Becquerel, Antoine Henri 1852-1908
French physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Paris, he studied at the �cole Polytechnique and the School of Bridges and Highways, and later succeeded his father Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel to the chair of physics at the Natural History Museum. He was an expert in fluorescence and phosphorescence, continuing the work of his father and grandfather. During his study of fluorescent uranium salt, pitchblende, he accidentally left a sample that had not been exposed to light on top of a photographic plate, and noticed later that the plate had a faint image of the pitchblende. He concluded that these 'Becquerel rays' were a property of atoms, thus discovering radioactivity and prompting the beginning of the nuclear age. His work led to the discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie and he subsequently shared with them the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics.