In Susan Quinn’s fully dimensional portrait, we come at last to know this complicated, passionate, brilliant woman. From the stubborn sixteen-year-old studying science at night while working as a governess, to her romance and scientific partnership with Pierre Curie – an extraordinary marriage of equals- we fell her defeats as well as her successes: her rejection by the French Academy, her unbearable grief at Pierre’s untimely and gruesome death, and her retreat into a love affair with a married fellow scientist, causing a scandal which almost cost her the second Nobel Prize.
Radium marie curie and pierre full#
From family documents and a private journal only recently made available, Susan Quinn at last tells the full human story. Despite these achievements, or perhaps because of her fame, she has remained a saintly, unapproachable genius. In 1911 she won an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for isolating new radioactive elements. “One hundred years ago, Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, for which she won the Nobel Prize in physics. But polonium and radium were differentįrom the known elements in one big wayeach was strongly radioactive.Marie Curie, A Life, by Susan Quinn, Da Capo Press, 1995 The substance they named poloniumīehaved chemically about the same as an element that was already known,īismuth, and the substance they named radium had about the Not one but two new radioactive elements. Then they would make more separations, again and again, tracking down the unknown element by its radioactivity. Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the worlds treasures online.
The trick they invented was to find which of the separated parts was most radioactive, using the Curie electrometer to make precise measurements. After the materials were separated into different types of compounds, the Curies used a new method of chemical analysis. For example, a particular element might dissolve in an acid, which they could pour off, leaving other elements behind in a sludge at the bottom of the pot. Marie Mattingly Meloney, editor of the women’s journal The Delineator, organized the campaign to gift Curie with one gram of radium.She successfully framed the element that Marie and Pierre Curie had discovered in 1898 as having utility beyond the lab bench, suggesting it might ease the suffering of millions. Pierre Curie was instrumental with Marie Curie in discovering both polonium and radium, but besides his several joint papers with her, he also published alone. He Curies used standard chemical procedures to separate the different substances in pitchblende. Pierre, excited by his wifes idea, joined her search. She was convinced that a careful analysis of pitchblende would uncover a new radioactive element.
She found that thorium compounds also gave off ∻ecquerel rays.Īrie discovered that the mineral pitchblende was more radioactive than could be accounted for by the uranium or thorium it contained. Trying to see what was so special about uranium, she tested minerals containing other elements.
As she measured the rays from different uranium compounds, she discovered that the more uranium atoms in a substance, the more intense the rays the substance gave off. Great care was needed to get reliable numbers. The 1909 medal was awarded to Marie and her husband Pierre (posthumously), and was given in the field of chemistry for the discovery of radium. Marie used this ∼urie electrometer to make exact measurements of the tiny electrical changes that uranium rays caused as they passed through air. Marie Curie was lucky to have at hand just the right kind of instrumenta very sensitive and precise deviceinvented about 15 years earlier by Pierre Curie and his brother, Jacques. When uranium rays passed through the air near an electrical measuring instrument, he found, the instrument detected a difference. O study the rays, Marie Curie used a property that Becquerel had discovered.
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