[Becquerel] "Uranium", in Nature, June 4, 1896, volume 54, pp 116-7 (in the issue of pp 97-120) being a three-paragraph note of about 500 words. Offered in the weekly issue, with the scarce outer wrappers (including 4pp of nicely illustrated advertisements including several for x-ray apparatus). This weekly issue is removed from a larger bound volume. Provenance: Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory with their rubber stamp on the upper right corner of the front wrapper. Very Good copy. $250
Becquerel began presenting his results in the discovery of radioactivity of uranium (uranyl sulfate) to the Academy beginning 24 February 1896 and "[with his] last announcement, on 18 May, Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity was complete, although he continued with ionization studies of his penetrating radiation until the following spring".
"Of more importance, he had shown that the power of emitting penetrating rays was a particular property of uranium. However, the implications of this second conclusion were by no means clear at the time. Becquerel characterized his own achievement as the first observation of phosphorescence in a metal. His immediate successors, G. C. Schmidt and Marie Curie, started with quite conventional views about the rays and came only gradually to realize that such radiation might also be emitted by other elements. Both then searched among the known elements, finding that only thorium was also a ray-emitter. Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, pushed on to search for unknown elements with the same property, however, and so discovered polonium and radium. With these discoveries, the field of radioactivity (a term that the Curies coined) was fully established. Nothing that Becquerel subsequently accomplished was as important as this discovery, by which he opened the way to nuclear physics."--Dictionary of Scientific Biography
This announcement in Nature 4 June is a very early English-language notice on his work on uranium. The first half of the short notice discusses Moissan with the second to Becquerel.
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