In the first days of 1896, just three weeks after the announcement of the discovery of what would soon be known as X-rays, a high school headmaster and math and physics teacher in the Netherlands started his own explorations using school equipment. Three weeks after that, the headmaster, Hein Hoffmans, published his results, days after snapping an image of the hand of the hospital director's 21
-year-old daughter, (pictured above) revealing the bones inside.
More than 100 years since those pioneering experiments, researchers at Maastricht University Medical Center flipped the switch on Hoffmans' still-functional machine. They measured the radiation it emitted and took another image of a hand - this time from a cadaver. What they found revealed just how far the technology has come.The Presurfer
