The Age of Radiance (5 page)

Marie:
“Pierre’s intellectual capacities were not those which would permit the rapid assimilation of a prescribed course of studies. His dreamer’s spirit would not submit itself to the ordering of the intellectual effort imposed by the school. . . . He grew up in all freedom, developing his taste for natural science through his excursions into the country, where he collected plants and animals for his father.” Pierre:
“I did not regret my nights passed in the woods, and my solitary days. If I had the time I would let myself recount my musings. I would describe my delicious valley, filled with the perfume of aromatic plants, the beautiful mass of foliage, so fresh and so humid, that hung over the Bievre, the fairy palace with its colonnade of hops, the stony hills, red with heather. . . . We must eat, sleep, be idle, have sex, love, touch the sweetest things in life and yet not succumb to them.”

Pierre Curie had fallen in love as a young man, but then the girl died, and a lack of income forced him to put off work toward his doctorate indefinitely. Instead, he became a poorly paid laboratory instructor at the city school; at the age of thirty-five, he was still living with his parents. Working with elder brother Jacques, Pierre studied crystals—quartz, tourmaline, topaz, sugar—and found that, when they were compressed along the axis of symmetry, they produced a charge—piezoelectricity (from the Greek, “to squeeze”). For the precise measurements needed for this work, the physicist brothers created a highly sensitive instrument that combined tiny weights, microscopic meter readers, and pneumatic dampeners—the Curie scale. Then, heating various materials to 1,400°C (over 2,500°F), they discovered a link between heat and magnetism. Today the temperature that a given element loses its magnetism, the Curie point, is used in studying plate tectonics, treating hypothermia, measuring the caffeine in beverages, and understanding extraterrestrial magnetic fields, while piezoelectricity is found in mechanisms propelling the droplets of ink-jet printers, regulating time in quartz watches, controlling the shrill wail of smoke detectors, turning the adjustable lenses of autofocus cameras, acting as the pickups of electric guitars, giving a spark to electric cigarette lighters, reducing vibrations within tennis rackets, and sending out high-frequency audio to monitor the heartbeats of fetuses.

Lord Kelvin was so taken with the Curie brothers’ work on electric quartz that he arranged for a number of visits with Pierre in his lab the first week of October 1893, the same period that the impoverished teacher was meeting the great love of his life. Marie Curie:
“As I entered the room, Pierre Curie was standing in the recess of a French window opening on a balcony.
He seemed to me very young, though he was at that time thirty-five years old. I was struck by the open expression of his face and by the slight suggestion of detachment in his whole attitude. His speech, rather slow and deliberate, his simplicity, and his smile, at once grave and youthful, inspired confidence. . . . There was, between his conceptions and mine, despite the difference between our native countries, a surprising kinship, no doubt attributable to a certain likeness in the moral atmosphere in which we were both raised by our families. . . . Soon he caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and he asked me to share that life. It was not, however, easy for me to make such a decision, for it meant separation from my country and my family, and the renouncement of certain social projects that were dear to me. Having grown up in an atmosphere of patriotism kept alive by the oppression of Poland, I wished, like many other young people of my country, to contribute my effort toward the conservation of our national spirit.”

Marie was the first woman Pierre had encountered in fifteen years who was both attractive physically and shared his great passion for science. She felt likewise; besides his professional achievements, Marie “noticed the grave and gentle expression of his face, as well as a certain abandon in his attitude, suggesting the dreamer absorbed in his reflections.” But then he asked if she planned to remain in France permanently, and she said, “Certainly not. . . . I shall be a teacher in Poland; I shall try to be useful. Poles have no right to abandon their country.”

After a few months passed, Marie made plans for a trip to Warsaw, for a vacation with her family, and to apply to graduate school in her native country. Pierre suddenly insisted, “Promise me that you will come back! If you stay in Poland you can’t possibly continue your studies. You have no right to abandon science.” Marie later said that she felt what Pierre really meant by this was “You have no right to abandon me.” But she could never, in turn, imagine abandoning Poland, or marrying a man who wasn’t Polish, and only allowed Pierre to consider themselves as friends.

While Marie was away, a torrent of letters arrived from Pierre in his childlike writing, signed “your very devoted friend” and begging her to return: “We promised each other (isn’t it true?) to have, for each other, at least a great affection. As long as you do not change your mind! For there are no promises which hold: these are things that do not admit of compulsion.” Pierre “had a touching desire to know all that was dear to me,” Marie said. He even learned a bit of her difficult native language and, when she finally returned in October, made a remarkably abject offer: he would move
to Poland and find some kind of position, if only she would marry him. Pierre Curie: “It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing in which I hardly dare believe, to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science. Of all these dreams, I believe the last, alone, is legitimate. I mean to say by this that we are powerless to change the social order. Even if this were not true we should not know what to do. And in working without understanding we should never be sure that we were not doing more harm than good, by retarding some inevitable evolution. From the point of view of science, on the contrary, we can pretend to accomplish something. The territory here is more solid and obvious, and however small it is, it is truly in our possession.”

After Kraków University rejected her application because she was a woman, Marie decided to compromise, writing a friend,
“It is a sorrow to me to have to stay forever in Paris, but what am I to do? Fate has made us deeply attached to each other and we cannot endure the idea of separating.” In time, she would change her mind, falling deeper and deeper in love:
“I have the best husband one could dream of; I could never have imagined finding one like him. He is a true gift of heaven, and the more we live together the more we love each other.” Pierre:
“I think of you who fill my life, and I long for new powers. It seems to me that in concentrating my mind exclusively upon you, as I am doing, that I should succeed in seeing you, and in following what you are doing; and that I should be able to make you feel that I am altogether yours at this moment—but the image does not come.”

Their wedding was in every way untraditional. The couple needed no lawyers since their only possessions were two bicycles bought the day before with wedding money from a cousin. They would have no white dress or tails, no gold rings, no formal breakfast, and no religious ceremony, as Pierre was a freethinker. The bride’s attire, a navy wool suit and blue-on-blue-striped blouse, was paid for by her brother-in-law’s mother and sewn by Mme. Glet according to Marie’s requirements that it be
“practical and dark, so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.”

The couple rode, together, atop the omnibus across boulevard Saint-Michel to the Gare du Luxembourg for the train to Pierre’s hometown of Sceaux, where his parents still lived. They were married at city hall, with a reception in the garden of the Curie home. Taking their
vélos
on the train, they honeymooned in Brittany. The two would in time discover they both enjoyed long bike rides and overseas travel, and over the next eleven years, Marie remembered,
“My husband and I were so closely united by our affection and our common work that we passed nearly all of our time together.”

Having refused Dr. Curie’s marital gift of furniture, their drawing room in Paris had a wooden table with two chairs, one for each of them, and none for any guests. Photographs depict the Curies as a remarkably severe couple: Pierre with his gaunt face, his bristling salt-and-pepper Vandyke, and his military brush cut; and his wife, Marie, tough as cancer. But clearly, they were as meant for each other as any man and woman in history. Though he had the significant scientific background, it was the unstoppable, indefatigable force known as Marie Curie, with her seemingly infinite reserves of energy and ambition, that drove the couple professionally. With her encouragement (and very likely nudging), by 1895 Pierre had won the doctorate he’d long deserved and was promoted to a full professorship at the city school. In addition to the two master’s degrees she held by the time of her marriage, Marie passed the French state exam to teach science to women, while continuing to experiment on magnetics and steel. The director at Pierre’s school gave her a lab to use, and she convinced French metalworks companies to donate materials, a trinity of corporate, government, and academic funding she would juggle for the rest of her professional life, and which would become a standard for modern practice in the era of big science.

In the summer of 1897, when they would be separated by Pierre’s work and Marie’s difficult first pregnancy, they would write back and forth in Polish, he poetically, beginning each with
“my dear little child whom I love”; she, in language plain enough that he might understand it. Then in her eighth month, during a bicycle trip when she said all was fine, they were forced to rush back to Paris where Marie’s father-in-law oversaw the birth of his granddaughter, Irène (
ee-REN
), on September 12. Though impossible to imagine for the first twenty years of her life, Irène and her husband would in time achieve a professional stature nearly as prominent as that of her parents.

Soon after giving birth, Marie decided on her doctoral topic: Henri Becquerel’s rays, which she picked since
“the subject seemed to us very attractive and all the more so because the question was entirely new and nothing yet had been written upon it.” With this pragmatic notion, Marie Curie had found a subject to study for the rest of her life; a partner to study it with; and a temple where she suffered and was redeemed.

Before Becquerel, German pharmacist Martin Klaproth named the element uranium in the spring of 1789 after the recently discovered Uranus. It was used to stain glass in the Roman empire, the bodies of American Indians, and the glazed pottery of Depression-era America (eating from Fiestaware orange-red plates produced before 1942 is hazardous, though the maker has
argued,
“In truth, the red glaze emitted far less radiation than some other consumer products”).

Marie arranged to get a ton of ore donated from Bohemia’s St. Joachim’s Valley, where a mine in the 1500s produced 2 million silver coins called
joachimsthalers
(or
thalers
, which became the English word
dollars
). Only interested in silver, the Bohemians ignored the various yellow, orange, and green ores they called “bad luck tar rock,” or
Pechblende
(English,
pitchblende
). Not realizing what bad luck this tar rock really was, though, the miners would, two decades later, choke up blood for about six weeks and then die from an unspecified “mountain sickness.”

With Pierre’s help, Marie built an ionization chamber out of wooden crates discarded by their grocer. Inside were two metal plates, with the element to be tested resting on the lower plate and one of Pierre and Jacques’s delicate instruments on the upper. By charging the lower with a battery, Marie could determine if the element electrified the air—as Becquerel had noted—through a current detected by the instrument. Besides its being one of the great love stories of the twentieth century, then, Marie Curie’s great professional luck in meeting Pierre was that he had coinvented the piezo electrometer.

What were these uranic rays, this invisible power somehow generated by inorganic minerals? Marie confirmed Becquerel’s assertion that the rays’ force was not affected by wetting, drying, heating, illuminating, compressing, or pulverizing; that nothing but the amount of uranium itself determined the amount of voltage emanated. But Marie and Pierre could not understand how uranium’s rays were birthed. They first theorized that a special feature within uranium absorbed cosmic rays from space, then slowly released them. To test this, German schoolteachers Julius Ester and Hans Friedrich Geitel buried radioactive materials beneath 300 meters of Harz mountain rock as well as at the bottom of an 850-meter mine shaft, for forty-eight hours. Neither had an effect on their emanations, and Marie, along with Ester and Geitel, then went beyond Becquerel to theorize that the effulgence must arise not from chemistry (from the interaction of uranium with other elements), but solely from within the element’s very atoms. By their showing all the ways in which its power was unaffected, radiance by default had to be an atomic property of the element uranium. For the rest of his life, Pierre Curie remained convinced that the process was an energy transfer, similar to thermodynamics, and spent many of his last years trying to apply theories of heat to radium and polonium. But if atoms were constantly losing their energy through a thermodynamic-like process, they
would eventually either implode or explode, and his experiments to counter Marie’s atomic assertion were all failures.

Out of everything Madame Curie would discover, as science this was the simplest, most significant, and most revolutionary. She had pointed to the first physical evidence that enormous energy lay within the very essence of matter. It was revolutionary because, as she noted,
“from this point of view, the atom of radium would be in a process of evolution, and we should be forced to abandon the theory of the invariability of atoms, which is at the foundation of modern chemistry.” The fundamental law of thermodynamics, which forbade the creation of energy from nothing, had been undone.