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In 1900, the French scientist Paul Villard discovered a third neutrally charged and especially penetrating type of radiation from radium, and after he described it, Rutherford realized it must be yet a third type of radiation, which in 1903 Rutherford named gamma rays.
Within weeks after Röntgen revealed the first X-ray photographs in January 1896, news of the discovery spread throughout the world. Soon afterward, the penetrating properties of the rays began to be exploited for medical purposes, with no inkling that such radiation might have deleterious effects.
The term radioactivity was actually coined by Marie Curie, who together with her husband Pierre, began investigating the phenomenon recently discovered by Becquerel. The Curies extracted uranium from ore and to their surprise, found that the leftover ore showed more activity than the pure uranium.
Early studies of radioactivity relied on measuring ionization power or on observing the effects of radiation on photographic plates. In 1898 French physicists Pierre and Marie Curie discovered the strongly radioactive elements polonium and radium, which occur naturally in uranium minerals.
On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen at the University of Würzburg, discovered a new kind of radiation which he called X-rays. It could in time be identified as the short-wave, high frequency counterpart of Hertz’s waves.
In early 1896 the scientific community was fascinated with the recent discovery of a new type of radiation. Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen had found that the Crookes tubes he had been using to study cathode rays emitted a new kind of invisible ray that was capable of penetrating through black paper.
In November 1898, they reported the chemical separation of two unknown materials from the ore pitchblende, both highly radioactive — the first use of the word. André Debierne (1874–1949) discovered another radioactive element, actinium. What they had was unclear, but it was spectacularly unexpected.