"[1]
[Footnote 1: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XVII, 891. Cambridge
Edition.]
Just recently we have had opened up before us a still more intimate
inner-circle view of the composition of matter. H.G.J. Moseley, a young
man only twenty-six years of age, at an English university, devised a
method of examining the spectra of the various elements by means of the
X-rays. He found in this way that the principal lines of these various
spectra are connected by a remarkably simple arithmetical relationship;
for when the elements are arranged in the order of their atomic weights,
they show a graded advance from one to another equal to successive
additions of the same electrical unit charge, thus indicating a real
gamut of the elements that we can run up by adding or run down by
subtracting the same unit of electrical charge. It is pitiable to have
to record that next year this scientific genius was killed in the
ill-fated Gallipoli expedition against Turkey.
Thus in many fairly independent ways we are brought around to this same
idea of a common structure underlying all the many seeming diversities
manifested by what we call matter.
The phenomena of radioactivity were discovered accidentally in 1896 by
the French chemist Becquerel.
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