Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was born on March 27, 1845 in Lennep, Germany to Friedrich and Charlotte Constance Roentgen. When he was three Wilhelm and his family moved to Apeldoorn, Nederland. His father owned a thriving cloth business so he was pretty well off. He lived right next to the Kostschool of Martinus Hermanus van Doorn, a boarding school with around eighty students, which he attended. He was expected after he graduated to go into his father’s business and eventually inherit it. At sixteen, he finished van Doorn’s school. His parents thought he was too young to start working, and he had a strong desire to learn, so a few years later, he ended up at the University of Utrecht. There was one problem though, the family he was supposed to stay with had to move. So Professor Gunning (the father in the family) got him enrolled at the Athenaeum in Amsterdam, which meant Wilhelm had to part with the Gunnings. That forced Wilhelm to bunk with another student going to his college, because back then they didn’t have dormitories for students. On March 17, 1865 a fraternity called “Placet hic requiescere Musis” (May the Muses rest here) selected him as a member of their fraternity. Then on May 9 he joined a scientific society called “Natura Dux nobis et auspex” (Nature is our leader and protector). Wilhelm didn’t like keeping house so, he found a room with the family of a cabinetmaker. There he started writing his first book, called “Question for the Inorganic Part of the Chemistry Textbook”, under the pen name of Dr J. W. Gunning. As you probably figured out that was the name of the man he had lived with in the past. People tried to find the real author but all they could find were the initials W.C.R. Wilhelm would later go to school in another college called Swiss Federal Technical School in Zurich, Switzerland. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy on June 22, 1869. While he was