On 8 November 1885, an unknown physicist was experimenting with a cathode ray tube in Würzburg. He noticed that the rays from the tube projected objects as bright shadows on a photographic plate. Shortly afterwards, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen informed the wider medical community for the first time about his observation of "a new kind of rays" ones which could penetrate bodies and image objects. The importance for medical diagnosis was obvious to many and the technology began spreading rapidly. But in the first few years, apparatus and tubes first had to be improved and procedures standardised.
In Bern, it was the physicist and meteorologist Aimé Forster who produced the first X-ray images in his laboratory at the University of Bern. As early as 1896, he presented "Radiographic images performed with X-rays" and pointed out the importance of the new technology for diagnosis. Initially, the hospital surgeons also used the X-ray facilities of the Institute of Physics, before a proprietary X-ray institute was put into operation in January 1898 in an extension to the Surgical Clinic.
X-ray images do not simply depict nature. They have to be produced. To ensure the comparability of the images, the recording procedures were initially standardised in the early years. This was because sceptics pointed out that faulty settings could lead to incorrect images that could be interpreted as pathological findings. The fact that X-ray technology was able to establish itself was, therefore, also linked to the development of devices, photographic plates or fluorescent screens. The big boom enabled the emergence of smaller companies like Roewag in Bern, which assemble entire devices from individual components.
After the discovery of X-rays, various companies such as Siemens quickly specialised in the production of X-ray tubes. In these X-ray tubes, X-rays were produced in a vacuum by the impact of electrons on an anode. One of the early manufacturers was Reinhold Burger in Berlin, who, together with Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, developed tubes for diagnosis, but soon also for therapy. His therapy tube was also used in the Bern X-ray Institute from 1913.