Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [18]
Pierre, who required absolute tranquility around him in order to think, was appalled by the post-Nobel frenzy. He called it “the disaster of our lives.” He was in the middle of experiments with radioactivity, passing radium through a magnetic field, and testing the amount of energy it put out by watching it heat water. One gram of radium took only one hour to heat a gram of water from freezing temperature to boiling—an astounding source of energy.
Now there were all these distractions from work. He bemoaned “this frittering away of our time.”
Their horror of publicity deepened when there was a new baby to protect—Ève, born in 1905 when Irène was seven and Marie thirty-eight. She duly noted expenses for celebratory telegrams and a bottle of champagne in her notebook.
Although exasperating for them at times, the Curies’ Nobel Prize aroused an abiding public interest in science. The work of researchers was now classified as must-know, their findings fascinating, the people captivating. Science was on the map, an impossible-to-ignore shaper of the twentieth century.
The Curies did appreciate the substantial amount of cash (split 50/50 with Becquerel) that came with the prize. For the first time, they had funds to pay an assistant. They also installed a modern bathroom. Sometimes Marie treated herself to a jar of caviar on the way home.
There were professional benefits as well. In 1904, Pierre was appointed to an important professorship in physics at the Sorbonne. The following year, he was elected to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences. This meant access to more funding and power. Electing a woman was, of course, still out of the question. In all of its 238 years, there had been few groups more staunchly male.
Radioactivity was ill-understood by the public, but radium was visible. And highly commercial. Minuscule amounts were put into any number of products. Surely it couldn’t be dangerous, when it was touted as the cure for every ill. One ludicrous headline declared, “Radium Makes Blind Girl See.”
Quack applications of real as well as fake radium became a multi-million-dollar business. It was put into hair tonic (promising to stop hair loss as well as get rid of gray), toothpaste, lipstick, suppositories. There were glow-in-the-dark costumes for dancers, radiant cocktails at restaurants. Chic people carried tiny vials of radium salt in their pockets, thinking to keep themselves healthy. There wasn’t much Marie could do about the bogus attempts to make money off radium, though she did hire a lawyer when an “Alfred Curie” began selling “Crème Tho-Radia.”
Meanwhile, real science sped forward. New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, using radioactive materials generously supplied by Marie, was working hard to prove his “transformation theory,” which claimed that radioactive elements actually change into other elements. In the process of changing, they give off radiation. He wrote about radioactive elements “which in their disintegration liberate enormous amounts of energy.”
In other words, elements like radium were unstable, and in the process of spontaneously breaking down, were decaying into other elements. It was this decay that was sending out energy in the form of his alpha and beta rays.
The Curies resisted Rutherford’s theory at first. Could something really be called an element if it was so unstable? But the decay theory had legs. And as evidence mounted, the Curies were gradually coming around to Rutherford’s point of view. For one thing, it confirmed Marie’s speculation that radioactivity was a subatomic property. There was something going on in the atom itself.
Medicine was the first scientific arena to be affected by radioactivity. In 1904, the first textbook describing radium treatments for cancer patients appeared.
That same year, Rutherford was exploring what radioactivity might reveal about how old minerals were. He came up with the