The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  After Kraków University rejected her application because she was a woman, Marie decided to compromise, writing a friend, “It is a sorrow to me to have to stay forever in Paris, but what am I to do? Fate has made us deeply attached to each other and we cannot endure the idea of separating.” In time, she would change her mind, falling deeper and deeper in love: “I have the best husband one could dream of; I could never have imagined finding one like him. He is a true gift of heaven, and the more we live together the more we love each other.” Pierre: “I think of you who fill my life, and I long for new powers. It seems to me that in concentrating my mind exclusively upon you, as I am doing, that I should succeed in seeing you, and in following what you are doing; and that I should be able to make you feel that I am altogether yours at this moment—but the image does not come.”

  Their wedding was in every way untraditional. The couple needed no lawyers since their only possessions were two bicycles bought the day before with wedding money from a cousin. They would have no white dress or tails, no gold rings, no formal breakfast, and no religious ceremony, as Pierre was a freethinker. The bride’s attire, a navy wool suit and blue-on-blue-striped blouse, was paid for by her brother-in-law’s mother and sewn by Mme. Glet according to Marie’s requirements that it be “practical and dark, so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.”

  The couple rode, together, atop the omnibus across boulevard Saint-Michel to the Gare du Luxembourg for the train to Pierre’s hometown of Sceaux, where his parents still lived. They were married at city hall, with a reception in the garden of the Curie home. Taking their vélos on the train, they honeymooned in Brittany. The two would in time discover they both enjoyed long bike rides and overseas travel, and over the next eleven years, Marie remembered, “My husband and I were so closely united by our affection and our common work that we passed nearly all of our time together.”

  Having refused Dr. Curie’s marital gift of furniture, their drawing room in Paris had a wooden table with two chairs, one for each of them, and none for any guests. Photographs depict the Curies as a remarkably severe couple: Pierre with his gaunt face, his bristling salt-and-pepper Vandyke, and his military brush cut; and his wife, Marie, tough as cancer. But clearly, they were as meant for each other as any man and woman in history. Though he had the significant scientific background, it was the unstoppable, indefatigable force known as Marie Curie, with her seemingly infinite reserves of energy and ambition, that drove the couple professionally. With her encouragement (and very likely nudging), by 1895 Pierre had won the doctorate he’d long deserved and was promoted to a full professorship at the city school. In addition to the two master’s degrees she held by the time of her marriage, Marie passed the French state exam to teach science to women, while continuing to experiment on magnetics and steel. The director at Pierre’s school gave her a lab to use, and she convinced French metalworks companies to donate materials, a trinity of corporate, government, and academic funding she would juggle for the rest of her professional life, and which would become a standard for modern practice in the era of big science.

  In the summer of 1897, when they would be separated by Pierre’s work and Marie’s difficult first pregnancy, they would write back and forth in Polish, he poetically, beginning each with “my dear little child whom I love”; she, in language plain enough that he might understand it. Then in her eighth month, during a bicycle trip when she said all was fine, they were forced to rush back to Paris where Marie’s father-in-law oversaw the birth of his granddaughter, Irène (ee-REN), on September 12. Though impossible to imagine for the first twenty years of her life, Irène and her husband would in time achieve a professional stature nearly as prominent as that of her parents.

  Soon after giving birth, Marie decided on her doctoral topic: Henri Becquerel’s rays, which she picked since “the subject seemed to us very attractive and all the more so because the question was entirely new and nothing yet had been written upon it.” With this pragmatic notion, Marie Curie had found a subject to study for the rest of her life; a partner to study it with; and a temple where she suffered and was redeemed.

  Before Becquerel, German pharmacist Martin Klaproth named the element uranium in the spring of 1789 after the recently discovered Uranus. It was used to stain glass in the Roman empire, the bodies of American Indians, and the glazed pottery of Depression-era America (eating from Fiestaware orange-red plates produced before 1942 is hazardous, though the maker has argued, “In truth, the red glaze emitted far less radiation than some other consumer products”).

  Marie arranged to get a ton of ore donated from Bohemia’s St. Joachim’s Valley, where a mine in the 1500s produced 2 million silver coins called joachimsthalers (or thalers, which became the English word dollars). Only interested in silver, the Bohemians ignored the various yellow, orange, and green ores they called “bad luck tar rock,” or Pechblende (English, pitchblende). Not realizing what bad luck this tar rock really was, though, the miners would, two decades later, choke up blood for about six weeks and then die from an unspecified “mountain sickness.”

  With Pierre’s help, Marie built an ionization chamber out of wooden crates discarded by their grocer. Inside were two metal plates, with the element to be tested resting on the lower plate and one of Pierre and Jacques’s delicate instruments on the upper. By charging the lower with a battery, Marie could determine if the element electrified the air—as Becquerel had noted—through a current detected by the instrument. Besides its being one of the great love stories of the twentieth century, then, Marie Curie’s great professional luck in meeting Pierre was that he had coinvented the piezo electrometer.

  What were these uranic rays, this invisible power somehow generated by inorganic minerals? Marie confirmed Becquerel’s assertion that the rays’ force was not affected by wetting, drying, heating, illuminating, compressing, or pulverizing; that nothing but the amount of uranium itself determined the amount of voltage emanated. But Marie and Pierre could not understand how uranium’s rays were birthed. They first theorized that a special feature within uranium absorbed cosmic rays from space, then slowly released them. To test this, German schoolteachers Julius Ester and Hans Friedrich Geitel buried radioactive materials beneath 300 meters of Harz mountain rock as well as at the bottom of an 850-meter mine shaft, for forty-eight hours. Neither had an effect on their emanations, and Marie, along with Ester and Geitel, then went beyond Becquerel to theorize that the effulgence must arise not from chemistry (from the interaction of uranium with other elements), but solely from within the element’s very atoms. By their showing all the ways in which its power was unaffected, radiance by default had to be an atomic property of the element uranium. For the rest of his life, Pierre Curie remained convinced that the process was an energy transfer, similar to thermodynamics, and spent many of his last years trying to apply theories of heat to radium and polonium. But if atoms were constantly losing their energy through a thermodynamic-like process, they would eventually either implode or explode, and his experiments to counter Marie’s atomic assertion were all failures.

  Out of everything Madame Curie would discover, as science this was the simplest, most significant, and most revolutionary. She had pointed to the first physical evidence that enormous energy lay within the very essence of matter. It was revolutionary because, as she noted, “from this point of view, the atom of radium would be in a process of evolution, and we should be forced to abandon the theory of the invariability of atoms, which is at the foundation of modern chemistry.” The fundamental law of thermodynamics, which forbade the creation of energy from nothing, had been undone.

  On February 17, 1898, Marie’s piezo electrometer measured torbernite (or chalcolite) having twice the radiance of uranium, while pitchblende ore was four times as vibrant. This only made sense if some other, even more powerful, radiating element, still unknown, lay within these compounds, and clearly, Becquerel was mistaken in calling them uranic rays. She tested and recalibrated
her instruments and still had the same results, working constantly to explain this mystery. Her speed came from a fear of being trumped, as she knew full well that if Becquerel (who was overseeing her doctorate) had not told the Académie des Sciences of his own findings the very day after he made them, the discoverer of Becquerel rays would instead have been Silvanus Thompson, who announced his identical discovery one day later.

  Pierre was so fascinated by his wife’s conclusions that on March 18 he dropped his work with crystals and joined her efforts. “Neither of us could foresee that in beginning this work we were to enter the path of a new science which we should follow for all our future,” she later said. Eventually the Curies worked with seven tons of pitchblende from Bohemia, black ore suffused with pine needles, in a “laboratory” that was essentially a hut that the municipal medical school used for its students to dissect human corpses. But now it was in such disrepair, especially the leaking roof, that it wasn’t even fit for cadavers. (The Institut Curie is now located on the same rue Lhomond as the shed, adjacent to rue Pierre et Marie Curie.) The hut’s glass roof made summers roasting, winters debilitating, and rain an imminent presence; the stove used for heat was too weak to be useful; the only ventilation was the opening of a window and a door, meaning that processes involving fumes, which were innumerable, were conducted in the courtyard . . . with any rainstorms forcing the scientists to scurry their equipment back into the leaky shed, where they worked at remarkable physical labors from 1898 to 1902 . . . four toilsome years. Marie:

  The life of a great scientist in his laboratory is not, as many may think, a peaceful idyll. More often it is a bitter battle with things, with one’s surroundings, and above all with oneself. . . . Between the days of fecund productivity are inserted days of uncertainty when nothing seems to succeed, and when even matter itself seems hostile; and it is then that one must hold out against discouragement. I had to work with as much as 20 kg of material at a time so that the hangar was filled with great vessels full of precipitate and of liquids. It was exhausting work to move the containers about, to transfer the liquids, and to stir for hours at a time, with an iron bar, the boiling material in the cast-iron basin. . . . I extracted from the mineral the radium-bearing barium, and this, in the state of chloride, I submitted to a fractional crystallization. . . . And yet it was in this miserable old shed that the best and happiest years of our life were spent, entirely consecrated to work. I sometimes passed the whole day stirring a mass in ebullition, with an iron rod nearly as big as myself.

  The couple carried on between them the labors of a large chemical plant. Even though that winter was especially harsh, their work had to be done out of doors due to the fires and fumes. The first step was to melt the crude ore in a large, oblong tank until it was boiling like lava. Then acids were poured in to dissolve out the salts. The next stage was to melt down the residue in separate cauldrons, fired up twenty-four hours a day, with either Pierre or Marie present throughout. The reduced ore had to be filtered again and again to remove all other elements, and then evaporated in small bowls . . . revealing crystals. Marie: “We lived in our single preoccupation as if in a dream. We’re very happy in spite of the difficult conditions under which we work. We passed our days at the laboratory, often eating a simple student’s lunch there. A great tranquility reigned in our poor shabby hangar; occasionally, while observing an operation, we would walk up and down talking about work, present and future. When we were cold, a cup of hot tea, drunk beside the stove, cheered us.”

  On April 14, they ground up one hundred grams of pitchblende to prepare it for crystallization, knowing full well that they were searching through an agglomeration of thirty or so elements arrayed in multiple compounds, yet having no idea that the elements they wanted were so rare that seven tons of ore would have to be processed to extract one gram. With advice from their school’s chemists, they heated, distilled, pulverized, and precipitated with ammonium, until Marie’s samples registered 300 times as radiant as uranium’s, and Pierre’s 350 times. Each time they thought they were done, however, the spectroscope refused to produce clear lines revealing a new element. Inside of a month, they were able to isolate two concentrations of ore radiant enough to publish findings. In their report of July 1898, “On a New Radio-Active Element Contained in Pitchblende,” they announced the discovery of a new member of the periodic table named for the home where Marie couldn’t live, yet couldn’t say farewell to: polonium. The same paper coined a new term for the emanation of Becquerel rays—“radio-active”—and called matter that emanated “radio-elements.”

  The more Marie learned about uranium and its emanations, the more in love she fell. Manya Skłodowska may have renounced religion with the death of her mother and sister, but she seemed a penitent in the arms of the Lord when it came to her approach to science: monastic, devoted, chaste, she lived her life in what Pasteur had called “the temples of the future”: laboratories. This would be especially true after Bronya and Casimir decided to leave France and open a tuberculosis sanitarium in their beloved Zakopane, Poland. Marie was brokenhearted, writing to Bronya on December 2, 1898, “You can’t imagine what a hole you have made in my life. . . . I have lost everything I clung to in Paris except my husband and child. It seems to me that Paris no longer exists, aside from our lodging and the school where we work.” Yet in that period, she would also say, “Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence with ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

  After three months of vacation in Auvergne, the Curies returned to work in November and made rapid progress, a barium concentrate producing results nine hundred times as strong as uranium’s. One of the school’s chemists could finally see their second element through the spectroscope, and around December 20 they named it: radium. After four years, forty tons of chemicals, and four hundred tons of water, on March 28, 1902, they produced one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

  In time, English chemist Frederick Soddy would work with New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford to discover the secret of uranic rays, the remarkable ability of radioactive elements to, through the spontaneous loss of subatomic particles, change into other elements, producing an emanation of alpha, beta, or gamma rays over the course of what they called a half-life. Subatomically bloated, these elements are forced to constantly shed neutrons or electrons until they achieve a stable, nonradioactive form and are at nucleic peace. It was, to Rutherford and Soddy’s great dismay, the transmutation that alchemists had pursued for centuries . . . dismay, as alchemy had been a laughable topic for generations. But half-lives themselves are pretty funny, when they aren’t being cosmically grand, such as what happens to the most common form of uranium over its many lives as it ejects subatomic particles and alchemizes into various elements and isotopes:

  Uranium-238 has a 1/2 life of 41/2 billion years, after which it turns into

  Thorium-234, with a 1/2 life of 24 days, after which it turns into

  Protactinium-234, with a 1/2 life of 1.16 minutes, after which it turns into

  Uranium-234, with a 1/2 life of 245,500 years, after which it turns into

  Thorium-230, with a 1/2 life of 75,380 years, after which it turns into

  Radium-226, with a 1/2 life of 1,620 years, after which it turns into

  Radon-222, with a 1/2 life of 3.8 days, after which it turns into

  Polonium-218, with a 1/2 life of 3 minutes, after which it turns into

  Lead-214, with a 1/2 life of 26.8 minutes, after which it turns into

  Bismuth-214, with a 1/2 life of 20 minutes, after which it turns into

  Polonium-214, with a 1/2 life of 0.164 microseconds, after which it turns into

  Lead-210, with a 1/2 life of 22.3 years, after which it turns into

  Bismuth-210, with a 1/2 life of 5 days, after which it turns into

  Polonium-210, with a 1/2 life of 138 days, after
which it turns into

  Lead-206, which is stable, not radioactive, and has no 1/2 life.

  While Pierre investigated radium’s signature properties (including that it generated enough continuous heat to melt its own weight in ice in under sixty minutes—the first clue to nuclear power), Marie experimented with the industrial-chemistry recipes needed to isolate her new elements. They tried finding an atomic weight by measuring unrefined against refined samples, but couldn’t, and from this they knew the element was in tiny amounts and very, very powerful. Three years later they would discover it was less than one-millionth of 1 percent, and this was only the start of its magic. Marie: “The chloride and bromide, freshly prepared and free from water, emit a light which resembles that of a glow-worm. . . . A glass vessel containing radium spontaneously charges itself with electricity. If the glass has a weak spot, for example, if it is scratched by a file, an electric spark is produced at that point, the vessel crumbles like a Leiden jar when overcharged, and the electric shock of the rupture is felt by the fingers holding the glass.” Marie would then note the remarkable property that Irène would investigate and that in time would revolutionize both medical diagnosis and treatment: “Radium has the power of communicating its radioactivity to surrounding bodies. When a solution of a radium salt is placed in a closed vessel, the radioactivity in part leaves the solution and distributes itself through the vessel, the walls of which become radioactive and luminous.”

  At that moment, there was no greater scientific achievement than adding new elements to the periodic table. The Curies had discovered two, publishing their proofs in nine months. Also, both elements brilliantly luminesced, radium with an aquatic shimmer reminiscent of absinthe. When the couple pressed glowing radium against their eyelids, they saw fireworks and meteors flashing across the retinas.