Thread by @marinamaral2

#OnThisDay in 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive compound radium chloride.

“(...) When Marie continued her analysis of the bismuth fractions, she found that every time she managed to take away an amount of bismuth, a residue with greater activity was left.

At the end of June 1898, they had a substance that was about 300 times more strongly active than uranium. In the work they published in July 1898, they write, “We thus believe that the substance that we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal never known before...

... akin to bismuth in its analytic properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we suggest that it should be called polonium after the name of the country of origin of one of us.” It was also in this work that they used the term radioactivity for the first time.

After another few months of work, the Curies informed the l’Académie des Sciences, on December 26, 1898, that they had demonstrated strong grounds for having come upon an additional very active substance that behaved chemically almost like pure barium.

They suggested the name of radium for the new element.

(...) Sometimes they could not do their processing outdoors, so the noxious gases had to be let out through the open windows. The only furniture were old, worn pine tables where Marie worked with her costly radium fractions.

Since they did not have any shelter in which to store their precious products the latter were arranged on tables and boards.

Marie could remember the joy they felt when they came into the shed at night, seeing “from all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes” of the products of their work.“

(...) Pierre was ill. His legs shook so that at times he found it hard to stand upright. He was in much pain. He consulted a doctor who diagnosed neurasthenia and prescribed strychnine. And the skin on Marie’s fingers was cracked and scarred.

They evidently had no idea that radiation could have a detrimental effect on their general state of health. Pierre, who liked to say that radium had a million times stronger radioactivity than uranium, often carried a sample in his waistcoat pocket to show his friends.

Marie liked to have a little radium salt by her bed that shone in the darkness. The papers they left behind them give off pronounced radioactivity (to this day).

If today at the Bibliothèque Nationale you want to consult the three notebooks in which their work from December 1897 and the three following years is recorded, you have to sign a certificate that you do so at your own risk.

In fact, it takes 1,620 years before the activity of radium is reduced to a half.

In view of the potential for the use of radium in medicine, factories began to be built in the USA for its large-scale production. The question came up of whether or not Marie and Pierre should apply for a patent for the production process.

They were both against doing so.

Pure research should be carried out for its own sake and must not become mixed up with industry’s profit motive. Researchers should be disinterested and make their findings available to everyone.

Marie and Pierre were generous in supplying their fellow researchers, Rutherford included, with the preparations they had so laboriously produced. They furnished industry with descriptions of the production process.

In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded half the Nobel Prize in Physics. The citation was, “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.”

nobelprize.org/prizes/themes/…

In 1906 Pierre Curie died in a Paris street accident. Marie won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium, using techniques she invented for isolating radioactive isotopes.

Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. In 1920 she founded the Curie Institute in Paris, and in 1932 the Curie Institute in Warsaw; both remain major centers of medical research.

Led by Curie, the Institute produced four more Nobel Prize winners, including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.

smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ma…

Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, France, of aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during WWI.

t.ly/yO47

Prints and posters: redbubble.com/people/marinam…

Marie Curie’s chemistry laboratory forms, with her office, the historical heart of the Musée Curie. This room, directly overlooking the garden of the Institut du Radium, has housed the research of the director for the last 20 years of her life.

artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/marie-…

If you enjoy this thread, please share it. Thank you!

Promptly after the war started, Marie attempted to donate her gold Nobel Prize medals to the war effort but the French National Bank refused to accept them. She then bought war bonds, using her Nobel Prize money.

She said: “I am going to give up the little gold I possess. I shall add to this the scientific medals, which are quite useless to me. There is something else: by sheer laziness, I had allowed the money for my second Nobel Prize to remain in Stockholm in Swedish crowns.

This is the chief part of what we possess. I should like to bring it back here and invest it in war loans. The state needs it.

Only, I have no illusions: this money will probably be lost."