The after-dinner speaker just didn't have a Stop button. He burbled on and on and on, oblivious to his increasingly restless audience. Finally one of the more drunken diners hurled an empty wine bottle at him. It missed, and hit the Chairman instead.
As the Chairman slid slowly to the floor clutching his head, he was heard to murmur, "Hit me again, I can still hear him."
Henri BecquerelDied 25 Aug 1908 at age 55 (born 15 Dec 1852). Antoine-Henri Becquerel was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity in fluorescent salts of uranium. “In recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity,” he shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Pierre and Marie Curie). His early researches were in optics. In 1896, in a drawer, he had stored for a few days a photographic plate in black paper, and some uranium mineral crystals left on it. Later, he found developed the plate was fogged. The crystals, long out of sunlight, could not fluoresce, yet he accidentally discovered the salt was a source of a penetrating radiation: radioactivity. Three years later he showed the rays were charged particles by their deflection in a magnetic field. Initially, the rays emitted by radioactive substances were named after him.« |
