Lucky mistakes: The X-ray

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Lucky mistakes mini-series, episode 95) is a short documentary about the discovery of X-rays. On 8 November 1895, in a dark room in Würzburg, Germany, the physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen saw a screen glow on the other side of the room while he worked with a glass tube covered in black cardboard: new, invisible rays were crossing the room. As he did not know what they were, he called them X-rays, X being the name of an unknown in maths. In seven weeks of work he found that the rays could go through paper, wood and skin, but not through bones or metal, and on 22 December 1895 he made the first X-ray of a person, the hand of his wife, Anna Bertha, with her ring. Doctors soon used X-rays to find broken bones; Röntgen asked for no money for his discovery and won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Today hospitals and dentists use X-rays every day, and airports use them to check bags. The narration is in the past simple, with the present simple for today; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 9 on facts and 1 on vocabulary (what X means in maths). The study topic is inventions and discoveries that began with a mistake or an accident.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (a drawing of Röntgen in his dark laboratory with the glowing screen, a photo portrait of Wilhelm Röntgen, the first X-ray photo of Anna Bertha's hand with her ring), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (Think about it: Why do you think X-rays were so important for doctors?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates. The pack's key words explain the new words (screen, glow, physics, experiment, tube, cardboard, invisible, ray, skin, bone, metal, dentist).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-school-and-society ("École et société"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.