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Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French physicist, Nobel laureate, and the discoverer of radioactivity along with Marie Skłodowska - Curie and Pierre Curie, for which all three won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. Becquerel was born in Paris into a family which produced four generations of scientists, including Becquerel's own son Jean. He studied engineering at the École Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées. In 1890 he married Louise Désirée Lorieux. 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 discovery of radioactivity is a famous example of serendipity, of how chance favors the prepared mind. Becquerel had long been interested in the 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 the previous fall, Becquerel thought that phosphorescent materials, such as some uranium salts, might emit penetrating X-ray ike radiation when illuminated by bright sunlight. His first experiments appeared to show this. Describing them to the French Academy of Sciences on 24 February 1896, he said:
But further experiments led him to doubt and then abandon this hypothesis. On 2 March 1896 he reported
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 of excitation by an external energy source. There followed a period of intense research in radioactivity, including the discovery of additional radioactive elements thorium, polonium and radium, the latter two by Becquerel's doctoral student Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie. In 1903, Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie 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 when, in 1857, Abel Niepce de Saint - Victor, who was investigating photography under Michel Eugène Chevreul, observed that uranium salts emitted radiation able to darken photographic emulsions. By 1861, Niepce de Saint - Victor realized that uranium salts produce "a radiation that is invisible to our eyes". (Note that Niepce de Saint - Victor knew Edmond Becquerel, Henri Becquerel's father.) 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):
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