In the late autumn of 1895, Doctor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, professor of physics and director of the Physical Institute of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, discovered the existence of X-rays. Even in a world without facsimiles or e-mail, the content of Professor Roentgen's initial report on the phenomenon he had discovered, which included X-ray photos of his wife's hand, rapidly became known around the world. X-rays were adopted for research in a wide range of fields, from medicine to physics, and in 1901 Professor Roentgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize for Physics. So great was his achievement that, though the term X-ray is commonly used to refer to his discovery, his name is still used as the unit of measurement of X-rays.

In 1996, 100 years after Professor Roentgen made history, a company called Canon achieved the world's first X-ray digital camera. The company's name might not become synonymous with digital X-rays, but the effort put into this camera's development by engineers at Canon is certainly comparable to that of Professor Roentgen.