POLONIUM IS NAMED FOR MARIE CURIE’S HOMELAND, POLAND. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, alongside Marie and Pierre Curie, for his discovery, and the standard international unit for measuring radioactivity is today named the becquerel in his honor. By trying to understand fluorescence, Becquerel had discovered radioactivity. Becquerel soon discovered that this property of uranium didn’t have anything to do with x-rays or even fluorescence: It was uranium’s own special type of radiation. To his surprise, the only one that seemed to expose the film at all-whether there was any sunlight or not-was uranium sulfate, which left a faint impression of its granules. He tried a series of experiments in which he sprinkled flakes of various fluorescent materials onto photographic film wrapped in black paper, leaving them outside in the sun to stimulate the fluorescence. The men had even amassed a vast collection of fluorescent minerals to use in their studies.īecquerel was intrigued Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays, and wondered if any of the minerals in his collection might emit them. Henri Becquerel, his father, and his grandfather were all chairs of the Department of Physics at the Musee d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and all conducted experiments on fluorescence and phosphorescence-you might call it their family obsession. THE STANDARD UNIT OF RADIOACTIVITY IS NAMED FOR ITS ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERER. As Jorgensen tells it, “Never before or since has any scientific discovery moved from bench to patient bedside so quickly.” 2. After a 45-minute exposure, the image was still somewhat faint, yet clear enough for surgeons to see the bullet and remove it-thus saving Cunning’s leg from amputation barely six weeks after Roentgen’s discovery. A professor at McGill University in Montreal soon replicated the experiment, and after hearing about it, Cunning’s doctor asked for an x-ray of his patient's leg. Roentgen’s first paper on the subject, “On a New Kind of Rays,” was published in a local journal on December 28, 1895, and was rapidly picked up in the both the scientific and popular press. The injury occurred just a few weeks after German professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen noticed a faint glow on a fluorescent screen in his lab while experimenting with cathode rays and a glass vacuum tube. Montreal resident Toulson Cunning had an unfortunate Christmas Day in 1895: For reasons Jorgensen does not relate, Cunning was shot in the leg. X-RAYS MOVED FROM THE LAB TO THE HOSPITAL IN RECORD TIME. While much of the book is concerned with explaining radiation risks so that consumers can better understand them (one takeaway fact: airport scanners expose you to less radiation than waiting in line for them does), it’s also full of intriguing, if occasionally horrifying, facts and anecdotes about the history of the "strange glow" that has transformed our lives. Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation, written by Georgetown professor of radiation medicine Timothy Jorgensen and released this month, is a fascinating account of how radiation has both helped and harmed our health.
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