The discovery of the ‘X-ray’ had profoundly significant effects upon modern culture: it pushed the boundaries of science and medicine, operated as spectacle for public entertainment, nourished beliefs in the paranormal and provided a subject through which printed media could raise emerging modern social and ethical issues. The fascination with X-rays, as Lisa Cartwright writes, was a ‘mania [that] swept the West at the turn of the century’ (1995: 109). Wilhelm Röntgen submitted the first research paper on X-rays on 28 December 1895 and within days the discovery appeared in newspapers, gracing the front page of the Viennese Die Presse on 5 January 1896. Knowledge of one invisible force was disseminated through another as the news was telegraphed across the world through pulsating electrical signals that circulated information with wired instantaneity. At least forty-nine books and 1,044 scientific essays on X-rays appeared in 1896 alone (see Natale 2011: 347). Whilst X-radiation generated an incredible cultural and scientific fascination, it was also enveloped into other media, from writing and literature to film and painting. Indeed, the very moment of the discovery attests to its position within intermedial modernism: Röntgen submitted his paper on X-rays on the same day as the Lumière brothers’ first public cinematic screening at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. As with the Röntgen rays, so news of the Lumières’ work spread across the world; both made a deep impact upon society, creating visible spectacles through technology’s harnessing of invisible matter. Marconi, again in 1895, achieved his first wireless telegram, creating physical effects from immaterial process through signal transmission and reception. While these new media, including X-rays, transformed and revealed hitherto concealed energies, they also invoked the realm of the dead. Marconi sought to develop an instrument for listening to the dead; photography also contained the fantastic possibility of capturing the spirits of the dead and auras of the living. Upon observing her X-rayed hand, Anne Berthe Röntgen reportedly exclaimed ‘I have seen my death!’ (Tuniz 2012: 3) (Figure 11.1). Modern technologies were folding, collapsing and transforming existing regimes of space, time, distance, speed, interiority and exteriority in different ways. The X-ray embodied technology’s promise of harnessing forces towards the expansion and increase of humanity’s powers, whilst it simultaneously contained a concurrent hauntological spectre at the heart of modernity’s ‘progress’.