PURSUIT OF RADIUM

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 26, 30 December 1925, Page 11

PURSUIT OF RADIUM

STORY OF DISCOVERY. WONDERFUL WORK OF M. AND MADAME CURIE.

Twenty-seven years ago on Saturday, in a small laboratory in France, radium was discovered by Monsieur and Madanio Curio. To-day Madame Curie is working without her husband’s aid, but her eldest daughter, Mile. Irene Curie, is there to roplaco him. A woman of singularly noble character and of extraordinary scientific attainments, Mine. Curie, when interviewed by M. Raymond do Nys for Lg Petit Parisien, said:—“December 26, 1908, was the date of the final experiment which isolated radium.. It was not very warm that- day in the shed in the Rue Lhomond, where we carried on our researches.”

“Mine. Curie’s look is strangely faraway and dreamy,” lie writes. “Her eyes are the colour of steel and of periwinkle. The pupils are large and extraordinary dilated, seen behind her convex binocular glasses. “ ‘Tell me, will you, madame, of that poor shed which you have now replacetl with your well equipped laboratory.’ ” “A furtive softness came into Mine. Curie’s grave face. . “ ‘lt was a wooden shack, with a pitch .floor and a glass roof. The rain came in. The wind entered as if it were at home. The furniture and materials were scanty. AVe had some old pine tables, a cast-iron stove which was much too small, and no place to keep fuel. Then there was the blackboard, on which Pierre Curie wrote his figures and equations and did his calculations over and over again. “ ‘Long after wo left it I used to go back to the shed occassionally.. On my last visit, after my husband’s death and some weeks before it was torn down, the blackboard was still covered with his figures. It was a povertystricken workshop for the precious products which we handled. AVe were there from early in the morning, and ! often spent the entire day there, eatimr luncheon on the corner- of flic

table and returning after dinner. At night the shed ivas beautiful, with the radiating preparations standing on stools or on the tables. In the darkness they emitted a feeble light which penetrated into the shadows and filled us with ecstasy. We were very peaceful there until the day when success came, and with it those who “make” it, the autograph hunters and the journalists.’ “‘Have I been indiscreet, madame ?’ “ ‘No. But Pierre Curie, when wo won the Nobel Prize together in 1903, often had the feeling that your confreres were. He wrote to a friend: “They even reproduced my daughter’s conversation with her nurse and told about the black and white cat which we have at home.” j “ ‘I shall not do that.’ j “No. But I shall note, while Mine. ! Curie silently reviews her memories, her dress, as simple as a black smock, and the nudity of the room in which

sh© received me. You might cell it a nun’s cell. The table is not ■wormeaten, like those in the old shed. But tho chairs aro all of wood, of hard, very hard, wood. “Mine. Curie prefers—at her laboratory as well as at home—whatever will J wear well. In the vestibule of the Radium Institute, a notice which she has signed in her own slow, careful hand, without any flourishes, adjures the pupils and- assistants to be saving of materials. Now rich, she wont for a long time to the school of poverty. If she had been willing to go to the expense of a motto she would have chosen this: ‘Work; Economise. 5 “ ‘As a student,’ she said, ‘I had to content myself with a tiny room, niggardly furnished, and like so many other women have known what solitude is behind four hostile walls. I had my books and my work. Then, after my marriage, we _ had for four years the little lodging in the Rue do la Glaciere, where you have a view

over the big gardens. Our furniture was given to us by relatives. I have it still. I kept house and did the cooking.’ “ ‘Did you wash the dishes, carry the coal and do the marketing ?’ “ ‘I did everything. But housekeeping, was not any harder than the work at the laboratory, where, with the aid of an iron rod, I had to stir in earthen or metal pots the products which.we were analysing. As to doing the marketing, there was nothing humiliating in that, even when I had to say to the butcher: “You know, I don’t care lor

the best cuts. A good stew will suit I my purse better.’ ” Mme. Curie was bom in Warsaw on November 7, 1876, the daughter of an impecunious college pro'fessor. She went to Paris when a young woman and took her first degree from the University of Paris in 1893. She becamo associated with Professor Pierre Curie in scientific research and married the professor shortly afterward. Their discovery of radium was given to the world in 1898. Seven years later the world was shocked to learn one morning that M. Curie had been run over by a Paris dray and killed. Mme. Curie succeeded to his professorship of general physics in the University of Paris. Mme. Curie is now fifty-eight years of age and has given more than thirty years of her life to the pursuit and study of radium. She lives at the Institute Curie in Paris on the salary of a teacher at the Sorbonne. She has made fifteen millionaires in America alone, and it is estimated that her discoveries and work saved the lives of 50,000 wounded men during the war.