Henri BecquerelBorn 15 Dec 1852; died 25 Aug 1908 at age 55. 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.« |
