The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  And yet, in a funny way, the knee injury was the best thing that ever happened to his career. It might sound strange to say that someone was born to be a bullpen catcher, but Moe Berg was. With his cerebral approach to the game, he proved a perfect mentor for young pitchers, and the lazy pace of bullpen life suited him perfectly. He didn’t need to warm up or practice much, and could lounge around the clubhouse and leaf through “live” newspapers instead. (Fans would even bring foreign-language editions to the ballpark for him.) He also had plenty of time to gab with sportswriters, who found Berg irresistible—funny, chatty, highly quotable. The press fawned over him, and why not? Here was a big, lumbering, unibrowed catcher from Newark who’d attended Princeton and the Sorbonne and spoke seventeen languages. It made for scintillating copy.

  Most columns about “Professor Berg” focused on his eccentricities: that he could read hieroglyphics and recite Edgar Allan Poe’s entire poetic oeuvre; that he ordered applesauce instead of steaks or sandwiches for lunch; that he bought dictionaries “to see if they were complete”; that he traveled with eight identical black suits and never wore anything else; that he once polished off a book on non-Euclidean space-time in the bullpen during a doubleheader in Detroit, then called on Albert Einstein the next time he visited Princeton to discuss the matter further. (One writer thereby dubbed the catcher “Einstein in knickers.”)

  Altogether, Berg got more column inches than any benchwarmer in baseball history—something his more talented peers didn’t always appreciate. In one of the all-time great putdowns in sports, a writer once asked a teammate about Berg’s ability to speak so many languages. The teammate, having heard the question perhaps one time too many, scoffed, “Yeah, well, he can’t hit in any of ’em.”

  Berg often played a curmudgeon for reporters, but he secretly adored media attention, in part because it won him several perks. For instance, he was one of just three big-leaguers selected to visit Japan in 1932 for a series of goodwill workshops on baseball. He taught the youngsters there the finer points of the sport: defending first-and-third situations, forcing ground balls with low pitches to set up double plays, even handling spitballs. For their part the Japanese players adored Berg and thought his dark complexion—and his unibrow—quite exotic. Berg later called Japan “heaven for umpires,” because the players there were so polite to them.

  The trip to Asia also gave Berg an excuse to travel more, and when his fellow ballplayers sailed back home, he headed west instead, touring Korea, China, Indochina, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Holland, France, and England. He no doubt returned to spring training out of shape again, but this time no one cared, since he had a fresh larder of tales to regale teammates and reporters with.

  Privately, though, one leg of the trip disturbed him. On arriving in Berlin in late January 1933, he immediately picked up several newspapers. Every headline was the same: Germany had a new chancellor, a forty-three-year-old firebrand named Adolf Hitler. Berg then spent the day watching crowds of jubilant Nazis celebrate in the streets. Upon returning home, he told anyone who’d listen that Europe was headed for grief.

  CHAPTER 2

  Near Misses and Big Hits

  Irène Curie wished that it would hurt less each time—that the pain and humiliation would fade. But every time she missed out on a major discovery, she felt the same sting.

  Irène was the daughter of the pioneering physicists Marie and Pierre Curie. She was born in 1897, during one of their most productive periods, and often had to compete with their research for attention—something that didn’t come naturally to a shy, retiring girl who sometimes hid behind doors rather than talk to houseguests. (One of the horrors of her childhood occurred when her parents won the Nobel Prize in 1903 for work on radioactivity and a mob of photographers stormed their house.) It didn’t help that Marie, despite her many wonderful qualities, was a distant parent. Polish-born, she’d lost her own mother at age seven and felt uncomfortable with intimacy. Irène and her younger sister were largely raised by their paternal grandfather, and even when the girls clamored for Marie’s affection—clinging to her skirt at night when she returned home late from the lab—she rarely hugged or touched them.

  Marie grew even more remote after a family tragedy in 1906. In April of that year, while playing at a friend’s house one afternoon, Irène received word that she’d have to stay there for a few days. No one explained why. Finally, late that night, Marie stopped by and mentioned something about Pierre hurting his head. “He will be away for a while,” Marie said, which Irène didn’t understand. Marie’s siblings from Poland soon arrived, as did Pierre’s brother, confusing the young girl further. It turned out that a carriage had struck and killed her father, which no one told her until after the funeral. The death might have knitted some families together, but Marie dealt with her grief by working even longer hours, and for years afterward she refused to say Pierre’s name aloud.

  Adolescence proved no easier for Irène. When she was twelve, Marie enrolled her in an alternative school where she taught math and science on Thursdays. The ten or so students there studied sculpture and Chinese as well, and participated in several sports. (No mere egghead, Marie believed strongly in physical education; the Curies swam and hiked and had a trapeze in their backyard.) The school sounded idyllic, a free-spirited alternative to the stuffy French education system, but Marie held her daughter to exacting standards. She once caught Irène daydreaming instead of working on a math problem, and when Irène admitted she didn’t know the answer, Marie barked, “How can you be so stupid?” and flung Irène’s notebook out the window. Irène had to trudge down two flights of stairs to retrieve it—and meanwhile solved the math problem in her head.

  The years 1910–1911 were especially wretched in the Curie household. First, Irène’s beloved grandfather died. Then a scandal involving Marie exploded in the French tabloids. She’d been carrying on with a married man, physicist Paul Langevin, and a newspaper printed excerpts of their love letters. (“When I know that you are with [your wife],” Marie wrote, “my nights are atrocious, I can’t sleep.”) One day the wife threatened to murder Marie in the street, and Langevin challenged the newspaper publisher to a duel. As things became increasingly sordid, both Marie and Langevin suffered humiliations, but Marie, as a woman, suffered more. Mobs threw rocks at her windows and screamed, “Go back to Poland!” Then, when Marie won a second, surprise Nobel Prize a few weeks later, the Swedish Academy asked her not to attend the award ceremony, to spare their king the embarrassment of shaking hands with an adulteress. Marie defied them and attended anyway, but grew so despondent over the scandal that she contemplated suicide. Unable to concentrate on research, much less raising children, she sent Irène and her sister to live with relatives.

  It took the cataclysm of World War I to forge a real bond between mother and daughter. In August 1914, Irène and her sister were on holiday in L’Arcouest, a fishing village in northern France sometimes called “Port Science” for its popularity among researchers. Marie planned to join them in a few weeks. But as soon as the war broke out, she dropped those plans and turned all her attention to her precious gram of radium. She’d isolated this speck of radioactive element 88 after several years of backbreaking labor, boiling down eight tons of mineral ore in a cauldron in a shed. It was the basis of all her research, and frankly the most precious thing in the world to her. So instead of going to Port Science to get her daughters, Marie made a run to Bordeaux, in southwest France, to hide the radium from the invading Germans, hauling it in a special lead-lined case that weighed 130 pounds, roughly sixty thousand times more than the radium it was shielding.

  Eventually France became stable enough for the Curie daughters to return to Paris. And here’s where Irène finally managed to win her mother’s respect. Drawing on her knowledge of science, Marie established a series of X-ray stations near the front lines to help surgeons locate shrapnel
in soldiers’ bodies; she also developed a fleet of vans with mobile X-ray units for the battlefield, which the army nicknamed “Little Curies.” Irène insisted on volunteering for the work, and she proved so adept at it that, at age nineteen, she found herself running a field station in Belgium. She was close enough to the trenches to hear gunfire, and despite the risks to her health—the equipment was poorly shielded at best—she X-rayed thousands of soldiers and repaired the machines when they broke down. She also joined Marie on several harrowing trips to the front in the Little Curie vans. “We were often not sure of being able to press forward,” Marie later recalled, “to say nothing of the uncertainties of finding lodging and food.” But the hardship bonded them, and by war’s end Marie could finally see her daughter as a real, independent woman.

  Incredibly, in between trips to the front, Irène found time to earn a degree in physics from the Sorbonne. At war’s end, she joined Marie’s institute as a doctoral student and assistant researcher. (At the time, over half the scientists there were women, both because Marie made it a point to support women in science and because so many young men had died in the trenches.) Irène thrived in this atmosphere, and by the early 1920s had enough confidence to take on an assistant of her own—and, with him, to defy her mother for the first time in her life.

  Frédéric Joliot couldn’t believe his luck. When the war ended, he was just another junior scientist struggling to find a job, largely because he hadn’t attended the “right” schools in snooty Paris. So when he applied to work at Marie Curie’s institute, he hadn’t gotten his hopes up. But as an outsider herself, Marie decided to take a flyer on this tall, thin youngster with a shark fin of a nose. (It helped that her former lover, Langevin, had recommended Joliot on the strongest terms.) The job offer stunned Joliot: as a child he used to clip out pictures of Curie from magazines, and he still revered her. He accepted in a heartbeat. Marie then introduced Joliot to his new boss, Irène.

  The youngsters fell into a comfortable partnership, with Irène focusing on chemistry and Joliot on physics. Marie approved of this relationship, as it echoed the division of labor that had proved so successful for her and her late husband. What she didn’t approve of—and was in fact stunned to learn—was that Frédéric also had his eye on a romantic relationship with the green-eyed Irène and had been courting her behind Marie’s back.

  Even more astounding, Irène reciprocated Joliot’s feelings. It was a hopeless match, really, given their polar temperaments. He was impulsive, vain, outgoing, and well groomed, always wearing an impeccable white coat in the lab; she was reserved, stoic, and frumpy, sometimes taking naps right on the floor. But they bonded, deeply, over several things—losing fathers at a young age; a passion for social justice; and especially a love of nuclear science. You can see this most clearly in their lab notebooks, which at times read like scientific arias: one of them might start writing up an experiment and the other would pick up the thought midsentence, extending the duet in a different handwriting. After a few years of such intimacy Irène finally accepted Joliot’s proposal of marriage, and on the morning of October 9, 1926, Joliot wedded and bedded his bride—or at least the former. Following the nuptials, they spent the afternoon in the lab.

  Suspicious of the match, Marie Curie often introduced Joliot to others not as her son-in-law, but as “the man who married Irène.” Among other things, she felt miffed that Irène and Joliot had changed their surnames to “Joliot-Curie” after marrying. On the one hand, the hyphenation seemed progressive and feminist, a declaration of equality. But cynics noted that Frédéric gained a whole lot more out of attaching “Curie” to his name than Irène did in attaching “Joliot” to hers. As a result, some colleagues began referring to Joliot as “Irène’s gigolo.” They did so both to put the upstart Joliot in his place and to insult Irène, who was in many ways the stronger, dominant partner. Nevertheless, the Joliot-Curies’ marriage, and their research, thrived.

  The couple endured their first setback as scientists in January 1932. A few years earlier, physicists in Germany had published some odd experimental results involving radioactive atoms. Radioactive atoms are unstable atoms: they break down and shoot out different types of particles—a sort of subatomic shrapnel. Specifically, the Germans were working with so-called alpha particles. They directed a stream of these alpha particles at a thin sheet of beryllium metal. This in turn caused the beryllium to release a second type of particle. But the identity of this secondary shrapnel proved mysterious. For one thing, it was extremely energetic: it zipped along so fast that it could pass through four solid inches of lead. The most vigorous type of radioactive particle then known was called a gamma ray, so the Germans concluded that this must be a special type of gamma ray and wrote up a paper.

  Two teams began doing follow-up work, including the Joliot-Curies in Paris, and thanks to Marie Curie’s nepotism they had a huge advantage over their rivals. Curie had the best equipment in the world, as well as the most potent sources of alpha particles, including her two grams of radium. (In addition to the original gram she’d hidden during World War I, she’d received another gram as a gift from the women of the United States in 1921, to honor her role as a pioneering female scientist.) Marie in turn gave her daughter and the man who’d married her daughter exclusive access to these scientific riches. In fact, before marrying into the family, Joliot had had to sign a prenuptial agreement specifying that, if Marie died and he divorced Irène, the radium belonged to Irène alone. That’s how valuable the stuff was: at least $100,000 per gram then, or $1.3 million today.

  Radium decays into other substances over time, and by sifting through Marie’s radium, among other sources, the Joliot-Curies isolated a sample of polonium, an element that releases an intense stream of alpha particles. They then re-created the German experiment and discovered something startling. Like the Germans, they let the alpha particles strike a sample of beryllium and knock loose “gamma rays.” But they also extended the experiment by putting a block of paraffin near the beryllium and letting the gamma rays slam into it. To their amazement, the paraffin began coughing up protons, another subatomic particle. Protons are vastly heavier than gamma rays; so for gammas to knock protons loose, the gammas had to be moving at unthinkable speeds. It would be like shooting spitballs so hard they dislodged a boulder. Excited, the Joliot-Curies wrote up a paper about their work and mailed it off for publication. Irène was quite pregnant at the time (there were no safety standards about exposing fetuses to radioactivity), so after the paper appeared they took a well-earned vacation to the Curie family cottage near L’Arcouest. (And make no mistake, it was the Curie family cottage: Joliot’s prenup also barred him from claiming any ownership of that.)

  Meanwhile, the other person doing follow-up work, James Chadwick in England, was struggling. He worked in the skinflint Cavendish lab in Cambridge, with clunky apparatus and weak sources of alpha particles. He finally cadged a better source from a hospital in Baltimore, which mailed him some nearly spent ampules of radioactive elements used to attack tumors. (There were no postal safety standards then, either.) By the time Chadwick received the ampules, the Joliot-Curies had published their work. But rather than resign himself to losing, he read their paper with a critical eye—and realized that their conclusions smelled fishy. He simply didn’t believe that tiny gamma spitballs could dislodge huge proton boulders. He came to a different conclusion instead.

  Scientists at the time believed that atoms were made of two particles: positive protons, which resided in the nucleus of an atom, and negative electrons, which swirled around the nucleus. But some theorists predicted the existence of a third particle, also residing in the nucleus—the neutral neutron. Chadwick wondered whether the strange beryllium “gamma rays” might actually be the first glimpse of neutrons. It would make sense: neutrons, being the same size as protons, could readily dislodge them. And because they were electrically neutral, neutrons could penetrate matter easily, even thick slabs of lead.

>   Chadwick spent the next thirty days running and rerunning experiments—sleeping just three hours many nights—and soon had solid proof of neutrons. Accordingly, he sent off a paper to Nature in February 1932. Upon returning from their vacation in Port Science, Irène and Joliot got hold of the paper and were mortified: they’d just missed out on discovering one of the three fundamental particles of the universe. It was the sharpest setback they could imagine—until things quickly got worse.

  After fumbling the discovery of the neutron, the Joliot-Curies redoubled their efforts. Despite having given birth six weeks earlier, Irène dragged Joliot to a lab on an 11,000-foot peak in the Swiss Alps in April. This altitude made the lab an ideal place to study so-called cosmic rays, a stream of subatomic particles that streak down onto Earth from outer space. No one really knew what the rays were back then, and Irène and Joliot wanted to study them and see whether this neutron particle appeared within the shower.

  Their work used a piece of equipment called a cloud chamber, a sealed basin with vaporous alcohol or water inside. When cosmic rays zipped through the chamber, they left behind a visible trail of droplets. By subjecting the basin to electric and magnetic fields, scientists could twist or bend the droplet trails, and from the shape of the twists and bends they could infer the size, speed, and electrical charge of the particles. An equipment geek, Joliot adored cloud chambers and would gaze at the trails for hours, fawning over the loops and whorls. Whenever a particularly lovely track appeared he’d gush, “Isn’t this the most beautiful experience in the world?” To which Irène would reply, “Yes, my dear, it would be… if not for childbirth.”