Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn't given for the nuclear power station - he wouldn't have survived that long - it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be.
Particles were coming out of the lithium, hitting the screen, and producing scintillations. They looked like stars suddenly appearing and disappearing.
The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France, with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living.
The first stage had been all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays.
It was at the beginning of 1934 while working on the emission of these positive electrons that we noticed a fundamental difference between that transmutation and all the others so far produced; all the reactions of nuclear chemistry induced were instantaneous phenomena, explosions.
[From uranium] there are present at least two distinct types of radiation one that is very readily absorbed, which will be termed for convenience the α radiation, and the other of a more penetrative character, which will be termed the β radiation.
My experiments proved that the radiation of uranium compounds can be measured with precision under determined conditions and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element of uranium.
The first unquestionable proofs of the transformation of elements into different chemical elements have been provided by the study of the phenomena of radioactivity.
