Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [13]
Even after the polonium was isolated, pitchblende still gave off an incredible amount of radiation. did this mean there was yet another new element waiting to be discovered? It certainly seemed that way. After being back at work for six weeks of experiments, the Curies discovered a substance nine hundred times as radioactive as pure uranium.
And it produced new and unique spectral lines.
Six days later, on december 20, 1898, she sent off a new paper to the Academy announcing the discovery of another new element. In it she concluded, “The various reasons we have just enumerated lead us to believe that the new radioactive substance contains a new element which we propose to give the name of RADIUM.” The name came from “radius,” the Latin for ray, used for the element’s intense radioactivity. discovering the two elements had taken one year. Marie couldn’t have done it without Pierre’s help. They were inseparable. “We really have the same way of seeing everything” was one of his most frequent comments. It wasn’t one of those marriages where one spouse’s obsessions made the other one feel neglected or envious—they shared exactly the same obsessions to an equal extent. Marie wrote to Bronia (who was in the process of founding a state-of-the-art treatment center for tuberculosis patients back in Poland): Pierre is “the best husband one could dream of. . . . He is a true gift of heaven, and the more we live together the more we love each other.”
The lab was a place of beauty, love—and serious accomplishment. By age thirty-one, Marie had discovered two new elements through the rays they emitted and coined the word that described those rays. One way in which she did differ significantly from Pierre was her drive to succeed. He was all but indifferent to competition or taking credit. She was just the opposite—she wanted her gold medals.
Almost from the beginning, she started calling radioactivity an atomic property. She drew the conclusion that the ability to radiate had to be linked to something in the interior of the atom itself.
A year earlier, the English physicist J. J. Thomson, while pursuing Röntgen’s research, had concluded that certain rays were made up of particles even smaller than atoms. In other words, no longer was the atom the smallest unit in matter, as Mendeleyev and everyone else had insisted. The atom was not the end of the story. Thomson was calling the particles “electrons”—the first subatomic particles to be identified.
There was still much more to understand about the atom and its structure. But the doors to modern particle physics—atomic science—had officially swung open.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Legend Begins
POLONIUM AND RADIUM. Both of Marie’s monumental discoveries had been based on what she understood to be true from spectroscopic evidence and the intensity of the elements’ rays. Now she felt compelled to go further, to produce actual substances that could be seen and measured, so that she could prove her theories on a chemical basis as well.
Thus began her legendary quest to isolate the pure radium that existed in such tiny traces in complex ores.
To do so would require huge amounts of pitchblende. She searched far and wide, locating a uranium mine in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. It supplied potters who made yellow glazes from uranium for the vases and dishes that the area was renowned for. The mine was willing to send the Curies ten tons of pitchblende residue, as long as they paid to have it shipped. To the mine it was waste material, basically worthless. All the uranium was gone from it.
To Marie it was priceless. A wealthy baron donated money for the shipping costs. The next problem was storage. Where do you put twenty thousand pounds of pitchblende residue? Pierre got permission to use a huge shed at the school. This was another gloomy place, freezing in winter, boiling in summer, previously a room for dissections, now too shabby and uncomfortable even for that. Foreign scientists who in later years visited the shed assumed it was some sort of practical joke.