A man in a neighbouring country of the company had been experimenting with variations of the anode and cathode several years before the company had even formed.
The mans experiments focused on light phenomena, rays of the cathode and other emissions generated by discharging electrical current in highly-evacuated glass tubes.
One particular combination, a tube with a small cathode and proportionately quite large anode proved to produce strange and unknown effects when charged with a high electrical current.

They were separated from each other by a few centimetres, as opposed to the one metre distance of the early fluorescent tubes.
He noted - while working in his darkened laboratory - that an object across the room began to glow when a tube was charged. It proved to be reacting to the rays emitted from his tube.
He was to find a few weeks later that when backing his wife’s hand with a photographic plate he could capture an image of her internal bone structure.
Being unable to identify the rays he had referred to them as X-rays.

The fact that something reacted across the room and not necessarily in a specific path of the tube would illustrate the principle that the light (and in this case radiation) was emitted in all directions. People practicing exposure were later to suffer serious diseases relating to the radiation. As with the darkened bulbs , which had only come later, the X-ray tube would also have to become directional.
A very short time after the company had even begun manufacturing incandescent bulbs, it had already become involved in the prototyping of the first tubes producing a light capable of penetrating solid objects as discovered by the man.