Madame Curie

Madame Curie was bom in Poland, but she did most of her work in France. Her husband, Pierre, was a physicist, and both were involved in the initial studies of radioactivity. Marie discovered that the mineral pitchblende contained two elements more radioactive than uranium. These elements turned out to be polonium and radium. Madame Curie coined the term radioactivity. She and her husband shared the Nobel Prize with Henri Becquerel in 1903. 

---

The activity of a sample, source or contaminated material is the rate at which radioactive disintegrations are taking place. The initial term, named by Madam Curie for her husband was, the Curie (Table 8.3-1). The modem unit is the Becquerel named after the discoverer of... 

Lise Meitner grew up in the Vienna of Emperor Franz-Josef and horsedrawn trolley cars. She was born there in 1878 into a well-to-do Jewish family and decided at an early age that she wanted to be a scientist like Madame Curie. (Later Albert Einstein would call her the German Madame Curie. ) In 1901, she entered the University of Vienna. There, where serious women students were considered odd, she was treated rudely by many of her fellow students. In 1905 she was only the second woman in the university s history to receive a Pli.D. in science. 

Walter, Alan E. Radiation and Modern Life Fulfilling Madame Curies Dream. Amherst, N.Y. Prometheus Books, 2004. 

In spite of the excitement the race to transmutation had spurred in the worlds of chemistry and occult alchemy, the crash came in 1914. The prestige and identity transmutation efforts had conferred upon chemistry were called into question—by physicists. Criticism had already come heavily from physicists such as J. J. Thomson, who debunked some of the experiments following the announcement of the Chemical Society meeting in February 1913, as well as from Rutherford, Royds, and Robert John Strutt (Lord Rayleigh). Even sympathetic chemists such as Madame Curie had been unable to reproduce Ramsay s results. Ramsay s own student and research partner, Egerton, could not successfully repeat the experiments when he went to work in a lab in Berlin. 

As Kelvin put it in a 1903 letter to Ramsay, The hypothesis of evolution in the atom or transformation in its substance, coupled with the supposition that the energy emitted by the radium is taken out of store in the atom, seems to me utterly improbable. And Travers notes that in June 1903, at a private dinner for Madame Curie and Kelvin, Madame Curie did her best to convert her dinner partner to the disintegration theory, without success (252). 

He noted that It is only right to add that Madame Curie carried out a similar experiment, using a platinum vessel, instead of one of glass or silica, and obtained no lithium. But, he confidently adds, It requires considerable practice... to detect very small quantities of matter (1912, 157). 

A little later Madame Curie and Mademoiselle GHeditsch repeated Cameron and Ramsay s experiments on copper salts, using, however, platinum apparatus. They failed to detect lithium after the action of the emanation, and think that Cameron and Ramsay s results may be due to the glass vessels employed. Dr. Perman has investigated the direct action of the emanation on copper and gold, and has failed to detect any trace of lithium. The transmutation of copper into lithium, therefore, must be regarded as unproved, but further research is necessary before any conclusive statements can be made on the subject. 

Madame CURIE and Mademoiselle GLEDITSCH "Action de emanation du radium sur les solutions des sels de cuivre," Comptes Rendus hebdomadaires de Seances de I Acadimie des Sciences, vol. cxlvii. (1908), pp. 345 et seq. (For an English translation of this paper, see The Chemical News, vol. xcviii. pp. 157 and 158.)... 

Marie Curie named polonium after her native country of Poland. She is also given credit for coining the world radioactivity. She is one of only two chemists to receive two Nobel Prizes. In 1903 both the Curies and Antoine-Henri Becquerel (1852—1908) shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on radioactivity in 1911 Madame Curie received the prize for chemistry for the discovery of radium and plonium. (The other scientist who received two Nobel Prizes was Linus Pauling [1901-1994], one for chemistry in 1954, and a Nobel Peace... 

Prize in 1962.) Madame Curie died from radiation poisoning that resulted from her work with radioactive elements. 

In 1898 Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934), while experimenting with thorium and uranium, coined the word radioactivity to describe this newly discovered type of radiation. She went on to discover polonium and radium. Madam Curie and her husband Pierre Curie (1859—1906), who discovered the piezoelectric effect, which is used to measure the level of radiation, and Henri Becquerel jointly received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity. 

The emanation of a radioactive gas from radium was observed by Madame Curie. In the atmosphere, radon diffuses and mixes with air like any other gas. Rutherford Brooks (1901) obtained a value 8 x 10-6 m2 s-1 for the diffusivity of radon. Recent determinations are in the range 1.0 to 1.2 x 10-5 m2 s-1 at N.T.P. (Jost, 1960). 

While in graduate school at Yale University in the early 1970s, when the women s liberation movement was all around us, I asked the professors in my department (History of Science and Medicine, since discontinued) at one of our Friday afternoon beer parties if there had ever been any women scientists. Certainly none had ever been mentioned in any of our courses. The answer was no, there had never been any. Not even Madame Curie who had won two Nobel Prizes No, she had been a mere drudge who stirred the pitchblende for her husband s experiments. Such was the state of knowledge (or ignorance or even prejudice) and authority then. Later, after I had completed my degree, I determined to see for myself if there had ever been any women scientists of any sort—and, as they say, the rest is history.1... 

It is named after the Nobel prize winner Madame Curie, who discovered many properties of radioactive elements. She also discovered an element which she called polonium after the country in which she was born. 

Curie, Eve. Madame Curie. Doubleday, Doran Company, Inc., Garden City. 1937. 

As regards the admission of Madame Curie to Honorary Membership, it must be borne in mind that Honorary and... 

Cm is the chemical symbol for curium, named after the famous scientist Madam Curie. Why wasn t the symbol C, Cu, or Cr used instead ... 

Marie Curie worked tirelessly to develop radioactivity as a new discipline in physics. With the help of five assistants, she studied the effects of radioactivity and developed the atomic theory of its origin. In 1911, Marie was awarded her second Nobel Prize— this time in chemistry, for the chemical processes discovered in the identification of radium and polonium and for the subsequent characterization of these elements. During World War I, she trained doctors in the new methods of radiology and, after learning to drive, personally transported medical equipment to hospitals. After the war, Madame Curie assumed leadership of the newly built Radium Institute in Paris. In 1920, a campaign was mounted in the United States to produce 1 gram of radium for Marie to support her research. She traveled to the United States to receive the precious vial of radium at the White House in 1921. 

It was mentioned in Chapter 4 that Henri Becquerel discovered natural radioactivity in 1896, He noticed that salts of uranium were able to affect a photographic plate through layers of opaque material. Madame Curie (Marie Sldodowska Curie, 1867-1934, a Polish chemist working in Paris) then began a systematic study of radioactive substances, as the subject of her doctor s dissertation. She found natural pitchblende, mainly to be several times more active than puri-... 

In the same year, 1896, the Curies isolated an active barium chloride fraction, containing another new element, which they named radium. They found that radium chloride could be separated from barium chloride by fractional precipitation of the aqueous solution by addition of alcohol. By 1%2 Madame Curie had prepared 0.1 g of nearly puie radium chloride, with radioactivity about three million times that of uranium. 

The radioactivity of uranium w as discovered in 1896 by Becquerel. Two years later, Madame Curie, observing that the radioactivity of pitchblende was greater than that of the element uranium, suggested that small quantities of a more active element were probably present in the mineral. This supposition led to the extraction of a chloride of the new element and to the subsequent discovery of radium. The... 

Percy was originally hired for a three-month period. But Madame Curie was very impressed with Percy s skills in the laboratory. Percy eventually ended up working at the Radium Institute until 1935. 

The standard unit by which radioactivity is measured is the curie, which is equal to 3.70 x 10 ° disintegrations s (dps) (=2.22 x 10 disintegrations min dpm). The curie is the amount of radioactivity exhibited by 1.00 g of pure Ra and derives its name from Madame Curie, who was a pioneer in the study of radioactivity and Ra. By convention, the relative rate at which a radionuclide decays is expressed in terms of its half life, ty, which is related to the decay constant by... 

Po by Madame Curie, as well as her presentations in front of the French Science Academy, was produced by a team of students (Figs. 10 and 11). 

Fig. 10 A scene from a student-produced movie, showing Madame Curie in her lab...

In 1902, Madame Curie finally succeeded in isolating one-tenth of a gram of pure radium, a sample sufficient also to determine radium s atomic weight of 225 grams per mole. Wholesale production of radium began two years later, resulting in the isolation of the first full gram of radium. That same year, the Curies shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Henri Becquerel—the Curies for their study of radioactivity, and Becquerel for the discovery of radioactivity. 

Curie, Eve. Madame Curie. New York Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1939 (translated by Vincent Sheean). Eve Curie was one of Pierre and Marie Curies two daughters. Eve s biography of her mother has long been considered the primary source of information about Marie as a person. 

Curie, E. 93, Madame Curie hoar leven en werk, 7 edn., Leopold, The Hague. 

Curie, Eve (1938 reprint 1986). Madame Curie, tr. V. Sheean. New York Da Capo. 

By 1898 Madame Curie and her husband Pierre, in collaboration with Bequerel, had isolated two new elements from the radioactive decay of uranium in pitchblende ore. Both were more radioactive than uranium itself. They named the first element polonium (Po) after Madame Curie s native land (Poland), and the second was named radium (Ra). Isolation of these two elements required chemical separation of very small amounts of Po and Ra from tons of pitchblende. Radium was found to be over 300,000 times more radioactive than uranium. 

Radium was first isolated in 1898 by Marie Sklodowska Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie. They were studying the radioactivity of pitchblende, a uranium-rich ore, and noticed that the ore was still radioactive with all the uranium removed. After years of painstaking work, the Curies eventually isolated radium and named it for the Latin word radius, meaning ray. For this work, Madame Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, her second such honor (the first one, in physics, shared with her husband and Henri Becquerel in 1903 for their initial studies of radioactivity). 

Marie emigrated to Paris in 1891 at the age of 24, where she decided to pursue a degree in science at the Sorbonne Institute. While studying there, Marie met Pierre Curie, a well-respected physicist, and they were married in 1895, after which Marie decided to pursue a doctorate in physics. As the subject of her doctoral thesis, she studied the strange radiation emitted by uranium ore, which had been accidentally discovered by Henri Becquerel. In her studies, Madame Curie noticed that pitchblende produced more radiation than uranium, and she became convinced that an as-yet-unknown element in pitchblende was responsible for this "radioactivity"—a term that she coined. 

---