World Radiography Day
Next: November 8, 2026
Thank the people who see inside us.
The story
Where it comes from
World Radiography Day marks the evening of 8 November 1895, when the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, experimenting with a discharge tube in his laboratory at Würzburg in Germany, saw a coated screen glow two metres away even though the tube was sealed in thick black card. He had found a new, invisible radiation, which he called X-rays because its nature was unknown. The International Society of Radiographers and Radiological Technologists keeps the day to celebrate radiographers, who take X-rays and scans and deliver radiation therapy.
How it's celebrated
Radiographers' societies around the world mark it with a yearly theme, posters, talks and celebrations in hospitals, and use the day to explain medical imaging and radiation safety to the public. The same date is also the International Day of Radiology, for the doctors who read the images. Thanking the person who took your last X-ray is a fine way to mark it.
Did you know
- Within weeks, Röntgen made an image of his wife's hand that showed her bones and her ring, one of the first X-ray photographs ever taken.
- Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, and he refused to patent X-rays so that everyone could use them.
- In Kyoto on 10 October 1896, less than a year after the discovery, Genzo Shimadzu Jr. and Professor Hanichi Muraoka made one of Japan's earliest X-ray photographs, of a silver coin inside a wooden box.
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