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Updated: June 13, 2025
This work was effected by Professor Giesel, then by M. Becquerel, Professor Rutherford, and by many other experimenters after them. All the methods which have already been mentioned in principle have been employed in order to discover whether they were electrified, and, if so, by electricity of what sign, to measure their speed, and to ascertain their degree of penetration.
But I agree with him and M. Edmond Becquerel, who worked independently at this subject, in thinking, that a body so magnetic as oxygen, swathing the earth, and subject to variations of temperature, diurnal and annual, must affect the manifestations of terrestrial magnetism.
At the end of several days work was again resumed, but the plates had been lying so long in the darkroom that they were deemed almost valueless and it was thought that there would not be much use in trying to use them. Becquerel was about to throw them away, but on second consideration thinking that some action might have possibly taken place in the dark, he resolved to try them.
In the year 1896, the French chemist Becquerel discovered the fact that salts of the metal uranium, the atomic weight of which is 240, and is greater than that of any other element, emit rays which cause electrified bodies to lose their electric charges, and act on photographic plates that are wrapped in sheets of black paper, or in thin sheets of other substances which stop rays of light.
The alpha rays are positively charged, and are projected at a speed which may attain the tenth of that of light; M.H. Becquerel has shown by the aid of photography that they are deviated by a magnet, and Professor Rutherford has, on his side, studied this deviation by the electrical method.
Becquerel, on the other hand, considers it certain that in tropical climates the destruction of the forests is accompanied with an elevation of the mean temperature, and he thinks it highly probable that it has the same effect in the temperate zones. The following is the substance of his remarks on this subject: "Forests act as frigorific causes in three ways: "1.
M. Becquerel established, after some hesitations natural in the face of phenomena which seemed so contrary to accepted ideas, that the radiating property was absolutely independent of phosphorescence, that all the salts of uranium, even the uranous salts which are not phosphorescent, give similar radiant effects, and that these phenomena correspond to a continuous emission of energy, but do not seem to be the result of a storage of energy under the influence of some external radiation.
This discovery was followed very shortly by confirmatory experiments made by Becquerel, Troost, and Arnold, and these were followed in turn by the discovery of Le Bon, made almost simultaneously, that certain bodies when acted upon by sunlight give out radiations which act upon a photographic plate.
Glancing over the table published by M. Becquerel in his book on climates, from the observations of Humboldt, Hall, Boussingault, and others, it becomes evident, I think, that nothing can be founded upon the comparisons therein instituted; that all reasoning, in the present state of our information, is premature and unreliable.
Further investigations by Lord Kelvin, Beattie, Smolan, and Rutherford confirmed the fact that, like the Roentgen rays, the uranium rays not only acted upon the photographic plate but discharged electrified bodies. And what seemed the more wonderful was the fact that these "Becquerel rays," as they were now called, emanated spontaneously from the pitch-blende.
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