Becquerel, Professor Rutherford, and by
many other experimenters after them. All the methods which have
already been mentioned in principle have been employed in order to
discover whether they were electrified, and, if so, by electricity of
what sign, to measure their speed, and to ascertain their degree of
penetration.
The general result has been to distinguish three sorts of radiations,
designated by the letters alpha, beta, gamma.
The alpha rays are positively charged, and are projected at a speed
which may attain the tenth of that of light; M.H. Becquerel has shown
by the aid of photography that they are deviated by a magnet, and
Professor Rutherford has, on his side, studied this deviation by the
electrical method. The relation of the charge to the mass is, in the
case of these rays, of the same order as in that of the ions of
electrolysis. They may therefore be considered as exactly analogous to
the canal rays of Goldstein, and we may attribute them to a material
transport of corpuscles of the magnitude of atoms. The relatively
considerable size of these corpuscles renders them very absorbable.
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