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In 1816, modesty prevented French physician Rene Laennec from placing his ear next to a young woman’s bare chest, so he rolled up a newspaper and listened through it, triggering the idea for his invention that led to today’s ubiquitous stethoscope. https://www.lung.org/blog/stethoscopes-history
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In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered that a cathode-ray tube could make a sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide glow, even when the tube and the paper were in separate rooms. Roentgen decided the tube must be emitting some kind of penetrating rays, which he called “X” rays for unknown. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200111/history.cfm