Recherches sur une Proprieté Nouvelle de la Matière. Activité Radiante Spontanee ou Radioactivité de la Matiere by BECQUEREL, Henry - 1903

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1903. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Mémoires de l'Academie des Sciences, Vol. 46. With 13 collotype plates. [4], 360, [4] pp. Original printed boards, section missing from foot of spine, edges foxed. ----

Dibner, Heralds of Science 163; Sparrow 20; PMM 393; Honeyman I, 263; Norman 159. - The first printing of Becquerel's landmark treatise on radioactivity, taking up the entire issue of the Memoires de l'Academie des Sciences de l'Institut de France, Vol. 46. Printing and the Mind of Man, 393, calls this "His definitive work, containing, a chronological narrative of his investigations, his mature conclusions and a bibliography of 214 treatises on radioactivity, dating from his first paper in 1896." He and the Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. The photographs reproduced in collotype at the rear of the work provide dramatic evidence of uranium radiation (originally called "Becquerel Rays") on his lab plates.