Elizabeth Rona arrived in Paris in 1926, sent by the Institute for Radium Research to learn from Irène Curie how to handle polonium sources. Elizabeth immediately made her way to the Left Bank, on the banks of the Seine, where the Curies’ laboratory, known as the Radium Institute, was located. Before entering, she walked around the building, catching a glimpse of the backyard garden, where she saw a multitude of plants and blossoms of various colors and heights. She was delighted; she had been told that Madame Curie, and especially her daughter Irène, loved flowers and always made it a point to have a profusion of them around. She also noticed that a balcony on the second floor opened to the garden. She suspected that it was a bedroom, whose occupant’s first view of the world upon waking was of the fresh plants and flowers.
Elizabeth was excited to meet the famous Madame Curie but also felt a shiver of apprehension running down her spine. She had a suspicion, one she hoped was unfounded, that like many other people of her stature, Madame Curie would turn out to be a conceited snob who barely spoke to her students.
She entered the institute and met an assistant, who led her to the back of the building, where the laboratory was located. There Elizabeth was surprised by the vision that was Madame Curie, a thin, pale woman in ragged lab coat, walking here and there among her students. This was the image that would forever accompany Elizabeth when she thought of Madame Curie after leaving the institute.
Elizabeth arrived that first day at lunchtime. Right away, Madame Curie let everyone out for a break and walked to meet Elizabeth, asking her if she’d eaten. Elizabeth said that, yes, she’d had lunch prior to arriving. That was good, Marie Curie said, as she hated to waste time on such frivolities. And with that, Marie Curie removed a piece of bread from her lab coat and began to munch on it. Elizabeth was startled. She had imagined that Marie Curie would indulge in a somewhat more elaborate and extended lunch, as most of the French enjoyed doing. But Marie Curie ate only bread while working in the laboratory—always a small piece that she had tucked away earlier. She found stopping for lunch useless. Why waste so much time over a meal when one can be working on an experiment? However, her students disagreed, and they got their lunch break.
Right after lunch, Madame Curie gave her lectures. Elizabeth learned early on that this timing was not the most conducive to learning. The students had just returned from a heavy meal, Madame Curie spoke in a low and steady voice, and the place itself was kept warm, thus many of the students had a hard time following her, and there was a tendency to nap instead. Elizabeth would have done things differently.
Elizabeth noticed that most of those in attendance were from Poland, and that the majority were women, which she appreciated. Also, as a rule, if there were difficulties or dangerous experiments to be performed, Madame Curie performed those herself rather than allowing one of the students, however advanced, to do it. And Irène was always by her side.
But on one occasion, a few days after Elizabeth’s arrival, Madame Curie made an exception, and Elizabeth became a part of that process. No one refused an invitation from Madame Curie, even if Elizabeth had no idea what the experiment was about. Intrigued, she had agreed, and now, here she was, trudging to the lab in the haze of the afternoon.
Madame Curie needed help opening a glass flask containing a very strong solution of radium salt. The flask had been sealed for years, and they both understood that because of the strong radiation, the solvent water had broken down and hydrogen peroxide had accumulated. If they did not take the proper precautions, there could be a very powerful explosion.
Knowing Elizabeth Rona’s reputation already, Madame Curie felt that with her help she could avoid the hazard.
However, something went wrong, and a loud explosion rocked the laboratory, one that was heard throughout the institute and the neighborhood, and made the rest of the students snap out of their afternoon reverie and come running to the laboratory.
Madame Curie explained that she had used a file to scrape away at the lid of the flask, to help the wax around it melt. But the explosion that followed had been so strong that the flask had fallen from her hands and shattered, spreading glass everywhere. Fortunately, neither Madame Curie nor Elizabeth had been hurt or contaminated. Elizabeth then noticed Madame Curie’s fingers, whose tips had been burned by too many previous experiments with radioactivity, and blamed that for the lack of dexterity she had just displayed.
In spite of the accident, Elizabeth was happy that she had been invited to work with Madame Curie and that she had the chance to spend some time alone with her. Before arriving in Paris, she had been warned by Stefan Meyer that Madame Curie was a very introverted woman. She liked her privacy, he had told Elizabeth, and kept her distance from people, even from her students.
After that explosion, it seemed that Madame Curie’s reserve had broken a bit. She often talked to Elizabeth about her long friendship with Stefan Meyer, who had helped her procure the pitchblende from the mines of Joachimsthal in Czechoslovakia, then part of Austria. It was from that pitchblende that she had first extracted polonium and then radium.
But she also had a more personal reason to feel indebted to Meyer, and that had nothing to do with science, she told Elizabeth. During the recent war, it was Meyer who had kept Madame Curie updated on the conditions of her family back in Poland. He had also managed to send them food parcels, which allowed them to fend off starvation and survive when many others hadn’t. She owed him a debt that went beyond any repayment imaginable.
At the laboratory, Elizabeth watched Irène prepare the polonium sources. Irène had pretty much perfected George de Hevesy’s and Friedrich Paneth’s technique of separation, which used electrolysis to separate polonium from lead-210 and bismuth-210. Irène used plutonium and gold electrodes and a weak solution of nitric acid. Polonium was then dissolved from the metal and deposited on a silver film, which was rotated in the nitric acid solution. Elizabeth watched Irène use this method over and over, but she could never match Irène’s high yields until she later figured out how to increase the concentration of polonium by distilling it.
Elizabeth liked Irène. Although she had been told that Irène could be standoffish, she didn’t find her so. She thought Irène was much like her mother, a shy person bent on following her own path rather than the one others had set up for her. She was warm, honest, liked romantic poetry (particularly the French poets), and enjoyed hiking—an activity that was dear to Elizabeth. Irène simply occupied an awkward position at the institute, as there were some who felt that she had gotten her job through nepotism.
Elizabeth also became aware that the Curie laboratory was highly contaminated. Nonetheless, the situation did not seem to bother anyone, least of all Madame Curie, who worried more about the radium’s safety than she did her own.
Elizabeth watched every morning as Catherine Chamié, who would later become her friend, removed the solutions from the safety box and, with a small, creaky cart, brought them into the laboratory. Lead bricks surrounded the cart itself, which was returned to the safe at night. Chamié was the keeper of the radium, and it was her duty to keep watch over it. Only she could go into and out of the safe.
Chamié had developed a paranoid attachment to the radium. Every evening, after she and Elizabeth left the laboratory for their respective boardinghouses, Chamié would stop midway and rush back, sensing that she had neglected to return the radium to the safe. Elizabeth would wait for her by the side of the road, knowing very well that Chamié had performed her job diligently but that no amount of assurance would help. Moments later, the woman would return, as she did every evening, comforted that, indeed, the radium was in its safe place.
Soon Elizabeth returned to Vienna, bringing with her all that the Curies had taught her about polonium. She did not know yet how she would use that knowledge, but some years down the road, the Americans would come calling, wanting to learn all she knew about the radioactive elements. Elizabeth would be very grateful for the time she had spent with the Cu
ries in Paris.
chapter four
Power Couple
1933
Although Lise Meitner had not been accepted to Marie Curie’s Radium Institute in Paris, Frédéric Joliot, a young physicist, had been. Despite his youth, he had already acquired a great reputation, and notable things were expected of him. He had arrived at the lab expecting to learn a lot from Madame Curie. What he had not anticipated was to fall in love with Madame Curie’s daughter Irène, who worked in the laboratory with her mother. A year later, they were married, and together they aggressively began to tackle the study on nuclear research. In 1934, they made history when they discovered that elements such as aluminum could be made radioactive when bombarded with radium.
In many ways, Irène Joliot-Curie was like her mother. They liked the same things, they studied the same subjects, and their characters were almost identical. Just like her mother, Irène would go on to win a Nobel Prize, too, but few would remember her name. She sometimes thought she had been cursed with the same notable last name as her parents, though she appreciated that she had been blessed with the talents of them both. Born during the most productive years of her parents’ lives, she had received little attention from them, and in fact most remembered her grandfather Eugène during her infancy and childhood.
Irène knew she was not well liked by the majority of those who worked at the institute. Even the women disliked her, which she thought was shameful. She did not like to gossip; whereas for the others it was a hobby. Small talk made her uncomfortable, as it did her mother and, to a lesser degree, her father.
Irène was serious—too serious, some people said. She did not display the carefree attitude that women were supposed to show when in a crowd, smiling and laughing even when one didn’t feel like acting that way. She was reflective by nature, and if she found a situation humorless, her face and attitude reflected her feelings.
She was also not a fanatic about her appearance, especially since she spent most of her days in the laboratory. Did one need to dress up or paint one’s face as if attending a performance at the theater in order to delve into a scientific experiment? She didn’t think so. But others saw her disregard for convention as arrogance.
Sometimes she recalled her youth as a series of adventures with her sister, Ève, swimming, cycling, and walking for long stretches of time in order to toughen up their bodies and dispositions, something her parents and grandfather had desired in both children.
Irène had also learned early on that, unlike in other families, where siblings competed to get their parents’ attention, in the Curies’ household it wasn’t with Ève that Irène had to fight to get noticed; it was with the laboratory. It was in the laboratory that her parents spent most of their time, and, it seemed to her, it was in the laboratory that they always preferred to be. So instead of loathing and begrudging the place, she had learned to love it, for it was there that she could be with both her parents, especially her mother.
Although few gave Irène the same credit bestowed on her mother, it was she who would bring scientists closer to developing the atomic bomb with the discovery of artificial radioactivity in 1933.
In October 1933, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie took part in the Solvay Conference in Physics in Brussels, Belgium. Held every few years, the invitation-only conference brought together the best minds of the world’s scientific community to discuss a single topic. That year the topic was the atomic nucleus. Among the invited participants was a cluster of brilliance: Madame Curie, of course, along with Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner.
Irène and Frédéric took to the stage and began relaying the results of their experiments. They spoke of neutrons and positrons that were emitted at the same time, and they spoke of the properties of the nucleus. As they talked, they could hear a rumbling in the audience, and members of the conference began shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Heated conversations soon ensued.
Oddly enough, one of those who seemed passionately opposed to the Joliot-Curies’ ideas was Lise Meitner, who had arrived from Berlin with a notable reputation for meticulous research. Lise told the Joliot-Curies that their results must be wrong: She had undertaken similar experiments herself and found not a single neutron. It was the wrong attitude, of course, coming from a scientist who should have known better: Simply because she had not arrived at the same conclusions as the Joliot-Curies did not automatically make them wrong. Yet Lise continued to badger the Joliot-Curies, especially Irène. She almost never spoke up with such passion in her laboratory or in front of her colleagues and associates, most of whom were men. Those who knew her later surmised that in speaking to Irène, she was speaking to her equal, to a woman, and was thus capable of letting loose. There was no need to watch her language, no need to be careful about her thoughts and ideas, and, to a certain degree, whether her judgments had been entirely correct did not matter. For better or worse, Irène took the brunt of Lise’s wrath.
Lise Meitner’s arguments deeply depressed Irène and, to a lesser extent, Frédéric. Still, they continued their studies in Paris, and in early 1934, they released the first reports on their discovery of artificial radioactivity. It did not surprise them that the reports were met with a good deal of skepticism, especially from Niels Bohr, who was quick to dismiss Irène. “In a letter from Mme. Joliot, she says she thinks that she has evidence of electron emission under the influence of alpha particles on beryllium,” he wrote, adding, “but I suspect that the beta particles tricks on their photographs are due to Compton effects on the atoms of the wall of the cloud chamber.” The Compton effect was then explained as the scattering of a photon, also known as an elementary particle, by a charged particle, usually an electron, which resulted in a decrease in energy.
Soon Irène and Frédéric were invited to Vienna, where Stefan Meyer was able to hear firsthand lectures they gave about their discoveries. Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie were thrilled to be receiving some professional recognition, although it was coming during a turbulent time in their lives: Marie Curie was extremely ill. It seemed that all those years of exposing herself to the effects of radium had finally caught up with her.
By early 1934, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie were bombarding aluminum with alpha particles. Irène had often heard the story of her parents finally seeing the radium late one night while she slept peacefully in her crib. There was something romantic about it that appealed to her nature, and often, as she worked into the wee hours of the night with Frédéric, she wondered whether something like that might happen to them, too. She did not have to wonder for long. One night in January, something extraordinary occurred. After bombarding aluminum with alpha particles, they were finally able to remove the source of the alpha particles. They made the announcement that they had achieved artificial radioactivity.
In late January, the scientist Enrico Fermi was returning to Rome following a vacation. The break had allowed him to spend the Christmas and New Year’s holidays with his family, away from his laboratory. It had also wiped away some of the disappointment he had felt when the journal Nature rejected the article he had submitted on the theory of beta decay. Although he had published a similar article in two other journals already, the failure to publish this particular one had stung him badly. A proud man, he saw any failure in his work as a fault in his character. But now, back in Rome and trying to catch up on his work, he read about the Joliot-Curies’ discoveries in an area he had been studying for many months. He felt inspired and wondered whether neutrons would induce a similar reaction in an atom’s nucleus.
Fermi and his team in Rome bombarded elements with neutrons, proceeding down the periodic table to uranium. Neutrons did indeed create minor reactions in an atom’s nucleus, but with uranium, the team couldn’t identify the new radioactive substances that were created. Fermi did not recognize that he had actually split the atom’s nucleus—a phenomenon Lise Meitner would explain later, with worldwide repercussions.
On July 4, 1934, in Pa
ris, Marie Curie died. She would not see her daughter and son-in-law win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificially induced radioactivity.
By then, scientists in Europe and the United States were using the Joliot-Curies’ technique to try to understand Fermi’s results—most scientists thought he had created new elements heavier than uranium. Only one dared to think differently.
Ida Noddack, a German scientist who was working in a government laboratory in Berlin, reviewed Fermi’s reports and criticized his chemistry in an article in September 1934. She believed he had created not new elements but rather isotopes of uranium, chemically identical to the element but with a different number of neutrons. It was conceivable, she wrote, that uranium’s heavy nucleus had shattered into several larger fragments. Although Noddack had co-discovered the element rhenium in 1925, she was neither a radiochemist nor a nuclear physicist. Her idea did not fit with what was known about nuclear reaction at the time. No one paid it any attention.
At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, physicist Lise Meitner convinced chemist Otto Hahn to start their own experiments bombarding uranium. They bombarded it with fast neutrons and slow neutrons, for short times and long times, all the while filtering out the new radioactive substances to study. They were convinced new elements were being created, but Lise still had trouble explaining the physics of the nuclear reaction that led to them.
Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband then tried a different tack in Paris. Along with their lab partner, the young Serbian scientist Pavle Savić, they studied the radioactive substances without chemically separating them first. They saw all the substances that the Berlin team had identified plus one other, with a surprisingly strong radioactivity of 3.5 hours. Later, when they did the separation, they found the 3.5-hour substance in the filtrate left over from separating the others. Irène and Savić presented their findings in 1937, suggesting that the new substance was an isotope of the element thorium.
Atomic Women Page 4