His vocation already was oriented toward teaching and he became physics professor at the Naval Academy from 1883 to 1894, while serving as general manager of the Valparaiso Gas Company. In 1896, at age 40, following a study trip to Europe, Salazar moves to Santiago, having been invited to collaborate with Luis Ladislao Zegers, who was tenured professor of industrial physics and electrotechnology in the Engineering School of the Universidad de Chile. It was with him that experiments were conducted leading to the birth of radiology in the nation. Only three months had elapsed since December 28, 1895, when Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had delivered the text of a lecture to the "Physikalisch-medizinischen Gesellschaft" in Würzburg. Since this scientific society happened to be on vacation, this lecture, "Ueber eine neue art von stahlen" (On a new form of radiation), was read as a "preliminary communication" on January 23, 1896. As a result of this publication, the following month, that is in February 1896, professors Zegers and Salazar began experimenting on this new technique in Chile. Success was finally obtained on March 22, 1896, as the first radiograph was made, not only in Chile but in all of Ibero-America. This accomplishment was announced and published on March 27 in the Actes de la Societé Scientifique du Chili (Proceedings of the Scientific Society of Chile), Vol. VI (1896), a monograph of 46 lines: "Experiments on the production of Roentgen rays by means of electric incandescent lights". This was the first work on X-rays published in Latin America. The publication is written in what some termed "rational orthography", which Salazar espoused. The article shows a schematic of the electric circuit used as well as a radiograph of four fingers of Zegers’ right hand, taken five days before the publication. The exposure for this radiograph lasted 14 minutes. The experiments in taking radiographs didn’t turn out to be so simple. It took a month before they could obtain the first radiographs. They were working with an induction coil, with a sufficiently long spark, which they operated using a hand-operated alternator, a Tesla circuit, and a tube made by Salazar. There was at the time not a single Crookes tube in Chile, which is why they began to experiment with light bulbs having a vacuum analogous to these tubes, but lacked the adequate electrodes for the anode.