[Ads-l] Antedating of "Infrared"

[Shapiro, Fred]

The OED's first use of the term "infrared" is dated 1881.  The letter below, which I am not sure where I got it from, traces it back to 1874.

Fred Shapiro



In “Herschel and the Puzzle of Infrared” (May–June 2012), Jack White mentions that it is not known who coined the term “infrared.” This mystery caught my attention. A Google Books search for “infra-red” finds two articles published in April 1874, both of which use the term in the context of Edmond Becquerel’s treatise on light. In that work, La Lumière (1867, vol. 1, p. 141), the French infra-rouge is used. One of the articles appeared in The Photographic News for Amateur Photographers (18:176), and is by M. de St. Florent; the other is uncredited but appeared in The British Journal of Photography (21:160) and is attributed to de St. Florent elsewhere in the volume. I have not been able to trace de St. Florent’s full name, but he published contemporaneously in Bulletin de la Société française de photographie. This author appears to be the coiner of “infra-red,” having translated it from French.

There are two curious sidelights to this story: Becquerel was the father of Henri Becquerel, for whom the unit of radioactivity was named; and the term “ultraviolet” was coined by William Herschel’s son John Herschel in 1840.

Gary Rosenberg

Academy of Natural Sciences

Drexel University

Philadelphia, PA


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