Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2021
On the frieze of the south-west facing Grenelle side of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, sandwiched between the names of Broca and Coriolis, is the name Becquerel. Paul Broca was a gifted physician and anthropologist and Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis a famous engineer and scientist. Antoine César Becquerel, however, was a physicist who, with his son Alexandre-Edmund, had made major contributions to the study of electricity. Alexandre-Edmund was himself to make major contributions to science, not only in relation to the study of electricity but also to the early development of photography; he was very interested in the curious phenomena of luminescence and phosphorescence as well. But it was Alexandre-Edmund’s son, Antoine Henri Becquerel, who was to stumble upon a completely different phenomenon that was to change forever our understanding of the world around us, and that phenomenon was radioactivity.
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