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“
Fortune has occasionally smiled on those who abandon all reason,
and what better year to celebrate them than 1996? For it is exactly 100 years
since the French chemist Henri Becquerel was led-by an unfounded belief that
certain rocks emit X-rays and some inexplicable experiments in his laboratory
in Paris- to one of the most monumental discoveries in history-that of
radioactivity. Like his father and grandfather before him, Becquerel had
an obsessive interest in minerals that glowed, or fluoresced , after exposure
to sunlight. He was trying to get to the bottom of this in January 1896 when
he heard the sensational news of the discovery of X-rays by the German physicist
Wilhelm Röntgen.


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