There's an irony in the breathless "built his very own x-ray machine" slant - x-rays are literally Victorian technology. Not for the reckless or uninitiated I suppose, but I remember books showing how to make x-ray devices from the wrong vacuum tubes and spark coils and such. Probably by Alfred Morgan but I can't find the reference now. Don't try any of this today, only bad things will happen, right?
To quote the more contemporary source below "Any person who regularly works with any combination of high voltage and vacuum should maintain a dosimetry program."
Yea exactly. Anyone with experience with electronics who is willing to work with high voltage and has some knowledge of vacuum tubes could probably make one.
Side note: old TV rectifier tubes from the 1950s and 60s were notoriously known for being x ray emitters, and were often made with leaded glass or kept inside shielded enclosures specifically because of the X-rays. So X-ray emitters were literally in everyday standard consumer electronics back then! Kind of crazy to think about these days...
Exactly, indeed. One of the links I gave shows how to use a 6BK4B rectifier tube for the purpose. No special X-ray tube or glasswork required. Most of the high voltage parts can be scavenged from old color tvs or monitors. Remember, though, only bad things will happen and the inside of a color tv is not a place of honor, no great deed is commemorated there, nothing of value is stored there...
Edit: that might sound tongue-in-cheek but please take it as hahah, only serious. You can hurt yourself with these things, you probably don't have a good reason to be experimenting with them, and if you do need to learn how to work with high voltage or ionizing radiation safely, this is not the place and I am not teaching you.
And the TVs themselves were three particle accelerators steered by magnetic coils slamming voltage rails of a few kV 15,750 times a second. The beams emitted X-Ray Bremsstrahlung. In everyone's home.
The last truly cool piece of physics in the house today is the magnetron, which is pretty damn cool.
They were certainly still around in the dusty corners of old shoe stores in the seventies and eighties but I never saw one used or even turned on. People were pretty aware of the hazards of that kind of thing by the fifties and sixties.
The standards of safety and ethical engineering were very different during that time. I don't think William Osman is building an unsafe X-Ray, whereas I doubt that Victorians understood the full impact and implications of the early X-Rays.
The point was that building a simple x-ray device is about as technically far-out as say, winding your own transformer. Sure, not too many people do it, but it's not exactly on the forefront of technology either.
To your point, safety standards have evolved enormously in the last thirty years even. You don't get to modern safety standards by accident or good intentions or earnest application of the best practices you know. From that I would assume Osman built an X-ray that was potentially unsafe in ways he did not anticipate. That is, it would not have been a suitable replacement for a commercial X-ray compliant with FDA regulations. To be fair, I haven't watched the video but I did read the summaries and it sounds like Osman had a healthy and reasonable regard for the risk of building and operating his device, as manifest in the fact that he didn't operate it much and decomissioned it afterwards.
And also, we know for a fact that the Victorians injured themselves with X-rays. Nothing to doubt or wonder about.
To quote the more contemporary source below "Any person who regularly works with any combination of high voltage and vacuum should maintain a dosimetry program."
http://www.belljar.net/xray.htm
http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_fair_projec...