Hoaxes and Blunders in the Early History of Radioactivity

In 1835 the French Académie des Sciences began to publish its weekly journal Comptes rendus intended to establish priority and publish rapidly articles and reports submitted to the Académie. For the historian it is a source of publications involving deliberate hoaxes and unintentional blunders, which Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir has characterized as “pathological science.” We have selected some of the most flagrant of these in the field of the then relatively new field of radioactivity—N-rays, spurious transmutations, spurious elements, radioactivity induced by solar radiation, and bioradioactivity.