after the discovery of ionizing radiation in 1895 when vilhelm runin captured an X-ray of his wife's hand scientists quickly began to unlock an entirely new world based around the phenomenon however nearly two decades later there was still an interesting debate regarding the nature of ionizing radiation in the atmosphere most scientists at the time believed that these high energy Rays came from the ground where radioactive substances released all sorts of ionizing radiation into the air however an experiment done by Theodore wolf in 1910 LED scientists to question this theory in his experiment he used an electroscope
to measure levels of ionizing radiation at both the bottom and at the top of the Eiffel Tower and what he found was that the amount of radiation at the top of the tower was lower than at the ground but it was unexpectedly higher than it should have been based on the Earth being the sole contributor to the race in the atmosphere this attracted the attention of many scientists including an Austrian scientist named Victor France hes who had just received his PhD from the University of Vienna and had begun working as an assistant at The Institute
for radium research at the vienes Academy of Sciences for his experiments with atmospheric radiation hes got a modified electroscope from their manufacturer that was specifically designed to operate under reduced pressure which would therefore allow it to operate at high altitudes this solved a common earlier problem many scientists studying the topic faced which was that electroscopes would become defective when they mounted them on balloons and sent them high into the atmosphere hes also wanted to mount his electroscope to a balloon for his tests but he decided to take it a step further and personally mount a
hot air balloon and fly with the electroscope to make sure it made precise measurements during his series of flights between 1911 and 1912 hes went as high as 5.3 km or 3.3 mil at a huge risk to himself he made his flights both during the day and night to get as accurate a set of data as possible what he found from these experiments was that as he increased from sea level to an altitude of about 1 km or 6 miles ionizing radiation did in fact decrease but beyond that point radiation started to increase all the
way up until he reached his maximum height of 5.3 km the radiation increased so much in fact that at his Peak height of flight the radiation level was measured to be approximately twice as much as the radiation measured at sea level his conclusion from this trend was that the major source of ionizing radiation a especially at Heights above 1 km above sea level did not come from the Earth but rather from outer space hess's pioneering work was confirmed further in the coming years by two scientists Robert milikin in 1925 and Carl David Anderson in 1932
and again in 1936 migan experimentally proved that the ionizing radiation existed as particles when he showed that the Rays could be deflected by Earth's magnetic field he coined these ionizing particles as cosmic rays Anderson who studied under milikin until 1930 discovered two new particles by studying cosmic rays the positron and the muon H and Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in 1936 for their discoveries if you enjoyed this video please consider liking and subscribing click here if you want to see more scientific progress made during this time period thank you for watching and I will see
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