100 YEARS AGO

The services which photography has rendered to science are now well recognised, and its value for purposes both of observation and record is well known and admitted. It is probably not so well known that methods now exist by which not only the form, but the colour, of natural objects can be represented with approximate fidelity. We are fortunate in being able to illustrate this fact by a plate giving some excellent reproductions of birds' eggs, produced under the superintendence of Mr. H. E. Dresser, entirely by photographic methods, and without the intervention of an artist. There is no need to dwell on the value of such work. For many scientific purposes it is as important to record colour as shape, and if this can be done in a trustworthy manner, a new and useful power is placed at the disposal of the teacher of science and of the writer of scientific books. The difficulty about the three-colour process of photography is that it is extremely difficult to make certain that the colours are reproduced with sufficient accuracy for scientific work. Accuracy enough for pictorial purposes is easily attained, but absolute truth to nature is quite another thing.

From Nature 11 December 1902.

50 YEARS AGO

Born in Paris a century ago, on December 15, 1852, Antoine Henri Becquerel came of a family long distinguished in the world of physical science. Educated at the École Polytechnique, Paris, his early studies were concerned with the magnetic rotation of the polarization plane of light... and the absorption of light by crystals. In 1892 he was appointed professor of physics at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle — a chair held before him by his father, Alexandre Edmond Becquerel (1878), and by his grandfather, Antoine César Becquerel (1837). Three years later he became professor of physics at the École Polytechnique. His greatest achievement was the result of a lucky accident, but at the same time it was the culmination of a long series of carefully planned experiments. In 1896 he found that photographic plates, protected against ordinary actinic radiations, were fogged by emanations from uranium ores. His paper entitled “Sur les radiations émises par phosphorescence”... ushered in the new era of radioactivity. Their discoverer in 1903 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie, who in 1898 had isolated radium from pitchblende.

From Nature 13 December 1952.