Henri Becquerel

Antoine Henri Becquerel

Henri Becquerel, French physicist

Born 15 December 1852

Paris, France

Died 25 August 1908 (aged 55)

Le Croisic, Brittany, France

Nationality French

Fields Physics, chemistry

Institutions Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers

École Polytechnique

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

Alma mater École Polytechnique

École des Ponts et Chaussées

 Doctoral students Marie Skłodowska-Curie

Known for Discovery of Radioactivity

 Rumford Medal (1900)

Notable awards
 Nobel Prize in Physics (1903)

 Barnard Medal (1905)

 ForMemRS (1908)[1]

Signature

Notes

Note that he is the father of Jean Becquerel, the son of A. E.

Becquerel, and the grandson ofAntoine César Becquerel.

Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a physicist, Nobel
laureate, and the discoverer of radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie
Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie,[2] received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI
unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

Early life
Becquerel was born in Paris into a family which produced four generations of scientists:
Becquerel's grandfather (Antoine César Becquerel), father (Alexandre-Edmond
Becquerel), and son (Jean Becquerel). He studied engineering at the École
Polytechniqueand the École des Ponts et Chaussées. In 1890 he married Louise Désirée
Lorieux.

Career
In 1892, he became the third in his family to occupy the physics chair at the Muséum
National d'Histoire Naturelle. In 1894, he became chief engineer in the Department of
Bridges and Highways.

Becquerel's earliest works centered around the subject of his doctoral thesis: the plane
polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and absorption of light by
crystals.[3]

Becquerel's discovery of spontaneous radioactivity is a famous example of serendipity, of

how chance favors the prepared mind. Becquerel had long been interested
in phosphorescence, the emission of light of one color following a body's exposure to
light of another color. In early 1896, in the wave of excitement following Wilhelm Conrad
Röntgen's discovery of X-rays on January 5 that same year, Becquerel thought that
phosphorescent materials, such as some uranium salts, might emit penetrating X-ray-like
radiation when illuminated by bright sunlight. His first experiments appeared to show this.

Describing them to the French Academy of Sciences on February 24, 1896, he said:

One wraps a Lumière photographic plate with a bromide emulsion in two sheets of very
thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to
the sun for a day. One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the
phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours.
When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes that the silhouette of the
phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative. If one places between the
phosphorescent substance and the paper a piece of money or a metal screen pierced
with a cut-out design, one sees the image of these objects appear on the negative ... One
must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question
emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduce silver salts.[4][5]

Becquerel in the lab

But further experiments led him to doubt and then abandon this hypothesis. On March 2,
1896 he reported

I will insist particularly upon the following fact, which seems to me quite important and
beyond the phenomena which one could expect to observe: The same crystalline crusts
[of potassium uranyl sulfate], arranged the same way with respect to the photographic
plates, in the same conditions and through the same screens, but sheltered from the
excitation of incident rays and kept in darkness, still produce the same photographic
images. Here is how I was led to make this observation: among the preceding
experiments, some had been prepared on Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th of
February, and since the sun was out only intermittently on these days, I kept the
apparatuses prepared and returned the cases to the darkness of a bureau drawer,
leaving in place the crusts of the uranium salt. Since the sun did not come out in the
following days, I developed the photographic plates on the 1st of March, expecting to find
the images very weak. Instead the silhouettes appeared with great intensity ... One
hypothesis which presents itself to the mind naturally enough would be to suppose that
these rays, whose effects have a great similarity to the effects produced by the rays
studied by M. Lenard and M. Röntgen, are invisible rays emitted by phosphorescence
and persisting infinitely longer than the duration of the luminous rays emitted by these
bodies. However, the present experiments, without being contrary to this hypothesis, do
not warrant this conclusion. I hope that the experiments which I am pursuing at the
moment will be able to bring some clarification to this new class of phenomena.[6][7]

By May 1896, after other experiments involving non-phosphorescent uranium salts, he

arrived at the correct explanation, namely that the penetrating radiation came from the
uranium itself, without any need for excitation by an external energy source.[8]

There followed a period of intense research into radioactivity, including the determination
that the element thorium is also radioactive and the discovery of additional radioactive
elements polonium and radium by Marie Skłodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre
Curie.

In 1903, Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Skłodowska-
Curie "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of
spontaneous radioactivity".

As often happens in science, radioactivity came close to being discovered nearly four
decades earlier in 1857, when Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor, who was investigating
photography under Michel Eugène Chevreul, observed that uranium salts emitted
radiation that could darken photographic emulsions.[9][10] By 1861, Niepce de Saint-Victor
realized that uranium salts produce "a radiation that is invisible to our eyes".[11][12][13] Niepce
de Saint-Victor knew Edmond Becquerel, Henri Becquerel's father. In 1868, Edmond
Becquerel published a book, La lumière: ses causes et ses effets (Light: Its causes and
its effects). On page 50 of volume 2, Edmond noted that Niepce de Saint-Victor had
observed that some objects that had been exposed to sunlight could expose
photographic plates even in the dark.[14] Niepce further noted that on the one hand, the
effect was diminished if an obstruction were placed between a photographic plate and
the object that had been exposed to the sun, but " … d'un autre côté, l'augmentation
d'effet quand la surface insolée est couverte de substances facilement altérables à la
lumière, comme le nitrate d'urane … " ( … on the other hand, the increase in the effect
when the surface exposed to the sun is covered with substances that are easily altered
by light, such as uranium nitrate … ).[15]
Honors and awards

Image of Becquerel's photographic plate which has been fogged by exposure to radiation from a
uranium salt. The shadow of a metal Maltese Cross placed between the plate and the uranium salt
is clearly visible.

In 1908, the year of his death, Becquerel was elected Permanent Secretary of
the Académie des Sciences. He died at the age of 55 in Le Croisic.

The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him. There is a crater
called Becquerel on the Moon and also a crater called Becquerel on Mars.

He also received the following awards besides the Nobel Prize for Physics (1903):

 Rumford Medal (1900)

 Helmholtz Medal (1901)
 Barnard Medal (1905)
 Toffie Medal (1908)

Becquerel was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1908.[1]