THE TWIN DISCOVERERS OF RADIUM

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 136, 5 March 1938, Page 8 (Supplement)

THE TWIN DISCOVERERS OF RADIUM

The Careers Of The Curies

A dejected little group of people waited on the platform of a Warsaw station. The centre of the group was a dark-haired girl of twenty with remarkably bright eyes. From the shadows two plain-clothes policemen watched her. Marie Sklodovska was, in the eyes of the police, a dangerous revolutionary. But the chief of police had a kindness for her father, so she escaped from Siberia. But she had been told she must leave Poland at once, writes the Hon. Mrs. Francis Lascelles. ’lt was a fearful blow for her father, as he was just about to see a cherished ambition fulfilled. In a few months his daughter would have taken a brilliant scientific degree at the University of which he was a professor.

“I will never come back to Warsaw until Poland'is independent 1” ’ cried Marie fiercely, as the Cracow train moved out.

She kept her vow, though little could she guess then under what triumphant circumstances she would return to Warsaw thirty-two years later. There was nothing to interest Marie Sklodovska at Cracow, then in Austrian territory, and she soon found herself in Paris, seeking cheap lodgings in the tortuous Latin Quarter, It was the Sorbonne, the celebrated University of Paris, which had lured her to the French capital. Marie became a dilgient student of science and chemistry. In her spare time she taught in small kindergarten schools, in order to earn money for her fees. Even so, there were days when poverty forced her to attend her classes without breakfast or dinner. One afternoon in the laboratory Marie worked beside Pierre Curie, a young physicist who was already making a name for himself. Pierre had not been talking to her ten minutes when he decided that she was the only human being he had ever met who really seemed able to converse in an intelligent manner. Their interest in each other ripened rapidly. They became engaged. In 1895 they were married. In every respect the union was a perfect one. They were magnificent lovers and magnificent workmates, a rare combination. People wondered as they watched this unique scientific partnership of man and wife, while the couple -worked through their complicated experiments side by side. For what were the two tense searchers looking? In 189 G the famous Bequerel discovered that the element uranium emitted radiation, which blackened photographic plates; and it soon became known that the Curies were interested and were making further experiments. One of these, made by Madame Curie, produced a totally unknown substance. She called it polonium, in memory of her native Poland. That was in the spring of 1898. Together the Curies began an exhaustive investigation of polonium. Their friends saw little or nothing of them that summer, for they had literally shut

themselves behind locked doors. Winter approached, and the Curies announced to the world the discovery of radium. The news stirred the whole scientific world profoundly. _ Overnight the Curies became celebrities.

But that did not interfere with their work. Nothing could drag Marie from her laboratory between the hours of 9.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m.—not even the President of France himself.

A caller, if sufficiently insistent, was ushered into the “lab,” and rnadame would “receive,” dressed in her stained white overall, returning to her apparatus after a brief greeting, and continuing the conversation as she bent over her work.

The stories of her extraordinary patience while experimenting are legion. When Pierre was tired and exhausted and ready to abandon an apparently fruitless line of research she would work on unperturbed; until, watching her, he-would grow ashamed of himself and go back to work. Pierre Curie was appointed Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne, a greatly coveted post, but he refused the post unless Marie was allowed to come and work beside him in the great Sorbonne laboratories.

Happy, famous, and respected, the Curies lived a strange but almost ideal existence. Then, one spring morning, in April, 1908, Pierre was run down in the street by a heavy dray. He was dead when his wife reached him.

At first, they say, when Marie saw the body, she lost the power of speech. After such a crushing blow few women would have had the courage to "carry on”; but Marie Curie was unconquerable. The Sorbonne appointed her to succeed Pierre in the Chair of Physics. Although no woman professor had ever been known in Paris before, and the path might be made hard for her, Marie accepted. Meanwhile, she continued her experiments. In 1910 she was able to announce triumphantly to the scientific world that she now knew how to separate polonium and radium. In the following year she received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

The Radium Institute was created in Paris, and Madame Curie took control of the research department. Her work for the Allies during the war, in organising the radiological services of the hospitals, was Invaluable. No one could have replaced the little widow. Then came 1919, and perhaps the greatest moment of Marie Curie’s whole career. The Faculty'of Warsaw University invited her to take the post of Professor of Radiology in the home of her student escapades. With joy in her heart she returned to her beloved Poland, now a nation once more. She had been born in 1867, and she was fond of telling friends lightly that she would die at sixty-seven. So, curiously enough, it happened; she died in July, 1934, and the whole world mourned the passing of a great benefactor of the race.