Physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, first man to isolate electrons, which generate x-rays, and then to count them one by one, was the chief speaker at the 37th annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society in Cleveland last week. Dr. Millikan, who has a strong urge for evangelism acquired from his preacher father, stretched his advertised topic "High Energy Radiations and Their Uses" to declaim that "a democracy like ours cannot survive and war can never be eliminated unless we can learn to solve our social problems by the rational method." Less original but also instructive were the addresses which disclosed the following recent developments in medical x-ray technique:
¶ John G. Trump, 28, an unobtrusive electrical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr, Richard Dresser, 43, an equally unobtrusive Boston Roentgenologist, will soon have in operation in Boston's Huntington Memorial Hospital a room-high electrostatic machine which will produce x-rays of 1,000,000-volt power, penetrating enough to reach any cancer within the human body. The principle of the machine is that of the 10,000,000-volt electrostatic generator which Engineer Trump's M. I. T. teacher, Robert J. Van de Graaff, invented (TIME, Dec. 4, 1933 et ante). Fast moving paper belts brush against an overhead metallic container which accumulates huge charges of electricity. In the Trump modification this electricity is poured into a tremendous x-ray tube which projects downward through the floor into the room below. At the nether end of the tube is a window of gold from which the 1,000,000-volt rays stream. The patient is simply placed beneath the stream when he requires treatment.
¶ Reported was the successful making of x-ray moving pictures with a home camera and 16-mm. film. Drs. William Holmes Stewart, William Joseph Hoffman, and Francis Henshall Ghiselin developed the technique at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital. The heart of the problem was to get a sharp, clear x-ray image on a fluoroscopic screen. The sharpness of the image depended on 1) the brightness of fluorescent material in the screen and 2) the length of time a patient may be subjected to x-ray transillumination. The invention in England of a zinc sulphide preparation which gave a bright blue image under x-rays and a cyanide preparation which gave a brilliant greenish yellow image solved the whole matter, for there are moving picture films which record clear pictures in those lights. Two seconds suffice to picture two or three beats of the heart, the acts of breathing and swallowing, movements of the diaphragm, abnormal action within the thorax, motions of joints. The relative thickness of the abdomen makes photographing the movements of its organs less satisfactory. Two seconds is too brief to get a good picture of the complete peristaltic wave of the stomach. But two seconds is enough to portray an ulcer in the fluctuating stomach or in the fluctuating duodenum.