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In 2012, Auburn University acquired the nation\u2019s third actively shielded whole-body 7 Tesla MRI.<\/span><\/p>\n The $8.5 million machine \u2014 still one of just seven in the South \u2014 provided Auburn University\u2019s MRI Research Center<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0game-changing access to dimensions of detail once unimaginable in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging. <\/span><\/p>\n Eight years later, the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering remains a national leader in medical imaging research. <\/span><\/p>\n The director of Auburn\u2019s first electrical engineering laboratory would be proud.<\/span><\/p>\n On Friday, Nov. 8, 1895, as Auburn\u2019s football team rode north to Nashville for its inaugural game under head coach John Heisman, the world changed. Word of what German mechanical engineer Wilhelm R\u00f6ntgen had first seen in his laboratory \u2014 that morning in America, that evening in W\u00fcrzburg \u2014 began popping up across the Atlantic the first week of January 1896. Newspapers began running brief but tantalizing tales about some sort of\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cnew photography.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n There had been a blurb on the supposed discovery in the Saturday, Feb. 8, 1896, edition of The Atlanta Constitution<\/i>. And Anthony Foster McKissick had laughed. <\/span><\/p>\n For 24 hours, he thought it had to be a mistake, a miscalculation. Maybe even a misprint. <\/span><\/p>\n Then came Sunday. <\/span><\/p>\n There was an abridged account of a Harvard professor\u2019s replication of R\u00f6ntgen\u2019s experiments under the headline: \u201cA Giant Stride in Science: How Objects Are Photographed Through Opaque Bodies – The Cathode Ray.\u201d It was almost too fantastic to believe. McKissick read the story. He read it again. He read it to his wife. She saw the look in his eyes. So did his students.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1891, Alabama A&M president Leroy Broun had hired the 23-year-old McKissick to take charge of what the school was calling the first electrical engineering department in the south. He\u2019d graduated with bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in engineering from the University of South Carolina in 1889, and had spent the past two years in pivotal positions at Westinghouse Co. and the Congaree Gas and Light Company, the first electric company in Columbia, S.C.<\/span><\/p>\n His position on the gridiron was just as pivotal. At 6\u20190, 210 pounds, McKissick was easily the biggest man on Auburn\u2019s first football team \u2014 professors were permitted to play in those early years \u2014 and the natural choice for center in 1892. He was good. He loved the game. He loved science more. <\/span><\/p>\n What he couldn\u2019t get out of his mind as he hurried from his home on South Gay Street to the electrical laboratory in the basement of Samford Hall on Monday morning, Feb. 10, 1896, were the bones of R\u00f6ntgen\u2019s wife\u2019s hands. The papers said the barium platinocyanide screen actually captured the shadows of her metacarpals and phalanges, wedding ring and all.<\/span><\/p>\n He looked in the corners and under tables. He finally found several vacuum tubes just sitting around, just waiting for a wizard to fill them with a new form of energy. He settled on one of the pointed four-inch Crookes tubes containing tiny platinum wires, same as R\u00f6ntgen had reportedly used. That was the easy part. The electricity was where things would get interesting. <\/span><\/p>\n He told his students the amount of power needed could, were they to join hands, instantly kill half of them. No one flinched. It was going to be a fun week.<\/span><\/p>\n They spent most of Monday building a new alternator. When they finished, they cranked 100 volts into the high frequency Tesla induction coil that the students had built that past fall. Suddenly, they had 15,000 volts. They then sent that bolt of lightning through a spark-gap and a condenser and turned it into a casket-friendly 100,000 volts. McKissick held a five-inch piece of wood to the cylinder. It burned in two. That was enough fun for Monday. <\/span><\/p>\n On Tuesday, it was time. They connected the new alternator to the Crookes tube, stood back, and threw the switch. The platinum wires sizzled. The tube filled with a soft, glowing white light that only a handful of Americans had ever beheld. This was it. They now shared the room with an invisible force that the world was calling X-rays.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n McKissick didn\u2019t know much about photography. But he was pretty sure he had some photographic plates lying around. He found a box of Seed\u2019s Extra-Rapid Dry Plates buried in the lab. They\u2019d been there for at least two years. He dusted one off and slipped it into a plate holder. He looked around for a test subject. His eyes settled on a small saw. He put it on top of the photographic plate, then covered it with a thin wooden board. He picked everything up and placed it beneath the glowing tube. They watched and waited. <\/span><\/p>\n After two and a half minutes, they removed the plate and carried it to a makeshift dark room.<\/span><\/p>\n The outline began to appear almost immediately. Without a camera, and through solid wood, they had photographed a saw.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n McKissick couldn\u2019t believe it. He was beaming. His students were beaming. The tube was beaming. They shut off the power. One of the students immediately took off for the post office to wire Atlanta for fresh plates. Until they arrived, McKissick thought he could borrow some from Mr. Abbott, the Loveliest Village\u2019s resident photographer. If no one was sitting for a portrait, surely he could spare some in the name of science. Absolutely, Abbott said. <\/span><\/p>\n The original board the class had used to obscure test subjects was less than an inch thick. On Wednesday, they went with something thicker and denser. It made no difference. <\/span><\/p>\n The outline of the scissors, blades open, was perfectly clear. So was the dollar inside the change purse. <\/span><\/p>\n They put a clasp and a key inside a cardboard box. Miller Reese Hutchison, one of McKissick\u2019s star students, and later chief engineer for Thomas Edison\u2019s laboratory, took the plate into the dark room and grabbed the bottle of Rodinol. Jaws dropped. It was as if the box hadn\u2019t even been there. <\/span><\/p>\n But nothing prepared them for the bones.<\/span><\/p>\n McKissick would have done it himself were there not any takers. But there were plenty. Hands shot into the air. He examined them, looking for the most scientifically interesting. He settled on a boy with a right index finger bent oddly to the left, hoping to capture as many clearly defined twists and turns and abnormalities as he could. Because his mind was already there \u2014 surgeries! Fractures, breaks, bullets! Under the R\u00f6ntgen rays, in theory, you could locate them instantly. <\/span><\/p>\n He had the boy stand as far back as he could while keeping his hand still on the plate. McKissick flipped the switch. Eight minutes later, he flipped it off. <\/span><\/p>\n The negative image was perfect. They saw the faint outline of the flesh. They saw the dense darkness of the bones. They heard the reverent silence of the room at the advent of a miracle.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Word traveled fast.<\/span><\/p>\n A.F. McKissick, the South\u2019s premiere practitioner of the new photography! One of the country\u2019s most experienced R\u00f6ntgen ray exhibitionists!<\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n The coverage started in the Constitution<\/i> and didn\u2019t stop. <\/span><\/p>\n On Thursday, he\u2019d quickly carried 15 or so of his best plates with him to Atlanta and dazzled the Constitution\u2019s<\/i> newsroom with the results of, as the paper called it, \u201cthe new light.\u201d They gave him nearly half a page \u2014 illustrations of the plates, even his portrait \u2014 under the headline \u201cFirst X Ray Pictures Brought To Atlanta Yesterday!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The Opelika Post<\/i> was eager for its own peek at the rays as soon as he returned. <\/span><\/p>\n So was a writer from a leading southern scientific journal. McKissick opened up the lab and obliged them, same as he would for hundreds more over the coming months.<\/span><\/p>\n He was already an old pro at scientific demonstrations. Not two weeks earlier, he\u2019d once again shown off some of his favorite experiments during yet another campus lecture on Nikola Tesla. <\/span><\/p>\n He made sparks jump between friends and lit up wires formed to spell the engineering genius\u2019 last name. <\/span><\/p>\n But the X-ray was now the show-stopper. The finale was always the inside of the hand. It was sorcery.<\/span><\/p>\n McKissick mania continued through the spring and well into the summer. Within a few days of the Constitution\u2019s<\/i> story, he\u2019d become a regional celebrity, not just a feather in Auburn\u2019s cap \u2014 a plume: the captain of the cathode, a name to know and revere, \u201can Apostle of Science,\u201d The Birmingham News<\/i> proclaimed.<\/span><\/p>\n To celebrate George Washington\u2019s birthday, Birmingham\u2019s school children were instructed to write McKissick\u2019s name on the board next to R\u00f6ntgen\u2019s as a tribute to a southerner who was, in the field of science, currently honoring the first president\u2019s legacy of leadership perhaps more than any man in America. <\/span><\/p>\n One rival institution was not amused. <\/span><\/p>\n The University of Georgia did its best to keep up, boasting that X-ray experiments conducted by its professors deserved equal attention.<\/span><\/p>\n McKissick\u2019s name remained the biggest by a mile and, as a result, earned him the biggest toys.<\/span><\/p>\n Companies began showering him with gifts and equipment. Boston-based L.E. Knolt Apparatus Co. delivered the finest Crooke\u2019s tube available, by which McKissick, with only a five-minute exposure, produced perhaps the clearest picture of the inner hand in the world at the time. Two voltmeters came from the Weston Electrical Instrument Company in Newark. Four transformers from the Water, Light and Power Company of Anderson, South Carolina. But what really turned the electrical lab into a revolving door of local curiosity seekers was the fabulous fluoroscope from the Edison Manufacturing Co.<\/span><\/p>\n Rather than waiting on a static image to develop, the handheld \u201cEdison Glasses\u201d gave operators a fluid, miraculous peek at whatever part of the body they were trained on. <\/span><\/p>\n McKissick was an engineer, but the medical application of the rays had been obvious from the second he saw inside one of his students, and Edison\u2019s ingenious new apparatus was the quickest way to embrace it. People left his lab rubbing their eyes, shaking their heads, declaring the discovery of the X-ray the greatest of the century. <\/span><\/p>\n McKissick took the show on the road, certain that the surgeons of the South would feel the same. Fluoroscope in hand, he moonlighted as a miracle worker for the rest of the spring and summer, volunteering his X-ray vision to the public, inviting bullet-ridden strangers to come find salvation under Auburn\u2019s magic light.<\/span><\/p>\n He promised that he could \u201clocate bullets or any metallic substance, or show fractures of the bones in any part of the limbs of the body\u201d for anyone who could travel to the electrical lab accompanied by a physician. They came from all over. A doctor from Columbia, Alabama, brought a teenager who\u2019d suffered 13 years with a pistol ball somewhere behind his knee cap; McKissick lit up the device and found exactly where it was in seconds. A doctor from Sylacauga did the same thing for a child crippled for 18 months after being accidentally shot in the leg. Thanks to McKissick, the child would walk again. The possibilities were endless.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ecm.eng.auburn.edu\/wp\/emag\/files\/2020\/12\/XRAY_6.jpg\")
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