Antoine-Edmond Becquerel

The recorded development of solar cell technology begins with the 1839 research of French experimental physicist Antoine-Edmond Becquerel [46,47]. At the age of nineteen he discovered the... 

Edmond Becquerel was one of a family of scientists. His father, Antoine-Cesar, was professor of physics at the Museum d Histoire Naturelle, and his son, [Antoine-] Henri Becquerel, also a physicist, discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity (for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1903). 

Antoine-Henri Becquerel, 1852-1908. French physicist and engineer. Discoverer of the rays emitted by uranium. He carried out important researches on rotatory magnetic polarization, phosphorescence, infrared spectra, and radioactivity. His grandfather Antoine-Cesar-Becquerel (1788-1878), and his father, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel (1820-1891), also made many important contributions to chemistry and physics. 

Antoine-Henri Becquerel was bom the son of the physicist Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel, and the grandson of the physicist Antoine-Cesar Becquerel, and it is not surprising that he followed in their footsteps. It is also not surprising that his research interests centered around solar radiation and phosphorescence, as these are phenomena that his father had investigated. He entered the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris, in 1872, which he left in 1874 and to which he subsequently returned. Becquerel received a doctorate degree from the Faculty of Sciences of Paris in 1888. In 1892, he was appointed professor of applied physics in the Department of Natural History at the Paris Museum, and in 1895, professor of physics at the Ecole Polytechnique. 

In 1889, still very young, Henri Becquerel was elected a member of the Academie des Sciences de France. His membership there came to be important in coimection with the discovery of uranium radiation. The Becquerel family, Henri s father Alexandre-Edmond and also his grandfather Antoine-Edmond, had been passionately interested in luminescence. Henri himself had, for his father s investigations, prepared beautiful crystals of potassium uranyl sulfate, a substance with fluorescing properties. In his earliest scientific work he also was concerned with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and with the absorption of light by crystals (the subject of his doctoral thesis). 

Becquerel, Antoine Henri (1852-1908) A French physicist who accidendy discovered the existence of radioactivity in 1896. By chance, he put away in a drawer some unexposed photographic plates wrapped in black paper. In the drawer there was also a specimen of uranium salt Later, the plates were found to be fogged and led to the conclusion that the uranium had emitted radiation that was sufflciendy powerful to penetrate the wrapping. In 1903 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics with Marie and Pierre Curie. His father (Antoine Cesar) and grandfather (Alexandre Edmond) were also eminent physicists and the three held, one after the other, the position of professor of physics at the Musde d Histoire Naturelle from 1837 to 1908. 

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