Incoming links: Uranium ore
Becquerel's rays Created 2024-08-14 Updated 2025-07-16
These must have been gamma rays.
Just before he left Cambridge for Montreal in 1898, Rutherford conducted a simple, systematic experiment to study the absorption of rays from uranium. [...] In 1901 he determined that Becquerel's rays are indeed electromagnetic rays. He called them γ (gamma) rays.
This terminology is used e.g. in Marie Curie's Polonium paper:
Some minerals containing uranium and thorium (pitchblende, chalcolite, uranite) are very active from the point of view of the emission of Becquerel rays.
Gamma spectroscopy of a Uranium ore
. Source. Several points of the Uranium 238 decay chain are clearly visible.
Gamma spectroscopy Created 2024-08-14 Updated 2025-07-16
Gamma spectroscopy of a Uranium ore
. Source. Several points of the Uranium 238 decay chain are clearly visible. Jáchymov Updated 2025-07-16
"Joachimsthal" is the German for it. Note how it is just near the modern frontier between Germany and the Czech Republic.
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uranium&oldid=1243907294#Pre-discovery_use:
In the early 19th century, the world's only known sources of uranium ore were these mines.
Apparently the region was a silver mining center:
Starting in the late Middle Ages, pitchblende was extracted from the Habsburg silver mines in Joachimsthal, Bohemia (now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic), and was used as a coloring agent in the local glassmaking industry