henri becquerel essays

henri becquerel essays Henri Becquerel was born into a family of scientists. He was born in the city of Paris, France, on December the fifteenth 1852. He inherited from his father a large supply of minerals and compounds, which were also studied by his father. His father, Alexander Edmond, contributed greatly to the theory of light. His grandfather, Antoine Ceaser, was a pioneer in the field of electrochemistry. In February 1896 Henri Becquerel was experimenting with uranium salts, in the Natural History Museum, when he accidentally discovered radioactivity. Becquerel worked with a double sulphate of uranium and potassium, which he exposed to sunlight and placed on photographic plates wrapped in black paper. Becquerel discovered that the plates revealed an image of the uranium crystals. He concluded, "that the phosphorescent substance in question emits radiation which penetrates paper opaque to light". Originally Becquerel thought that the sun's energy was being absorbed by the uranium, which then emitted X- rays, but later on his discoveries led him to learn that the uranium emitted radiation without an external source of energy such as the sun. As a result of these conclusions Becquerel amazingly had discovered radioactivity. Later Life Becquerel was a civil engineer who studied in the Ecole Polytechnique. After discovering the radioactivity of uranium salts he was awarded the Nobel Prize Henri Bequerel demonstrated that the radiation emitted by uranium shared certain characteristics with X-rays but, unlike X-rays, could be deflected by a magnetic field and therefore must consist of charged particles. For his discovery of radioactivity, Becquerel was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics, together with Piere and Marie Curie. Becquerel published his findings in many papers, principally in the Anneles de ...