Last month marked the 175th anniversary of the birth of German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845–1923), who won the 1901 Nobel prize for his discovery of X-rays. His work is still a linchpin of modern science and medicine.

Röntgen’s academic career had a less-than-propitious start. Wrongly accused of being the author of a caricature of his class teacher, he was expelled from high school in the Netherlands without graduating. His application to Utrecht University in the Netherlands was rejected as a result, but he went on to study mechanical engineering at the Federal Polytechnical School (now the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich. He was then rejected by Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany for a postdoctoral qualification, which he eventually secured at the University of Strasbourg, France.

Despite this rejection, Röntgen later donated his Nobel Prize money to the University of Würzburg. In another example of his philanthropy, he declined to patent his X-ray discovery, thereby making it available to the world. He also turned down the honour of a noble title.

In 1903, French engineer Henri Becquerel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Marie and Pierre Curie (see also Nature 579, 490–491; 2020), for their pioneering work on radioactivity. Becquerel was inspired by Röntgen’s X-rays, which gave him insight into other forms of radiation, such as phosphorescence (see Nature 78, 414–416; 1908).