Was Napoleon Murdered with Arsenic

Napoleon had a major influence on history. Such personalities are often surrounded by various legends. To prove this point, it is enough to read a few lines from Leo Tolstoy s epic novel. War and Peace  

The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as the Hebrew, in which 

Writing the words L Empereur Napoleon in numbers, it appears that the sum of them is 666, 

Returning to Napoleon s hairs Italian physicists made a concerted effort to study them in 2008. They used a scientific method called neutron activation analysis the sample was irradiated with neutrons for some time (a nuclear reactor is usually needed for this), which caused the formation of short-lived radioactive atoms, the amounts of which could be easily measured without actually destroying the object being studied. An advantage of this method is that very small amounts of elements can be detected. The particular hairs were carefully selected in this study. Contemporary human hairs were chosen randomly. From museums around Europe, the scientists obtained hairs both from King of Rome Napoleon II (1811-1832) and empress Josephine (1763-1814), the son and first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, and of course from Napoleon himself, not only from the island of Saint Helena, bnt also form his childhood (age of 1) in Corsica and from the island of Elba, the scene of Ms first exile. The arsenic content of these samples is shown in Table 4.2. 

The interpretation of the results from extensive studies requires a lot of care, wMch includes sometMng that is called statistical analysis. Top-quality scientific data always give an estimate of their error, wMch means the precision of the results is also measured. It is quite impossible to measure anytMng with 100% precision in science. There is always a source of error, wMch introduces uncertainty into measured final results. TMs uncertainty is expressed by the numbers after the signs in Table 4.2. The measured value of 8.3 0.9 ppm for the hair of one-year old Napoleon in Corsica imphes that the actual content of arsenic is somewhere between 8.3-0.9=7.4 ppm and 8.3 0.9=9.2 ppm. At first sight, tMs may seem a lot of uncertainty for a scientific result. However, tins is only a question of what the data are needed for. 

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