A timeline of events on nuclear chemistry between 1896 and 1986, with inset images of Henri Becquerel, Marie and Pierre Curie at work in their laboratory, equipment used by Hahn and Strassmann, Enrico Fermi, clouds from the atom bomb test, and the Idaho Testing Station. Events in the timeline: 1896 - French scientist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity in uranium. 1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie discover the radioactive elements radium and polonium. By making radium available to other scientists, the Curies helped advance the study of radioactivity. 1905 - Albert Einstein’s mass-energy equation, E = mc 2, provides the basis for nuclear power. 1932 - First atom smasher (subatomic particle accelerator) is used by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. 1938 - Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann produce nuclear fission by bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons. 1942 - The first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction is achieved by Enrico Fermi’s research group in Chicago. 1945 - United States explodes first atom bomb in a test near Alamagordo, New Mexico. 1951 - Electricity from nuclear fission produced at National Reactor Testing Station, Idaho. 1960 - Willard Libby wins the Nobel Prize for developing carbon-14 dating. The technique became widely used in archaeology and geology. 1986 - Partial meltdown occurs at Chernobyl power plant.