The Nobel Prize website (www.nobelprize.org) records all the prizes awarded and includes background information as well as copies of the lectures presented by the prize winners associated with the Award Ceremony. In his lecture entitled, “On Radioactivity, A New Property of Matter” Becquerel modestly describes his work from 1896 as having been inspired by the experiments conducted by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his work with electron beams incident on phosphors in an evacuated glass tube producing invisible rays that were detected some distance from the tube. He called this X-radiation. Becquerel set out to determine whether all phosphorescent material emitted similar rays.
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