January 12, 1896

Henry Louis Smith

Three Davidson students reportedly make a secret early X-ray photograph

The students said their professor was not even there. He denied their version — and their whole claim surfaced only about thirty years later.

A Sunday night in the college laboratory

According to a claim first published decades later, the Davidson College juniors Osmond Barringer, Eben Hardie and Pender Porter secretly entered the college laboratory on the evening of Sunday 12 January 1896 to reproduce Röntgen's X-ray work.

They reportedly exposed a photographic plate beneath a Crookes tube for three hours. The objects on it included a cadaver finger pierced by pins and wearing a ring, a pill box of small objects, a magnifying glass and an emptied egg containing a button.

The plate reportedly showed the differing penetration of materials of different densities. The students kept the experiment quiet because they feared punishment for entering the laboratory and dissecting rooms.

Two incompatible accounts

The students said Henry Louis Smith was not present. Smith disputed their account and maintained that their experiment had followed his earlier demonstrations.

Because they said nothing at the time, the date and the attribution both rest on testimony first published about thirty years afterwards. The surviving plate shows that an early experiment happened, but not when, or who operated the equipment.

Not the first X-ray, and not the right Smith

Röntgen had produced radiographs in 1895, so no Davidson plate can be a world first. A modern scholarly review concludes that the retrospective 12 January claim cannot be corroborated, and identifies the first confirmed American success as Arthur Wright's at Yale on 27 January.

Smith's own better-documented radiograph, of a bullet in a cadaver's hand, was made on 22 February 1896.

The "H. L. Smith" of the listing is Henry Louis Smith, the Davidson physicist born in 1859 — not Herman Lyle Smith, the mathematician born in 1892 whom the corpus article describes.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The 12 January date rests on a retrospective 1926 claim and cannot be independently corroborated by contemporary documentation.
Henry Louis Smith denied the students' priority account and asserted that their work followed his earlier successes or classroom demonstrations.
The surviving plate establishes that an early experiment occurred but does not by itself establish its date or who operated the equipment.
The claim should not be described as the first X-ray photograph worldwide: Röntgen produced radiographs in 1895. Nor is it the first confirmed U.S. experiment.