Antoine Henri Becquerel, a French scientist, was conducting an experiment in Feb 1896, which started with the exposure of a uranium-bearing crystal to sunlight. Once the crystal had sat in the sunshine for a while, he placed it on a photographic plate. As he had anticipated, the crystal produced its image on the plate. Becquerel theorized that the absorbed energy of the sun was being released by the uranium in the form of x-rays. Further testing of this theory had to be put off for a few days because the sky had clouded up and the sun had disappeared. For the next couple of days he left his sample of uranium in a closed drawer along with the photographic plate. When the weather had cleared on March 1st, he returned to the drawer to retrieve his gear. He was surprised to find that the crystal had left a clear, strong image on the photographic plate.

How could this be? There was no source of energy to produce the image! What Becquerel had discovered was that a piece of mineral which contained uranium could produce it’s image on a photographic plate in the absence of light. He attributed this phenomenon to spontaneous emission by the uranium. 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. As the new radiation was bent by the magnetic field so that the radiation must be charged and different than x-rays. When different radioactive substances were put in the magnetic field, they deflected in different directions or not at all, showing that there were three classes of radioactivity: negative, positive, and electrically neutral.

Although Becquerel did not pursue these findings, Pierre Curie and Marie Curie researched further and came up with the term “radioactivity”. 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.

 

Reference:

http://www.mapsofworld.com/on-this-day/march-1-1692-the-salem-witch-trials-begin-in-massachusetts

http://people.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/nuclear/discovery.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/becquerel-bio.html

http://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/4.html