~~Henri+Becquerel~~

= Henri Becquerel =

15 December 1852 – 25 August 190 il était né en France Most of his work was done in the decade of 1890-1900 [] (Look at that guy, rockin the handlebar AND and epic soup-catcher? the pure awsome that he must have radiated had to be palpable.)

He was a member of a distinguished family of scholars and scientists. His father, Alexander Becquerel, was a Professor of Applied Physics and had done research on solar radiation and on phosphorescence, while his grandfather, Antoine César, had been a Fellow of the Royal Society and the inventor of an electrolytic method for extracting metals from their ores. He entered the Polytechnic in 1872, then the government department of Ponts-et-Chaussées in 1874, becoming ingénieur in 1877 and being promoted to ingénieur-en-chef in 1894. In 1888 he acquired the degree of docteur-ès-sciences. From 1878 he had held an appointment as an Assistant at the Museum of Natural History, taking over from his father in the Chair of Applied Physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Applied Physics in the Department of Natural History at the Paris Museum. He became a Professor at the Polytechnic in 1895.

He is best known for the discovery of radioactivity: spontaneous radiation given off by certain elements. The "expiriment" was actually conducted by accident. thinking that radiation was given off only when an external energy source was present as Rotgen thought, he was useing the sun to see if x-rays were what made up the radiation by seeing if they posphoresed and exposed photo plates. one day, it was really cloudy, so he put his rig into the sock drawer to keep it out of the light. the next day he discovered that dispite, in fact, being in the dark, the plates were exposed, showing that radiation ocures without any external source,

his work closely coincided with marry curie, and they both received the Nobel prize in physics in 1903 for their own parts in the discovery of radiation.

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[] this is an xray of his wife's hand. had her stick her hand in his rig and see if he had similar results as he did in the sock drawer.