Nikola Tesla film in his laboratory in previous experiments (later identified as ""Roentgen rays"" or "X-Rays"). His early experiments were with Crookes tubes, a cold cathode electrical discharge tube. Tesla may have inadvertently captured an X-ray image—predating, by a few weeks, Wilhelm Röntgen's December 1895 announcement of the discovery of X-rays when he tried to photograph Mark Twain illuminated by a Geissler tube, an earlier type of gas discharge tube. The only thing captured in the image was the metal locking screw on the camera lens. In March 1896, after hearing of Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-ray and X-ray imaging (radiography), Tesla
Harley A. Wilhelm Mallinckrodt, Union Carbide and DuPont began producing uranium by the Ames process, and Ames phased out its own production by early 1945. The Ames Laboratory also produced of extremely pure cerium for the cerium sulphide crucibles used by the plutonium metallurgists. Fears that world supplies of uranium were limited led to experiments with thorium, which could be irradiated to produce fissile uranium-233. A calcium reduction process was developed for thorium, and produced some . After World War II, Spedding and Wilhelm founded the Institute of Atomic Research and the Ames Laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission. Wilhelm became its associate