A new type of ray (following soon after the discovery of X rays, alpha, beta, and gamma rays), which Rene Blondlot, an eminent French physicist at the University of Nancy, believed he had discovered in 1903. This was the year in which Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery and investigation of radioactivity. Wilhelm Rontgen had recently discovered X rays. Physicists across the world were alert to the possibility of undiscovered rays. At the same time the instrumentation for discovery and analysis of such phenomena was very crude and this made such work difficult and liable to error. Blondlot had been investigating the nature of X rays particles or electromagnetic waves when he found another type of ray and began to sort out its properties. N-rays, as he called them N for Nancy were emitted by X ray generators, some materials such as tempered steel, and by Nernst glowers. They passed through wood, paper, mica, quartz, and thin sheets of some metals and were absorbed by water and rock salt. They could be bent by aluminum and quartz prisms and dispersed into a wide spectrum. Another Nancy scientist, medical physicist Augustin Charpentier, showed that contracting muscles, active nerves, and the central nervous system all emitted N-rays. Other physicists, excited by the appearance of a new field of research, joined in the research. Some reported success, and soon a series of papers confirming and extending Blondlot’s discovery appeared. Others failed to find any evidence of N-rays, some attributing their lack of success to inadequate technique, some questioning whether the rays existed. Most of the successful experimenters were in and around Nancy and had the benefit of Blondlot’s advice and guidance. Another group in Paris, led by Jean Becquerel and A. Broca, also turned to Blondlot for help. All those based in countries other than France were unsuccessful; some were skeptical and others felt that they lacked the necessary expertise. In 1904 the French Academy of Sciences honored Blondlot for the whole of his works, with a special mention of his new ray at the end of the citation.
When R. W. Wood, a physics professor at Johns Hopkins and an authority on physical optics, failed to reproduce Blondlot’s observations, he visited Nancy to check out Blondlot’s work. Blondlot’s detectors were either spark gaps or phosphorescent strips. An increase in brightness detected either by eye or on a photographic plate indicated the presence of N-rays. Wood could not detect the claimed effects. He then removed the aluminum prism in one experiment and replaced the N-ray emitter by a nonemitter in another, in both cases undetected by Blondlot and his coworkers. In neither case were the Nancy scientists aware of any change. Wood believed that Blondlot and other N-ray enthusiasts had deluded themselves and published his conclusions in Nature, September 1904. Despite this, N-rays still had a short vogue among some, but by no means all, French physicists.