Henri Becquerel – Biography
Antoine Henri Becquerel
was born in Paris on December 15, 1852, a member of a
distinguished family of scholars and scientists. His father,
Alexander Edmond 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 Pontset-Chaussees 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.
Becquerel's earliest work was concerned with the plane
polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and
with the absorption of light by crystals (his doctorate thesis).
He also worked on the subject of terrestrial magnetism. In 1896,
his previous work was overshadowed by his discovery of the
phenomenon of natural radioactivity. Following a discussion with
Henri Poincaré on the radiation which had recently been
discovered by Röntgen (X-rays) and which was accompanied by
a type of phosphorescence in the vacuum tube, Becquerel decided
to investigate whether there was any connection between X-rays
and naturally occurring phosphorescence. He had inherited from
his father a supply of uranium salts, which phosphoresce on
exposure to light. When the salts were placed near to a
photographic plate covered with opaque paper, the plate was
discovered to be fogged. The phenomenon was found to be common to
all the uranium salts studied and was concluded to be a property
of the uranium atom. Later, Becquerel showed that the rays
emitted by uranium, which for a long time were named after their
discoverer, caused gases to ionize and that they differed from
X-rays in that they could be deflected by electric or magnetic
fields. For his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity Becquerel
was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, the
other half being given to Pierre and Marie Curie for their study
of the Becquerel radiation.
Becquerel published his findings in many papers, principally in
the Annales de Physique et de Chimie and the Comptes Rendus de
l'Academie des Sciences.
He was elected a member of the Academie des Sciences de France in
1889 and succeeded Berthelot as Life Secretary of that body. He
was a member also of the Accademia dei Lincei and of the Royal
Academy of Berlin, amongst others. He was made an Officer of the
Legion of Honour in 1900.
He was married to Mlle. Janin, the daughter of a civil engineer.
They had a son Jean, b. 1878, who was also a physicist: the
fourth generation of scientists in the Becquerel family.
Antoine Henri Becquerel died at Le Croisic
on August 25, 1908.
From
Nobel Lectures. Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967
This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel
Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
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