Antoine Henri Becquerel May 2026

: He was the first to realize that beta particles were identical to the high-speed electrons recently discovered by J.J. Thomson.

Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) was a Nobel Prize-winning French physicist renowned for his discovery of . His work laid the foundational stone for nuclear physics and changed our understanding of the atomic structure. The Discovery of Radioactivity (1896) antoine henri becquerel

Becquerel's most famous achievement was an accidental discovery involving uranium salts. : He was the first to realize that

: Days later, he developed the plate and found a clear, dark image of the crystals—meaning they were emitting "penetrating rays" spontaneously, without any external energy source like the sun. antoine henri becquerel