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Updated: May 11, 2025
In that location and over a large stretch of surrounding country-side the earth's outer crust is mainly argillaceous with here and there an outcrop of sandstone. There is not the smallest indication of pitch-blende anywhere in the neighbourhood, and radium, as even those little versed in chemistry or geology are aware, is only to be found in that particular ore.
Since pitch-blende contained uranium, or uranium salts, he surmised that a somewhat similar result might be obtained with the ore itself. He therefore prepared a photographic plate wrapped in black paper, intending to attempt making an impression on the plate of some metal body interposed between it and the pitch-blende.
For this purpose he had selected a key; but as the day proved to be cloudy he put the plate, with the key and pitch-blende resting upon it, in a dark drawer in his desk, and did not return to the experiment for several days.
Madame Curie, stimulated by her own discoveries and those of the other scientists just referred to, began a series of examinations upon various substances by numerous complicated methods to try and find a possible new element, as certain peculiarities of the substances found in the pitch-blende seemed to indicate the presence of some hitherto unknown body.
The first definite discovery of such a radio-active substance was made by M. Henri Becquerel, in 1896, while making some experiments upon the peculiar ore pitch-blende. Pitch-blende is a heavy, black, pitchy-looking mineral, found principally at present in some parts of Saxony and Bohemia on the Continent, in Cornwall in Great Britain, and in Colorado in America.
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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