A cloudy day, a forgotten drawer, and a scientist who refused to ignore a strange result — that’s how the world accidentally stumbled into the terrifying and fascinating age of radioactivity.
Back in 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel was trying to understand a scientific mystery sparked by Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays a year earlier. Like many scientists of the era, Becquerel wondered if glowing materials could produce similar invisible rays.
