[Ads-l] Antedating of "Infrared"

[Mark Mandel]

Heh! I was a precocious reader. Before I knew what the word meant I thought
it was pronounced /ɪn'frerd/, as if the past participle of a (likewise
unknown) verb "*to infrare".

MAM

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020, 11:13 AM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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