Wimshurst-driven X-Ray

[WARNING]
Do not attempt to use such apparatus at home if you're not sufficiently familiar with radiation protection and high voltage appliances! The machinery shown here actually works and will, being operated at higher efficiency, produce X-rays which are highly dangerous to your health!

The text in the picture says
" 'Voltana' influence machine of double rotation shown here driving a Hittorf-Crookes tube like the one Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen used to discover the X-rays."

What you see in the picture is an electrostatic generator, called influence or Wimshurst machine (the latter description only applying to this certain type of influence machine).
This generator's terminals are connected to a prototypical form of X-ray tube (described by Röntgen himself as Hittorf or Crookes tube in his papers on the invention of his new rays - see W.C.Röntgen "Über eine neue Art von Strahlen [On a New Kind of Rays]", 1896).

The X-ray tube is mouth-blown after the original by scientific glass apparatus manufacturer Lutz Neumann ([link]) in Cursdorf, Germany, who is one of the last of his profession.

The Wimshurst machine is a "Voltana"-manufactured type (see my before/after pictures [link] ) dated roughly between 1915 and the early 1920s, which I restored by applying new disks of acrylic glass, cleaning the brass parts, rewiring the Leyden flasks and adding new short-curcuit-rods self-made out of brass and ebony and conductor chains (commonly used on such machines even until insulated copper wire was readily available) of brass.

As additional requisites I put the book "A System Of Phrenology" by George Combe, New York, 1849 and a brassen protractor on the table.

When operated in the dark, whereby operating means turning the crank of the Wimshurst machine and assuring that the terminals are correctly connected (negative to cathode, positive to anode), the electrons or "cathode rays" travel from the cathode in a straight line to the glass bulb, where upon collision with the glass they produce Roentgen radiation or X-rays. Proper function can be seen as glowing of the rounded bulb and the residual gass in the whole tube, and with a Geiger counter measuring the produced radiation. DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!