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The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells, 1897

In discussing the process used to turn the protagonist invisible, Wells writes:

...the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet they are obvious enough.

"Ethereal vibrations" is a 19th century term meaning radiation. (This is from a time before Einstein had pinned down the interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and radiation was thought to be due to vibrations in an ever-present "ether".) "Röntgen vibrations" refers specifically to X-rays, which had been discovered only two years previously.

So Wells' protagonist got his invisibility "super power" by exposure to some form of radiation similar to X-rays, but different. It's a striking early example of unusual abilities being associated with exposure to radiation.

There is one little technical detail that might make this debatable: we don't actually know if the radiation in Wells' story was ionising or not. This question isn't addressed in the story, and couldn't be, because such a concept didn't quite exist in science at the time. (The electron was discovered in the same year; gamma rays wouldn't be discovered until 1900.) But given that you only specified "ionising radiation" in order to avoid mundane things like sunlight, I suspect this counts as the earliest example of what you're looking for.

The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells, 1897

In discussing the process used to turn the protagonist invisible, Wells writes:

...the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet they are obvious enough.

"Ethereal vibrations" is a 19th century term meaning radiation. (This is from a time before Einstein had pinned down the interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and radiation was thought to be due to vibrations in an ever-present "ether".) "Röntgen vibrations" refers specifically to X-rays, which had been discovered only two years previously.

So Wells' protagonist got his invisibility "super power" by exposure to some form of radiation similar to X-rays, but different. It's a striking early example of unusual abilities being associated with exposure to radiation.

There is one little technical detail that might make this debatable: we don't actually know if the radiation in Wells' story was ionising or not. This question isn't addressed in the story, and couldn't be, because such a concept didn't quite exist in science at the time. (The electron was discovered in the same year; gamma rays wouldn't be discovered until 1900.) But given that you only specified "ionising radiation" in order to avoid mundane things like sunlight, I suspect this counts as the earliest example of what you're looking for.

The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells, 1897

In discussing the process used to turn the protagonist invisible, Wells writes:

...the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet they are obvious enough.

"Ethereal vibrations" is a 19th century term meaning radiation. (This is from a time before the Michelson-Morley experiment, when radiation was thought to be due to vibrations in an ever-present "ether".) "Röntgen vibrations" refers specifically to X-rays, which had been discovered only two years previously.

So Wells' protagonist got his invisibility "super power" by exposure to some form of radiation similar to X-rays, but different. It's a striking early example of unusual abilities being associated with exposure to radiation.

There is one little technical detail that might make this debatable: we don't actually know if the radiation in Wells' story was ionising or not. This question isn't addressed in the story, and couldn't be, because such a concept didn't quite exist in science at the time. (The electron was discovered in the same year; gamma rays wouldn't be discovered until 1900.) But given that you only specified "ionising radiation" in order to avoid mundane things like sunlight, I suspect this counts as the earliest example of what you're looking for.

The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells, 1897

In discussing the process used to turn the protagonist invisible, Wells writes:

...the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet they are obvious enough.

"Ethereal vibrations" is a 19th century term meaning radiation. (This is from a time before Einstein had pinned down the interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and radiation was thought to be due to vibrations in an ever-present "ether".) "Röntgen vibrations" refers specifically to X-rays, which had been discovered only two years previously.

So Wells' protagonist got his invisibility "super power" by exposure to some form of radiation similar to X-rays, but different. It's a striking early example of unusual abilities being associated with exposure to radiation.

There is one little technical detail that might make this debatable: we don't actually know if the radiation in Wells' story was ionising or not. This question isn't addressed in the story, and couldn't be, because such a concept didn't quite exist in science at the time. (The electron was discovered in the same year; gamma rays wouldn't be discovered until 1900.) But given that you only specified "ionising radiation" in order to avoid mundane things like sunlight, I suspect this counts as the earliest example of what you're looking for.

The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells, 1897

This is a somewhat debatable one, but in discussing the process used to turn the protagonist invisible, Wells writes:

...the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet they are obvious enough.

"Röntgen vibrations" refers to X-rays, which had been discovered only two years previously. Wells' protagonist got his invisibility "super power" by exposure to something that was in some way like X-rays, but different.

Perhaps, like X-rays, these "ethereal vibrations" were ionising. Or perhaps they weren't, we don't know. But in either case this seemed worth mentioning as a very early example of unusual abilities being associated with exposure to radiation.

The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells, 1897

In discussing the process used to turn the protagonist invisible, Wells writes:

...the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet they are obvious enough.

"Ethereal vibrations" is a 19th century term meaning radiation. (This is from a time before the Michelson-Morley experiment, when radiation was thought to be due to vibrations in an ever-present "ether".) "Röntgen vibrations" refers specifically to X-rays, which had been discovered only two years previously.

So Wells' protagonist got his invisibility "super power" by exposure to some form of radiation similar to X-rays, but different. It's a striking early example of unusual abilities being associated with exposure to radiation.

There is one little technical detail that might make this debatable: we don't actually know if the radiation in Wells' story was ionising or not. This question isn't addressed in the story, and couldn't be, because such a concept didn't quite exist in science at the time. (The electron was discovered in the same year; gamma rays wouldn't be discovered until 1900.) But given that you only specified "ionising radiation" in order to avoid mundane things like sunlight, I suspect this counts as the earliest example of what you're looking for.