William D. Coolidge
William David Coolidge ( born October 23, 1873 in Hudson ( Massachusetts); † February 3, 1975 in Schenectady, New York ) was an American physicist.
Coolidge studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ), where he in 1896 constructed an X- ray generating device. A scholarship took him from 1896 to 1899 to Leipzig, where he also received his doctorate. After his return to Massachusetts, he taught at MIT before he entered the research laboratory of General Electric in Schenectady in 1905. In 1932 he became director of the research institute, which he headed until his retirement in 1944.
William David Coolidge developed deformable tungsten wires in light bulbs were used as Glühdrahtwendeln. This spiral-shaped tungsten wires were in 1913 by him and named after him in the Coolidge tube, a thermionic vacuum tube, were released by the X-rays used. This tube with reproducible radiation ( radiation intensity and quality ) was the precursor of almost all medical X-ray tubes are still in use, although its development plus lasted until the mid-1940s.
Coolidge worked during the First World War and to locators for submarine detection, then concentrated his work but back to the X-ray technique where he also worked in the fields of materials testing and cancer treatment.