OBITUARY.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 287, 28 August 1908, Page 7

OBITUARY.

A GREAT FRENCH SCIENTIST. ' HENRI BECQUEREL. (by telegraph—pkess association—coptbight.j London, August 26. The death is announced of M. Henri Bccquerel, discoverer of Becquerel's rays. DISCOVERER OF RADIO-ACTIVITY. WHAT BECQUEREL DID. ' M. Henri Bccquerel,' Membre de I'lnstitut, was the discoverer of Becquerel ( rays, the basis of the phenomena of radio-activity. It was his experiments with uraniumi from which he first derived the Bocquerel rays, that led to the discovery of the radio-activity of tho allied olements radium, actinium, and polenium. Radium, with its raj'-enlitting power 100,000 times greater than uranium, placed in the hands of Madame' and M. Curie, Becquerel, and other investigators (including Rutherford), a mighty engine of research for determining the properties of Becquerel rays. But it was in uranium that Becquerol first proved the existence of tho new property, radio-activity. In tho words of one writer, "As Becquerol stood in his laboratory that night he appears sharply silhouetted against the background of the ages; he is comparable with that Theophrastus who, two thousand years ago, rubbed a piece of ■ amber on his coat-sleeve and poticed that it attracted bits of paper, unknowing that this bit of amber'was cjiual to tho lamp of Aladdin, or to that Paleolithic savage who, the first of all men, noticed tho attractive powers of Ipdestone.. New properties of matter arc not-so common that tlieir significanco can bo exaggerated. This new property of matter was culled-radio-activity, and as such it takes itb place beside magnetism, electricity, light, and heat."

In tho "genealogy of the rays" comes first Cathode rays, then Lenard rays, and X rays, after them S rays and Niewenglowski's rays, then Becquerel rays. While Niewenglowski's rays are directly due to the action of the sun upon the substance which emitted them, Becquerel rays arise from a substance whose natural property it is, not only to emit them, but apparently to manufacture 'hem. Here, then, was no stored-up, transformed sunlight, suoli as Niewenglowski's rays, but penetrating, continuous omissions from a substance having no relation to light. Becquerel's discovery of the emission of rays capable of passing straight through copper from a chemical substanco in its normal condition, constituted to us a new property of matter—a new thing in nature. Of Becquerel himself, the writer quoted above says:—"He comes very honestly by his powers. His grandfather, Antoine Cesar (178S--1878), through sixty years of indefatigable labour, contributed more than five hundred memoirs, works of noto on mineralogy and electricity. His father, Alexandre Edmond (18201891), was the author of so many memoirs that they constitute practically a history of the relations of optics to electricity through tho past fifty years. Henri Becquerel, the son, was subjected to the • training and influent of these honoured men, and it is little wonder, then, that, through heredity and environment, ho shculd bbar the face of one who sends his soul into the invisible—for that, in good solid truth is what every true experimenter literally does. In due time he succeeded to the Professorship of Physics, the chair of his father, and began his work in their laboratory in the quaint old home of Cuvier in the Jardin des Plantes—'a laboratory to which I had gone,' he says, 'from the time I was able to walk.' There he wrought nobly for the credit of his name, until Rontgen's discovery of the X-rays initiated an investigation which culminated in the disvorey of the Becquerel rays aud radio-activity.

EMINENT FIRE BRICADE LEADER. CAPTAIN SHAW. London, August 26. Sir Eyre Massey Shaw,, formerly Captain of the London Fire Brigade, is dead. For thirty years, from. 18G1 to 1891, Captain Shaw was Chief of the Metropolitan Firo Brigade, London, and camo almost to typify in English eyes the noble and heroic of the fire-fighting service. W. S. Gilbert placed him in the Gilbert-Sullivan opera "lolanthe," in which tho Queen of the Fairies sings:— 0 Captain Shaw, typo of True Love kept , under, Could thy Brigade, with cold cascade, quench my great Love, I wonder. In 1891 he retired from the leadership of the London Brigade, and was made Sir Eyre Massey Shaw; and in 1592 became a Freeman of the City of London. . He was born at Ballymore, County Cork, Ireland, in 1830, and was educated at Trinity College. In earlier life ho was Captain of the North Cork Rifles and Chief of the Belfast Fire Brigade. Ho has written on "Firo Protection," "Fires in Theatres," and kindred subjects.