Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium: 1898
1898 · event
In 1898, in a converted shed in Paris with a leaking roof, a young physicist from Warsaw measured something that did not add up. Marie Sklodowska Curie was studying the rays given off by uranium, discovered two years earlier by Henri Becquerel, and found that a uranium ore called pitchblende was far more active than its uranium content could explain. The obvious conclusion was that the ore contained something else, present in tiny quantities and far more powerful. Working with her husband Pierre, she announced polonium in July of that year, naming it after her occupied homeland, and radium in December.
Proving it took four years of physical labour. The Curies obtained tonnes of residue from a mine in Bohemia and processed it by hand, stirring boiling vats with an iron rod in an unheated workspace, to obtain a tenth of a gram of radium chloride. Marie coined the word radioactivity for the phenomenon and showed that it is a property of the atom itself, which broke the assumption that atoms were unchanging.
She shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and received a second, in Chemistry, in 1911, and remains the only person to have won in two different sciences. During the First World War she equipped vehicles with X ray apparatus and drove to the front to help surgeons locate shrapnel, training women as operators.
Marie Curie died in 1934 of a blood disease almost certainly caused by her exposure, at a time when nobody had understood the risk. Her notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead lined boxes. Radium therapy, radiography and the whole science of nuclear physics grew from the work in that shed, and she is buried in the Pantheon in Paris, the first woman placed there for her own achievements.