In very much the same way the phrase “Hobson’s choice” is supposed to have resulted from the story told here of a livery-stable keeper at Cambridge, England, called Hobson, who obliged each customer to take the horse nearest the stable door, when a wish to hire one was expressed, even though he might permit customers to make the rounds of all the stalls, examining and perhaps selecting other horses. Since the interest inspired by that report, “Hobson’s choice” has come to mean a choice without any alternative, or the chance to take the thing which is offered or nothing.
At the time the discovery of X-rays was announced by Prof. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen of the University of Würzburg, Germany, he was not sure of their exact nature, and so he named them “X-Rays,” because “X” has always been understood to be the symbol for an “unknown quantity.”
They are invisible rays transmitted through the air in a manner similar to light. They are produced by passing unidirectional electric current of from twenty to one hundred thousand volts pressure through a specially constructed high vacuum tube, within which rays radiating from the surface of a concave cathode (the negative electrode of a galvanic battery), are focused upon and bombard a target of refractory material such as tungsten, iridium, platinum, from which focus spot the X-rays radiate in all directions.
They are used in medicine and surgery, to photograph the skeleton and all the internal organs of the human body, as an aid in diagnosis; also to destroy diseased tissue without the aid of surgery. Cancers and tumors of certain kinds and a number of skin diseases are said to be made to disappear by their use. When the apparatus is used, the subject is placed on a long table and the X-ray tube, in its lead glass shield container, is brought over the part of the body to which the rays are to be applied.
The most up-to-date apparatus consists of a high-tension transformer and rectifier, driven by a rotary converter, which derives power from direct-current electric service and delivers alternating current to the high-tension transformer.
Although some people maintain that the word “Yankee” originated with the way white men interpreted the Indians’ name for the early settlers, most of those who have wondered about it have decided that it came to be used as a nickname for persons born in the United States, because of a farmer, named Jonathan Hastings and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, using it to describe some good, home-made cider of his making, as “Yankee cider.” The word was taken up by the students of Harvard University, and gradually spread throughout the whole country.