MADAME CURIE, NOBEL PRIZEWINNER.

White Ribbon, Volume 17, Issue 199, 18 January 1912, Page 1

MADAME CURIE, NOBEL PRIZEWINNER.

First Woman Investigator ot the Century. (BY W. FRANCIS AHERN.) Towards the close of last year a body of men. serious, erudite, and cautious (to whose ranks no woman was ever admitted), were engaged

in France debating, while all the world waited their decision as to w hether they would admit a certain Polish woman to the honour of their membership. The body was the French Academy of Sciences, and the woman was Madame Sklodowska Curie, the humble wife of an obscure professor in chemistry, who discovered radium and evolved the whole science of radio - activity

wnich threatens to overturn the theories of a hundred physicists and chemists, alive and dead. The right to he admitted to the Academy of Sciences was not of Madame Curie’s seeking, for she had persistently refused all honours and favours, and the Academy had certainly little to give her, since she had already achieved more than any member of that austere society

had, and her name was more renowned than those of any of the men who debated her legibility. The prestige of the enormous accomplishments of Madame Curie was great, for she stood at the turn-ing-point in science - the point where all fundamental theories of energy, light, and chemical reaction had to be discarded and remoulded. But the prestige of the Academy appeared greater than all this, for in the end Madame Curie was refused admittance, not because her accomplishments did not demand it, hut because she was a woman—that is all! In the light of the above controversy, it was a fitting recompense that this little Polish lady should receive the Nohel Prize for her work in the world of science.

The Discovery of Radium. In 1909 the Curies discovered the element that takes the world hack 1o Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, the metal with the incomprehensible radiations which seem to hum for ever and are yet noi fire, which have the weirdest medicinal qualities, and are poison to the flesh, which seem to contain tha secrets of eternal youth, and have led scientists to doubt the usefu’ness of all their classifications of matter, and to wonder vaguely if the outcome of it all will be a proof of the protoatomic theory. Certainly this matter of two children who came to Paris a few years ago and lived in poverty in the Latin Qju r m lias been the greatest corti hi.tur to the chemical and physical s« ierces in this generation, and the Academy of Sciences hesitated and refused to admit to its ranks this woman, who all the time lectures, experiments, and cares for her children, indifferent to their decision. When one is solving universal problems, honours that will be forgotten long before one’s name has ceased to he a thing to conjure with are lightly considered. Madame Curie is a Polish woman. Her father was a professor of physics in a Warsaw college. He was exceedingly poor, and every spare shilling he could spare from his salary went in apparatus for his laboratory. He could not afford an assistant, and as he was all day in his laboratory preparing his work.

he stayed late every night to clean up and wash his implements. When his little daughter, Sklodowska, could scarcely read she was pressed into service as a test-tube w’asher. and spent long days with her father doing the rough work in his experiments. and scouring the tubes and crucibles, as the students finished with them. -

An Unpaid Helper. The time came wdien she exhausted the possibilities of her father’s laboratory, and it was decided to send her to Paris. When she arrived there she found she did not have enough money to pay the tuition at the university, so she w r as forced to enter a cheap technical school. Her tutor was Professor Curie, a man of middle age; with some slight scientific distinction, hut no salary to speak of, and no great recognition. Her instructor soon discovered that Sklodowska had a faculty for absorbing everything he propounded, and a keen sense of analysis, which amounted almost to intuition. She soon outstripped all her fellow T -students, and Professor Pierre Curie appealed to his faculty for thepporerw r er to make her his assistant. They would not grant her any salary, however, and so she served as a helper once more at no salary, working constantly with the Profes s or at his experiments. Pierre Curie found new" employment in the Mechanic’s Institute, and his serious little helper went with him. Again she was unable to get a salaried position,and continued her work unpaid, and for Curie himself. Curie’s income was small in itself, hut they thought they could do better if they united their resources so they were married. They went to live in the old Latin Quarter, and continued their work under better conditions. They did not live any better, however; that w’is not their object. But they were able to spend so much more or. apparatus and chemicals.

Here Madame Curie secured a position as a lecturer in the Sevres normal schools. Again there was more money for scientific w T ork. In 1896 Henri Becquerel discovered by accident the emanation of light from uranium. He made an exposure of a plate without sufficient sunlight

in the presence of uranium, and, believing the plate was still good because so little light had reached it, he put it away to be used at a later date. For some reason he developed it, and found to his astonishment that a clear impression had been made —as clear as it could have been done in bright sunlight. He remembered thecircumstances under which his plate had been exposed, and immediately set to work on his study of the “ Becquerel ” rays.

(iuided by Intuition. When Madame Curie was first shown a bit of this uranium extracted from Bohemian pitchblende, she jumped to the conclusion that there w r ere other substances in the compound which could better account for these emanations. She told herhusband about it, and though her belief was founded on little more than intuition, he had come to have considerable faith in this scientific guessing of his wife, so they set to w F ork on pitchblende —the waste from the Bohemian uranium mines. First of all they isolated “ polinium," having the iridescent qualities of uranium: and so named because Mdme. Curie was a native of Poland. The next to come out of the meltingpot w’as actinum, and then radium — the metal which has revolutionised science.

At the Paris Exhibition of 1900, on a little shelf in the department of retrospective science, visitors found a substance marked “ Radium Pierre and Madame Curie.” There was nothing in the catalogue about it, and no descriptive card. For the discovery had been made after the catalogue was printed, and so little was know n about the discovery" or the discoverers that it was almost impossible to say anything about it.

On this last discovery, the Curies had spent more than £2OO, which meant a great deal to them. They found few people who were curious to know what they were doing, and when a few real scientists found their w ay from the exposition to the iittle laboratory behind the Pantheon, Pierre Curie was immensely flattered, and thought it gracious of his callers that they should pay him so much attention. They did not realise that their discovery really amounted to anything. The honours

that the world heaped upon them were all in the future, and Madame Curie had no premonition of the laurels that were coming and when they came the Curies were modest, almost resentful of the attention that was heaped on them. Radium was found to have the value in medicine of the X-rays. It was discovered that it was the most certain test for diamonds, that it would burn the skin through a metal box, and all sorts of insulation; that the rays of emanation were of a gaseous nature, like helium gas, which could he bottled; that they penetrated any substance, and gave any substance the qualities of radium, but at that time the quantity of radium in the world was infinitesimal ; it had not been isolated, and the scientists had not learned enough of it to bring its properties into juxtaposition to their time-honoured principles. Still, it was interesting, wonderfully fascinating, and Professor Curie was asked to lecture on its properties before the Sorbonne. Now honours Come Quickly.

After the lecture honours came rapidly. The fact that it cost over £400,000 to produce a pound of radium from 2500 tons of pitchblende deterred the poor chemistry instructor from putting great quantities of it before scientific bodies for their study. The announcement that there was more gold in seawater than radium in pitchblende led the general public to believe that it was such a rare and unattainable substance that it would never be of much practical service. They did not know how little of it would work miracles, and how little it would take to set the scientists to revising their chemical axioms.

In 1905 the Royal Society of Great Britain presented the Curies with medals of recognition, and Professor Curie was given a chair in the Sorbonne. In 1906 a blow fell on the Curie household, The professor was riding his bicycle, and was run over and carried home dead. Madame Curie, the impassive woman of science, made no demonstration. She shed no tears, but silently prepared for the obsequies, attended by her two little children, and in every way in her gnef was the same modest, quiet little woman she had been in

her scientific triumph. After the funeral she wasoffered her husband’s chair in the faculty of the University of the Sorbonne, while other honours were proferred her. As she had consistently refused all honours previously, all France half suspected she would refuse it,though no woman had ever been offered a place in the faculty of a University before. It was an unprecedented honour, and after much persuasion she accepted it. Thousands of people attended to hear her first lecture, and were surprised to see an emaciated little woman, with a portentious brow, but not the slightest symptom of Parisian chic” in her appearance. She is not beautiful. Hers is a plain Polish face, with the high cheek bones and round chin, and the only feature that impresses one is the high, rounded forehead. One woman only had ever occupied the position which Madame Curie had occupied, and she did not hold it officially. That woman was Novella, the beautiful daughter of Jean d’Andree, of the Bologna University. When Jean was ill his daughter lectured eloquently on canonic law, but Petrarch and some other youthful students paid so much attention to the fair face that they failed to take notes, so the city fathers forced her to lecture behind a curtain.

First a Mother a Scientist Afterwards. Madame Curie is not a sensationalist, however, either in appearance or manner. Her modesty is the first thing that impresses you, and her simplicity the second. She is a mother of two children, and a mother primarily. Secondarily, she is a scientist, and, last of all. a lecturer. She has been the chief experimenter in a field which has forced the chemists to put a question mark at the end of their long catalogue of elements, and has led many of them to consider the proto-atomic theory, that is the theory that all matter is essentially one, and that the division into elements is simply an arbitrary convenience, not base 1 upon chemical fact. For does not radium emanate light which penetrates objects which light has never penetrated ? And does not this emanation appear to have an actual corpc ocular character, as if it were made up of fine particles thrown oft from the

body of the metal ? All this is opposed to the vibratory theory of light, which has long been in good scientific standing and takes science back to the days of Newton, the physicist, who pronounced the corpuscular theories of light. Madame Curie is the woman who has erected a turning post at which science in its progress must stop and consider whether it is on the right road or not. Her intuition about the character of pitchblende has grown into a great question mark, which now materialises in tantalising fashion before the men who have been working out theories books of them —on basic principles of which none of them is certain, since ladium remains inexplicable. Madame Curie means much to France and to science at large. And yet she is onlya woman! — h\‘r/mm/r.