Man-made ‘controllable’ x-rays excited the world, Nature-made ‘uncontrollable’ uranium rays not so much

 It has long interested me why the global reception for two hugely important scientific discoveries, that happened with a few hundred miles of each other at virtually the same time, were so different. 

Amateur or scientist, the world was instantly transfixed, December 28th 1895, when unknown scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, from the little known university of Warzburg, in the small Bavarian city of Warzburg reported to the tiny local catch-all scientific-medical journal that he had generated rays that could penetrate flesh to reveal the bones inside.

With days, over the quiet Christmas holidays, that report was telegraphed via the mass media onto the breakfast tables of ordinary readers and scientists around the world. And with extraordinary speed, again over the quiet Christmas holiday period, science bodies met to discuss the event, while many other, much more prominent, scientists rushed to duplicate it. 

One such prominent scientist was Henri Becquerel, working in a global centre of scientific activity, Paris.

He quickly told the world just two months later, March 2 1896, that a mineral, uranium, naturally did what a man did deliberately with a cathode tube.

But unlike a cathode tube, which could be turned on and off under human control, this radiation happened entirely randomly, an event with no Laplacian determinism behind it. This was no pop science, pictures of a woman’s hand with bones and wedding rings clearly visible. This was an event that destroyed the existing scientific hegemony accepted since the discoveries of Newton.

And it was an event reported by a well known scientist to the then globally powerfully French Academy of Science.

Yet it was largely ignored by science, press and citizen alike. 

But the story gets odder still, much odder. For the same discovery had been made 40 years earlier, confirmed by many in other countries, reported to that same French Academy of Science and even remarked upon by Becquerel’s physicist father in one of his science books. 

That discoverer, Abel Niepce de Saint Victor, was hardly unknown, the cousin of the inventor of photography and a well known photography pioneer himself. Again the story was ignored by the world of science…

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