Sarah Frances Whiting examines the bones in her hand using a fluoroscope in Wellesley’s physics laboratory in 1896. A Crookes tube is on the table in front of her.
The march of time and progress is inevitable, and that often means things get … discarded. Left behind. Forgotten. Or hastily shoved in a mislabeled box and left to sit unnoticed for decades.
Until, one night, the box is opened.
But before we get to that box, there were other boxes. And bits. And artifacts from years of teaching science at Wellesley. Items rescued from obscurity (and sometimes the dumpster) by John Cameron, now professor emeritus of biological sciences at Wellesley.
“Around 2012, 2013, I started to collect things,” he says. “My office and my lab started to look like a museum.” Long interested in the history of science, Cameron incorporated the origins of experiments and scientific ideas into his courses. “I became conscious of the fact that a lot of the artifacts that represented the ways in which biology in particular had been taught at Wellesley, objects that were used in laboratories, materials that were involved in teaching, were just being thrown away over the years.”
Cameron’s collection began to grow, and he and Kristina Niovi Jones, director of the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens, received funding from Science Center Director Cathy Summa ’83 to hire students to begin cataloging materials scattered throughout the Science Center. As the planned renovations for the building loomed, a committee was formed to help determine what to do with these items.
Wellesley’s physics laboratory, photographed here in 1893, was originally located in the fifth-floor attic of College Hall, which was destroyed in the fire of 1914.
Jacki Musacchio ’89, professor of art, was part of that committee along with Cameron. “The very fact that [these objects] survived—they’re incredibly rare, they’re beautiful, and in terms of their manufacture, they’re really interesting, so it was kind of a natural fit to do both science and art,” Musacchio says. In fact, the objects were the subject of a 2014 Davis Museum exhibit, The Art of Science, curated by Musacchio and art department colleagues Rebecca Bedell ’80 and Martha McNamara.
Work continued with the objects until “everything came to a head in 2019,” Cameron says. Sage Hall needed to be emptied ahead of construction, and so all of the artifacts needed a new home. “One night, like 9:30 at night, I was in the Science Center, packing up, and I found a box from the 1970s,” Cameron says. Although it was labeled as containing film, it held something unique. And historic. The box contained 15 cyanotype prints from some of the first X-ray experiments done in the U.S. (See four of the prints, with captions that were handwritten on the backs of the images, in the gallery below.)
German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was the first to identify the rays, in November 1895, and he published his findings in German; news of his work reached English-language publications in early January 1896. Scientists across the U.S. quickly attempted to replicate and build upon his work. Sarah Frances Whiting, founder of the physics and astronomy departments at Wellesley, was one of them.
She successfully made an X-ray image on Feb. 7, 1896, using components available in Wellesley’s physics laboratory, pictured above.
Wellesley lore had Whiting as one of the first to replicate Röntgen’s experiments in the U.S., and that wasn’t far off the mark. “It turns out they’re not the first ones made in the United States,” Musacchio says. The first that can be corroborated happened on Jan. 27, 1896, at Yale, followed by several more done by men from large research universities. But “they were the first for an undergraduate institution almost certainly,” Musacchio says. “They were the first for women absolutely, and they have this great backstory, these women working together in a lab and putting their jewelry in a box to make an X-ray.”
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