Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [2]
Chemistry took a giant leap forward in the next century—with Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. In command of the best private laboratory in the world, Lavoisier wrote Elementary Treatise of Chemistry in 1789, providing a much more detailed definition of what constitutes an element, and proposing the first table of known elements. Five years later, after the French Revolution, the unfortunate Lavoisier, a well-off tax collector, was sent to the guillotine.
dmitri Mendeleyev was able to stand on Lavoisier’s shoulders even though the Frenchman’s head was no longer attached to them. In 1869, this Russian chemist wrote The Principles of Chemistry. Inspired by his favorite game—solitaire—Mendeleyev set up a table, or grid, to organize the elements. He used a method similar to the way a solitaire player lays out cards, by suit in horizontal rows, by number in vertical columns. Each row of his table he called a “period.” Establishing a pattern, he devised what we call the periodic table of all the known elements. In Mendeleyev’s time, some sixty elements were officially recognized—like oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and uranium, discovered in 1798. The table we use today comes from his table.
By Marie’s day, the climate for scientists in France had vastly improved since the time of the Revolution. In part, this was due to the great Louis Pasteur, who in 1868 revolutionized medicine by discovering that bacteria could cause disease. A French national hero, Pasteur inspired Marie by calling labs “sacred places” where “humanity grows, fortifies itself, and becomes better.”
In much of her early work, Marie was encouraged and assisted by her husband, Pierre Curie. Work was such a driving force of her life that it’s impossible to imagine her marrying anyone other than Pierre, an important scientist in his own right. In 1895, the couple became intrigued with the German Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, and the French scientist Henri Becquerel, who was studying the fascinating rays that were emitted from uranium. Building upon the work of these two physicists, Marie found her life’s obsession: adding two new elements to Mendeleyev’s table—polonium and radium—and researching them further.
In going on to found the prestigious Radium Institute, she dedicated the rest of her life specifically to providing shoulders for the next generation of scientists to stand on.
In all she did she was brave, undeterred. Both she and Pierre Curie fell sick from overexposure to radium. Yet, as she said in one of her most famous quotes: “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” She viewed science not as a source of pain or martyrdom, but as a heroic adventure: “If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible.” Like a test tube full of the radium she discovered, Marie Curie glows with the pure passion of her commitment.
As for publicity that focused on scientists as human beings, she had this to say: “In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.” So would she have liked this book? Probably not.
CHAPTER ONE
The Gold-Medal Girl
THE SKLODOWSKI CHILDREN were all exceptional. Of the brainy five, the oldest, a talented storyteller, died before she turned fifteen. Two grew up to become doctors. One became a teacher. And the youngest, born November 7, 1867, was to become famous—as Marie Curie.
Education was in Marie’s bones. (Her Polish name was Marya and her childhood nickname Manya.) She came from a family of teachers, people who wanted to learn as much as they could in order to change their world for the better, people who believed in great causes. She grew up in Warsaw, Poland, at a time when there was a very real cause to fight for.
Technically, Poland no longer existed. Many people around Marie wore black clothes at all times, in a state of mourning for their former country. Once it had been a mighty kingdom, but by 1795, it had been cut up into pieces claimed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Warsaw was under the