Henri Becquerel
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Antoine Henri Becquerel was a French engineer, physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.
Portrait of Henri's grandfather, Antoine César Becquerel, by Antoine-Jean Gros
Becquerel in the lab
Image of Becquerel's photographic plate which has been fogged by exposure to radiation from a uranium salt. The shadow of a metal Maltese Cross placed between the plate and the uranium salt is clearly visible.
The French National Museum of Natural History, known in French as the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, is the national natural history museum of France and a grand établissement of higher education part of Sorbonne Universities. The main museum, with four galleries, is located in Paris, France, within the Jardin des Plantes on the left bank of the River Seine. It was formally founded in 1793, during the French Revolution, but was begun even earlier in 1635 as the royal garden of medicinal plants. The museum now has 14 sites throughout France.
Grand Gallery of Evolution of the National Museum of Natural History
Statue of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in the formal garden
Buffon's "Natural History" (1763)
The museum's seal, designed in 1793, illustrates the three realms of Nature, Collective work, and the French Revolution.