Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [14]
In the spring of 1899, bag after bag of brown dust mixed with pine needles started arriving at the shed from Bohemia.
Marie’s mission was to purify known substances out of the pitchblende residue. First she chemically extracted all the elements that weren’t radioactive. Finally she obtained a material that was mostly barium chloride but which also contained radium. At this point she used a delicate process called fractional crystallization to separate the barium from the radium. It was a bit like producing rock candy, which is made by repeated heating and cooling a solution of sugar and water. Again and again, she crystallized and recrystallized—many thousands of times, all the while striving to avoid contaminating her samples with unwanted substances. It was, typically, painstaking work where she couldn’t be too careful. (Later she attributed her success to a very simple rule: “The secret is in not going too fast.”)
The shed was filled with vats of liquids she had to move and pour, stirring for hours at a time. It was dirty work, and mind-numbingly tedious: “I would be broken with fatigue at the day’s end.” She kept track of every detail in notebook after notebook. Accidental contamination and other setbacks occurred often. On the best days, when progress was made, she used as many as nine exclamation points to indicate her giddiness.
Pierre later said that if the decision had been his, he wouldn’t have persisted with the daunting task of isolating radium, or would have done it later when they had a decent lab. But like her mother who’d cobbled shoes, Marie did the hands-on work that needed to be done, knowing it was for a worthy cause. And always the drive to succeed—and get credit—fueled Marie. Pierre was simply not as competitive.
Months passed. Marie worked in her notebooks at the shed and at home. All scientists are recorders of events—think of Leonardo da vinci and his notebooks. Marie was a fanatic recorder. Not just of scientific work. She itemized long lists of expenses (“His” and “Hers”), wrote down recipes (gooseberry jam, with ingredients tallied so precisely it might have been a lab experiment), and especially took note of anything to do with Irène.
Even as a mother, Marie was a scientist. She noted daily measurements of her daughter’s height, weight, the diameter of her little head; her first words (“gogli, gogli, go”); when each tooth came in; every instance of a skinned knee; all of her accomplishments. In some ways, Irène was treated like an experiment in progress. And conversely, Marie referred to radium as “my child.”
Through repeated purifications, the radiation kept getting more intense. Something extraordinary was happening. The substance she had isolated glowed in the dark. “It was like creating something out of nothing,” she said.
After her start in 1899, the months piled up into years. Of their days at the lab, she wrote, “A great tranquility reigned. . . . We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.” At noon they would break for a simple lunch, perhaps a few bites of sausage with a cup of tea. They had few visitors and participated less than ever in the cultural life of turn-of-the-century Paris.
At night, sometimes the couple would walk the five blocks back to the lab, holding hands, to see in the darkness the eerie blue-green glow of test tubes with radium: “Slightly luminous silhouettes . . . stirred us with new emotion and enchantment . . . like faint fairy light.” In their bedroom they kept a vial of radium salts and marveled at its glow before falling asleep.
What the Curies couldn’t know, not in 1899, was how extremely dangerous radiation exposure is to all living creatures. Its harmful effects weren’t clear for years afterward, and neither of the Curies took precautions while handling it. The excitement of their discoveries was much more on their minds than trivial concerns like a constant burning in their fingers. It was never clear whether the Curies suspected radium’s danger; they were part of a tradition of