Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  When they undergo chemical combination, the elements are said to exhibit different oxidation states. Often each is associated with a characteristic colour, such as the ferrous green and ferric brown of the salts of iron. But when iron rusts we are more likely to note the corrosion of time than to see the rich-hued beauty that Ruskin saw. Oxygen, ‘that insinuating vamp’, as another writer terms it, is the element that ruins others, crusting their pure surface with a layer of chaos and decay.

  What is not yet oxidized is potentially so. The carbon in the wood of the trees is tomorrow’s carbon dioxide. The rusting hulk is yesterday’s ironclad battleship. Civilization, it is immediately apparent, is simply organized resistance to oxidation. We are able to stem the tide in some places, and even reverse it in a few by various desperate measures–wresting metals from their ores, planting forests, extinguishing fires–but never for long. Oxidation betrays the march of time and the inevitable triumph of entropy. The gas gives life and in doing so brings death closer. Oxygen is, according to a recent book on the element, ‘the single most important cause of ageing and age-related disease’. Some of the damage comes from reactive chemicals produced as intermediates during normal respiration–not oxygen molecules, but the short-lived species containing unpaired oxygen atoms known as free radicals–that find themselves at a loose end, as it were, and able to wreak biochemical havoc. One of the most meaningful measures of ageing is to look at the extent of damage to biological cells due to this oxidation, the scientific equivalent of counting crow’s feet or liver spots.

  As I am writing this in June 2009, I hear that the singer Michael Jackson is dead at the age of fifty. Is it possible that the oxygen tent he reportedly slept under accelerated his life and brought forward his death, as Priestley observed and feared? Immediately, there is talk that his body will be preserved, in his trademark moonwalk pose, by ‘plastination’ using special resins, and displayed in the space where he had been planning to give a comeback concert: London’s O2 Arena.

  Our Lady of Radium

  Every now and again, an element which even most scientists may never see will nevertheless escape the confines of the laboratory to achieve a kind of fame or notoriety in the wider world. It happened, as we have seen, with plutonium after the dropping of the atomic bomb. But it happened first with radium. An element–an explosively reactive as well as radioactive metal–of which no ordinary mortal had the slightest practical experience suddenly burst upon the world, was seized upon as a miraculous talisman, sought after and fought over, adopted for place names and product brands, and then was equally dramatically dropped a few decades later like a hot brick.

  The central figure in the radium story–and one of the reasons why it became such a phenomenon–is Marie Curie. She was born Maria Sklodowska near Warsaw in 1867, but, excluded from university in Poland, emigrated to Paris to complete her education. She felt liberated in Paris, and still more so at the Sorbonne, where she was free to find her own direction without the stifling supervision she had known in her Polish gymnasium. Unusually, she studied both chemistry and physics; she would go on to win the Nobel Prize in both fields, an achievement still unequalled by any woman or man. Marie would have returned to Poland to follow her parents into teaching but then, as she prepared for her graduation exams, she met Pierre Curie; they married quietly the following year, 1895.

  The next decade until Pierre’s death at the age of forty-six, crushed under the wheels and hooves of a passing horse-drawn wagon, marked a scientific partnership of rare harmony and productivity. With Pierre’s encouragement and space in his laboratory, Marie decided to investigate the spontaneous emission of X-ray-like energy–a newly reported effect that she termed ‘radioactivity’–identified from samples of the uranium ore known as pitchblende. Her chief tool was a quartz device invented by Pierre some years earlier, which exploited the property that some crystals possess of emitting an electrical charge in response to pressure exerted upon them. This meter was capable of detecting the very small electric currents associated with radioactive decay processes. Marie found that radioactivity was a phenomenon intrinsic to particular substances, and not the product of some kind of interaction with other matter or energy as many people then thought. During the course of her measurements, she also found that some uranium ores were more radioactive than others, and that some–bizarrely–were even more radioactive than pure uranium metal. This could only mean that the ore must contain an unknown, highly radioactive material.

  This caught Pierre’s interest and, dropping his own research, he and Marie hastily began to pulverize a handful of pitchblende and then dissolve it using chemicals that would enable them progressively to isolate the most radioactive components. Over a period of two months, they gradually obtained a product 300 times more radioactive than uranium. They noticed that some of the radioactivity was linked to barium in the sample and some to the element bismuth. Three weeks later, they were convinced that a new element must be mimicking the chemistry of the bismuth, which is not naturally radioactive. The Curies had already chosen the name polonium after Marie’s beloved homeland–she had once dressed as ‘Polonia’ at a gathering of expatriates in Paris–and on 13 July 1898 Pierre was able to write in the laboratory notebook the letters ‘Po’. But their inability yet to separate the element from bismuth was a source of frustration especially to Marie. She wanted to hold polonium in her hand.

  Meanwhile, the couple continued to chase down the radioactive species linked to barium using a new sample of pitchblende. They succeeded just before Christmas, this time obtaining unequivocal evidence for the existence of another new element, even more radioactive than polonium, to which they gave the name radium. The salts of barium and radium are more soluble than those of bismuth and polonium. It made sense to try to isolate radium by repeatedly boiling up salt solutions and then cooling them slowly so that pure radium chloride, which was marginally less soluble than barium chloride, crystallized out first. Marie set out to tackle this immense challenge in 1899. She acquired ten tonnes of pitchblende residue, already more radioactive than the basic ore. It came in sacks of brown dust mixed with pine needles. Processing the material in twenty-kilogramme batches, she turned the primitive ‘hangar’ of a laboratory into a factory with cauldrons of boiling radioactive liquor in various stages of preparation. The work was physically exhausting, but there was always the exhilaration of the chase. At last, by 1902, she had tangible evidence of the new element, a tenth of a gramme of pure radium chloride.

  What does a chemist feel when she discovers an element? The sensations are often dissipated by lengthy effort, but there are moments of intense pleasure. With their two elements and their two Nobel Prizes, the Curies experienced more of these moments than most scientists ever do. Certainly, they were not enamoured of the official ballyhoo that came with their success. Attending even their own award ceremonies was never their highest priority, understandably so in Marie’s case when the awards were sometimes grudgingly given–she had not at first been included on the Nobel nomination papers when Pierre was put forward with Henri Becquerel, the discoverer of uranium radiation. And the publicity that ensued was simply a nuisance.

  But the material aspect of the discoveries thrilled them. Suspicion had quickly turned to conviction that the pitchblende was hiding something. Before long, they knew they were looking for new elements–and they had the names ready. Their scientific papers laid claim to the discoveries with a seemly boldness: they proposed these names without apology, but they were also generous in acknowledging the contribution of others. Marie in particular felt proud of ‘our new metals’, and was frustrated to know that radium and polonium existed without being able to take physical possession of them. They had hoped to see coloured salts, but delighted in the light that shone unexpectedly from the impure material. Sometimes after dinner they would sneak back to the laboratory to see the samples glowing in their places, a sight that never failed to stir them with ‘new emotion and enchantment’.
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  How did radium, this rare, peculiar and intractable element, come to public notice? In the first place, of course, it did so because of the Nobel Prize. The seven awards made in physics, chemistry and medicine during the first two years of the prizes received little attention. But this changed dramatically with the first award made to a woman, and to a married couple, which handed the media material for all manner of romantic fantasies. The strange properties of radium–its luminous blue glow and its mysterious, invisible radioactivity–added spice to the mix. Marie Curie was beatified as ‘Our Lady of radium’, yet was also beginning to suffer from what was not yet known as radiation sickness.

  George Bernard Shaw gauged the public excitement with satirical accuracy, but was too quick to deny that there might be real substance to it. Radium, he wrote in the introduction to his play The Doctor’s Dilemma, ‘has excited our credulity precisely as the apparitions at Lourdes excited the credulity of Roman Catholics’. For radium, whose ability to damage the skin had been noticed from the first, was now found to be miraculously effective in the treatment of cancers. This discovery at once launched an industry and a folklore. By 1904, there was a large brick factory on the banks of the Marne outside Paris making radium salts on a scaled-up version of the process used by Curie. Others quickly followed. Radium, destroyer of tumours, was too good to leave at that, and was quickly and indiscriminately exploited as a ‘therapy’ for ailments of the blood, the bones and the nerves.

  Scientists rushed to experiment with the new element. William Ramsay bought a sample from a London chemical supplier and took it back to his laboratory to confirm that it was genuine. He put a little of the sample on a wire and put the wire in a flame. The red colour confirmed that it was pure radium, uncontaminated by barium, which would have turned the flame green, but the radioactive vapour that Ramsay unwittingly released into the laboratory as a result of the test rendered it useless thereafter for experiments in radioactivity.

  Visitors flocked to the mountains where radium was naturally abundant–the Erzgebirge. These, the famous ‘ore mountains’ of Bohemia, were already known as the most prolific metal-producing region in Europe. The mines were reopened in 770 CE after the fall of the Roman Empire by Charlemagne, who brought in prisoners from Saxony–long celebrated for its miners–to obtain gold, silver and lead. Later, uranium and cobalt were mined as well, for coloured glasses and ceramics.

  Joachimstal (now known as Jáchymov in the Czech Republic) became a centre of the tourist boom. In 1912, the Radium Palace Hotel, a massive neoclassical confection clinging to the wooded mountainside, opened its doors to offer radioactive spa treatments. The waters contained low concentrations of dissolved radium and gained a slight effervescence from its radioactive decay into radon gas. (Joachimstal has other elemental connections, too: in the sixteenth century, the first silver dollar coins, or Joachimsthaler, were minted here, and it was where Agricola wrote his metallurgical masterpiece, De Re Metallica.)*

  The Radium Palace Hotel has recently reopened, promising treatments based on ‘the healing effect of radon-rich waters that flow deep below the surface of the Earth’. If you’re feeling flush you can book into the Madame Curie apartment. Not far away, another spa town still rejoices in the name Radiumbad. Radon water healing galleries were also widespread in the United States, where there were once settlements named Radium in seven states. There are still towns called Radium Springs in Georgia, Wyoming and New Mexico.

  Spas have always been places of elemental renewal. The Romans came to Bath for the sulphurous waters. Bad Suderode in the Harz Mountains of Germany is the place for calcium, Buxton for magnesium, while Marienbad will spritz you with carbonated waters. Other waters are oxygenated or iodized. It seems only fair that this custom should keep abreast of chemical advance, and that the newfound elements radon and radium should also have their day.

  Those who did not take radium at the source found radium brought to them. Radium was demonstrated at parties. People played radium roulette and went to radium dances. The ‘Radium Models’ posed in luminous costumes. Radium was popularized in cartoons and, above all, hailed as an all-purpose miracle cure. Radium was added to products of all kinds, especially those supposed to offer therapeutic benefit. The word appeared on many other items as a fashionable brand name. There was Radium butter, Radium cigars, Radium beer, Radium chocolate and Radium toothpaste, Radium condoms, Radium suppositories and Radium contraceptive jelly.

  The public was before long familiar enough with the bizarre properties of radium that they were an effective means of enhancing almost any manufacturer’s claims. Aurora Radium Fertilizer was sold with the promise that it ‘heats the soil’. Radium was put in chicken feed in the hope that the eggs might be self-incubating, if not actually self-cooking. Oradium wool for babies was ‘endowed with a physico-chemical treatment of remarkable power: radio-activity’: ‘Everybody knows the extraordinary effects of organic stimulation of cellular excitation passed on by radium…Wool so treated combines the standard advantages of the textile with undeniable hygienic value. To knit Baby’s layette, children’s woollen garments, your underclothes and your pullover, use laine oradium.’

  The Curie name was often invoked to endorse these remedies, illicitly in many cases. Curie Hair Tonic was said to restore hair growth and colour, for example. This commercial licence can be excused to some degree as the Curies’ own Radium Institute would give its imprimatur to products where they genuinely contained a source of radium emanation. This was done out of scientific probity–a stamp ‘du Laboratoire Curie de Paris’ would discreetly guarantee that a preparation contained, for example, ‘5 millimicrogrammes de Radium élément pour 1 gramme de Crème’. The Radium Institute was also enlisted to brand chromium-plated bath-side dispensers of radiation. These emanateurs or ‘fountains’ bubbled radon gas from a decaying radium source along a rubber tube into the bathwater; they were also used to add radioactive fizz to drinks. They are now highly collectible.

  The aura of an elixir is most evident in the illustrated boys’ adventure books that made the element central to their quest. They positioned radium as an exotic material to be plundered from far-off lands with much derring-do. The splendid cover of one of these books, La Course du Radium (better translated, by the way, as The Dash for Radium, not The Course of Radium Treatment), shows tribal horsemen galloping through the desert too late to catch our hero making his getaway in a biplane. This was all pure fancy. For most practical purposes, the only sources of prepared radium were in the two most genteel and sophisticated cities of Europe, Paris and the Curies’ laboratory, and Vienna with its rival Radium Research Institute.

  It was abundantly clear by the 1930s that radium was a serious danger to health. The case of the New Jersey ‘radium girls’, who painted the dials on luminous watches, had seen to that. In 1925, one of these women sued her employer, the US Radium Corporation, for damage to her health. She and her colleagues were in the habit of using their lips to put a fine point on the brushes they used. In the end, at least fifteen workers died suffering extreme symptoms of anaemia and decay of the tissue in the jaw. Marie Curie was aware of the deaths of several French engineers who had been involved in preparing therapeutic radium sources, although there were at this stage none at her own institute, a fact that she put down to superior safety precautions, which were indeed remarkably thorough for the time. But very soon, a number of Curie’s colleagues began to succumb to radiation sickness.

  Despite the increasingly recognized danger, radium’s popularity as a brand remained undimmed. French pharmacies sold ‘Tho-Radia’ eau de cologne, powder, cream soap and lipstick ‘according to the formula of Dr Alfred Curie’–the doctor in point being either an impostor or a figment of the manufacturer’s imagination as there was nobody of that name in the Curie family. Tho-Radia cosmetics, advertised as ‘scientific beauty products’ and promoted by one Jacqueline Donny, who was Miss France in 1948 and Miss Europe in 1949, may or may not ever have contained th
orium and radium–the Curie Institute found none when they tested them. Many other products plainly had no business incorporating radium at all. Nevertheless, Radium razors traded on it, promising that they had ‘the scientific edge’. A brand of ‘parfum atomique’ depicted a bottle labelled ‘Atome 58’ with a glowing halo around it, no matter that the element with the atomic number fifty-eight is harmless cerium. The last few brands failed as public opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power grew stronger in the 1960s. Radium itself is now restricted to use in radiological clinics.

  The room where Curie discovered polonium and radium, which she later recalled as ‘a clapboard hut with asphalt floor and glass roof giving incomplete protection against the rain’, no longer exists. Science does not sanctify the spaces where breakthroughs are made, only the breakthroughs themselves, and occasionally those who make them. The Curie couple themselves embodied the extremes of the attitudes scientists may take towards their achievements. Marie admired Pierre’s attitude that it did not matter who made a discovery so long as it was made, but could not share it, always feeling more possessive about her scientific achievements. Had it survived, the laboratory would have served as a reminder that discovery does not require comfortable surroundings, merely the right equipment at the right time, in this case the pitchblende and Pierre’s sensitive quartz balance. Marie Curie wrote of that time that she and Pierre had been ‘living with a sole preoccupation, as if in a dream’.

  In 1914, eight years after Pierre’s death, Marie Curie at last moved to more adequate quarters, a cluster of new buildings comprising the Radium Institute and, across a small garden, the Pasteur Institute. French windows in Marie’s laboratory opened on to a small garden between the two buildings, symbolizing the closeness of chemistry and biology to nature and each other. Marie occupied this office until her death in 1934, whereupon she was succeeded as director by André-Louis Debierne, who discovered another element in pitchblende, actinium. Later, Marie’s daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie took over the helm. In 1958, the building was closed because it was too saturated with radiation to do anything else with.