen pictures caught on.

Maybe worth pointing out that both doctors and laboratory scientists historically had a close relationship with glass blowers and glass work. Many doctors back then would have known someone who was able to make them a Crookes tube (often themselves). A sufficiently hard vacuum pump was I think the trickiest part?

trhway•5h ago
similarly waiting for mass adoption of iPhone based ultrasound and some kind of laser computational tomography-interferometry (capable to see at least few centimeter deep). We're probably can do iPhone bases X-ray too - the CCDs are very sensitive so the dose at dental Xrays is already much lower than film-based, and may be we can go even lower with small discharge device (at the level of unrolling a duct tape roll) Naturally, add in some diagnostic AI, and you get tricorder :)
margalabargala•4h ago
I'm not sure I agree with the premise that cfDNA has not reached widespread acceptance.

For example, 94% of OBGYNs in the US that have training for high risk pregnancies, offer NIPT tests [0].

Basically anyone in the US who is pregnant can order a NIPT test for very little money.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4303457/

cortesoft•4h ago
I had no idea X-rays were invented in 1986!
xattt•2h ago
Dr. Wilhem Röntgen was moon-walking with joy.
saulpw•38m ago
They weren't! X-rays were the first step towards nukes. 1895 for X-rays and 50 years later in 1945 for the atomic bomb.
ulfw•4h ago
What is the point of these hallucinationed AI blobs the internet is filling up with.

None of the dates in this "article" are correct and are off by a hundred years.

Worthless and don't waste your time reading it. Go to ChatGPT if you're bored and want more lies and invented bullshit

Brave world we live in now

tzs•4h ago
> The public was fascinated by this technology and studios offered the public “views of their bones” and “shoe fitting” images

For shoe fitting there were actually x-ray machines in shoe stores. They were widely used, especially when buying shoes for children. Wikipedia has a nice description [1]:

> The shoe-fitting fluoroscope, also sold under the names X-ray Shoe Fitter, Pedoscope and Foot-o-scope, was an X-ray fluoroscope machine installed in shoe stores from the 1920s until about the 1970s. The device was a metal construction covered in finished wood, approximately 4 feet (1.2 m) tall in the shape of short column, with a ledge with an opening through which the standing customer (adult or child) would put their feet and look through a viewing porthole at the top of the fluoroscope down at the X-ray view of the feet and shoes. Two other viewing portholes on either side enabled the parent and a sales assistant to observe the toes being wiggled to show how much room for the toes there was inside the shoe. The bones of the feet were clearly visible, as was the outline of the shoe, including the stitching around the edges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

BBC staff: we're forced to do pro-Israel PR

https://www.owenjones.news/p/bbc-staff-were-forced-to-do-pro-israel
11•mhga•29m ago•0 comments

New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-sphere-packing-record-stems-from-an-unexpected-source-20250707/
239•pseudolus•8h ago•106 comments

LookingGlass: Generative Anamorphoses via Laplacian Pyramid Warping

https://studios.disneyresearch.com/2025/06/09/lookingglass-generative-anamorphoses-via-laplacian-pyramid-warping/
46•jw1224•4h ago•9 comments

What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

https://serd.es/2025/07/04/Switch-project-pt3.html
44•ahlCVA•3d ago•2 comments

Mercury: Ultra-fast language models based on diffusion

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17298
390•PaulHoule•14h ago•160 comments

The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250701-the-chemical-secrets-that-help-keep-honey-fresh-for-so-long
85•bookofjoe•3d ago•36 comments

My first verified imperative program

https://markushimmel.de/blog/my-first-verified-imperative-program/
126•TwoFx•8h ago•47 comments

Launch HN: Morph (YC S23) – Apply AI code edits at 4,500 tokens/sec

157•bhaktatejas922•12h ago•110 comments

I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

https://noperator.dev/posts/o3-pocket-profile/
319•noperator•14h ago•127 comments

Epanet-JS

https://macwright.com/2025/07/03/epanet-placemark
15•surprisetalk•3d ago•2 comments

The Miyawaki Method of micro-forestry

https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe-6-5-the-method
109•zeristor•2d ago•24 comments

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/
704•adrianh•11h ago•264 comments

When Figma starts designing us

https://designsystems.international/ideas/when-figma-starts-designing-us/
216•bravomartin•1d ago•103 comments

Analysing Roman itineraries using GIS tooling

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-025-02175-w
12•diodorus•3d ago•1 comments

François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QcCeSsNRks
166•sandslash•4d ago•146 comments

Why are there no good dinosaur films?

https://briannazigler.substack.com/p/why-are-there-no-good-dinosaur-films
59•fremden•3d ago•126 comments

Show HN: NYC Subway Simulator and Route Designer

https://buildmytransit.nyc
136•HeavenFox•12h ago•15 comments

Lightfastness Testing of Colored Pencils

https://sarahrenaeclark.com/lightfast-testing-pencils/
118•picture•3d ago•29 comments

You Should Run a Certificate Transparency Log

https://words.filippo.io/run-sunlight/
82•Metalnem•6h ago•27 comments

CU Randomness Beacon

https://random.colorado.edu/
3•wello•2d ago•0 comments

Solving Wordle with uv's dependency resolver

https://mildbyte.xyz/blog/solving-wordle-with-uv-dependency-resolver/
139•mildbyte•2d ago•12 comments

The Era of Exploration

https://yidingjiang.github.io/blog/post/exploration/
73•jxmorris12•11h ago•6 comments

Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-hymn-babylon-millennium.html
167•wglb•3d ago•69 comments

Show HN: Ossia score – A sequencer for audio-visual artists

https://github.com/ossia/score
73•jcelerier•9h ago•11 comments

Charles Babbage and deciphering codes (1864)

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Babbage_deciphering/
13•pncnmnp•3d ago•0 comments

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms.html
443•zdw•1d ago•373 comments

Show HN: I wrote a "web OS" based on the Apple Lisa's UI, with 1-bit graphics

https://alpha.lisagui.com/
483•ayaros•1d ago•136 comments

Artist in Residence on a Satellite

http://global.cafa.edu.cn/infoDetail/1/324
13•thenthenthen•2d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Unlearning Comparator, a visual tool to compare machine unlearning

https://gnueaj.github.io/Machine-Unlearning-Comparator/
37•jaeunglee•10h ago•2 comments

So you wanna build an aging company

https://www.librariesforthefuture.bio/p/is-this-aging
51•apsec112•3d ago•51 comments