LIVING METALS
Discovery was made by the French scientist henri becquerel in 1896, allthough at first he had no idea of the importance of what he discovered. one thing happened to leave a piece of Uranium on a wrapped photographic plate in a dark drawer. Yet when he developed the plate it solved marks just as though it had been exposed to light. Obviously leader element uranium possessed some mysterious ability to give off a type of light all by itself. Bacquarrel and two other French scientists, Pierre and Marie Curie, called the strange power "radiation" and tried to find what it is in the metal which causes it to find what it is in the metal which causes it to give off these mysterious rays. The Curies eventually found an even more powerful radiating element which they called radium -"the radiating one".
As year passed scientist found that have the rays given off by these radioactive elements could be deflected with a magnet, so they clearly possessed a small electric charge. They found that some of these rays bore a positive charge and some of a negative.
They called these "rays" alpha and beta particles and slowly they come to realise that these particles are actually tiny fragments of atoms breaking apart. As they break away from the parent metal these atoms recognise themselves to form a different kind of pattern in other words they become the atoms of a different element.
The discovery of radioactivity was the first big step towards the discovery of the marvels of atomic energy came from.
The sight of elements breaking down into energy seemed against the basic laws of nature. The man solve this mystery was the greater mathematician Albert Einstein.
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Metals