Becquerel, Antoine Henri (X 1872 ; 1852-1908).

A Ponts-et-Chaussées (Bridges and roads) engineer, grandson, son and father of polytechnicians, all physics teachers at the Museum of Natural History, and all members of the Academy of Sciences, he is the most famous of this line of physicists. He was appointed professor at the Museum in 1892 and at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1895. A great specialist in phosphorescence, he discovered the rays of uranium in 1896, the first demonstration of radioactivity, by studying the phenomena of hard fluorescence uranium salts. He won the London Rumford Prize and Medal (1900) and shared, with Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. The United States awarded him the Barnard Medal in 1905. Elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1889, he became vice-president in 1906, then one of his two perpetual secretaries on June 29, 1908, two months before his death