Niépce de Saint-Victor "Mémoire sur une nouvelle action de la lumière", Comptes rendus … , (1857) , vol. 45, pages 811-815. (“On a new action of light”). In the weekly issue, offered removed from a larger bound volume, without the outer wrappers. Very Good copy. $125
On Niepce de Saint-Victor's near-discovery of radioactivity:
“In the 1850s, Niépce de Saint-Victor was trying to develop color photography, using light-sensitive metal salts. Beginning in 1857, long before Henri Becquerel's famous serendipitous discovery of radioactivity in 1896, Niépce de Saint-Victor observed that, even in complete darkness, certain salts could expose photographic emulsions. [The paper offered here.] He soon realized that uranium salts were responsible for this anomalous phenomenon. [This was offered in a second Memoire in the next volume of the Comptes Rendus in the same year and a fifth memoire in 1861.] Niépce recognized that the “light” that was exposing his photographic plates was neither conventional phosphorescence nor fluorescence: the salts could expose photographic plates long after the salts had last been exposed to sunlight. Niépce's superior, Michel Eugène Chevreul, recognized the phenomenon as a fundamental discovery ("une découverte capitale"), pointing out that uranium salts retained their power to expose photographic plates even after six months in the dark ("encore actif six mois après son insolation"). By 1861, Niépce stated frankly that uranium salts emitted some sort of radiation that was invisible to the human eye...”--Wikipedia
“Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805-1870) was a French photographic inventor. An army lieutenant and cousin of Nicéphore Niépce, he first experimented in 1847 with negatives made with albumen on glass, a method subsequently used by the Langenheim brothers for their lantern slides. At his laboratory near Paris, Niépce de Saint-Victor worked on the fixation of natural photographic colour as well as the perfection of his cousin's heliographic process for photomechanical printing. His method of photomechanical printing, called heliogravure...”--Wikipedia
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