The Age of Radiance (6 page)

On February 17, 1898, Marie’s piezo electrometer measured torbernite (or chalcolite) having twice the radiance of uranium, while pitchblende ore was four times as vibrant. This only made sense if some other, even more powerful, radiating element, still unknown, lay within these compounds, and clearly, Becquerel was mistaken in calling them uranic rays. She tested and recalibrated her instruments and still had the same results, working constantly to explain this mystery. Her speed came from a fear of being trumped, as she knew full well that if Becquerel (who was overseeing her doctorate) had not told the Académie des Sciences of his own findings the very day after he made them, the discoverer of Becquerel rays would instead have been Silvanus Thompson, who announced his identical discovery one day later.

Pierre was so fascinated by his wife’s conclusions that on March 18 he dropped his work with crystals and joined her efforts.
“Neither of us could foresee that in beginning this work we were to enter the path of a new science which we should follow for all our future,” she later said. Eventually the Curies worked with seven tons of pitchblende from Bohemia, black ore suffused with pine needles, in a “laboratory” that was essentially a hut that the municipal medical school used for its students to dissect human corpses. But now it was in such disrepair, especially the leaking roof, that it wasn’t even fit for cadavers. (The Institut Curie is now located on the same rue Lhomond as the shed, adjacent to rue Pierre et Marie Curie.) The hut’s glass roof made summers roasting, winters debilitating, and rain an imminent presence; the stove used for heat was too weak to be useful; the only ventilation was the opening of a window and a door, meaning that processes involving fumes, which were innumerable, were conducted in the courtyard . . . with any rainstorms forcing the scientists to scurry their equipment back into the leaky shed, where they worked at remarkable physical labors from 1898 to 1902 . . . four toilsome years. Marie:

The life of a great scientist in his laboratory is not, as many may think, a peaceful idyll. More often it is a bitter battle with things, with one’s surroundings, and above all with oneself. . . . Between the days of fecund productivity are inserted days of uncertainty when nothing seems to succeed, and when even matter itself seems hostile; and it is then that one must hold out against discouragement. I had to work with as much as 20 kg of material at a time so that the hangar was filled with great vessels full of precipitate and of liquids. It was exhausting work to move the containers about, to transfer the liquids, and to stir for hours at a time, with an iron bar, the boiling material in the cast-iron basin. . . . I extracted from the mineral the radium-bearing barium, and this, in the state of chloride, I submitted to a fractional crystallization. . . . And yet it was in this miserable old shed that the best and happiest years of our life were spent, entirely consecrated to work. I sometimes passed the whole day stirring a mass in ebullition, with an iron rod nearly as big as myself.

The couple carried on between them the labors of a large chemical plant. Even though that winter was especially harsh, their work had to be done out of doors due to the fires and fumes. The first step was to melt the crude ore in a large, oblong tank until it was boiling like lava. Then acids were poured in to dissolve out the salts. The next stage was to melt down the residue in separate cauldrons, fired up twenty-four hours a day, with either Pierre or Marie present throughout. The reduced ore had to be filtered again and again to remove all other elements, and then evaporated in small bowls . . . revealing crystals. Marie:
“We lived in our single preoccupation as if in a dream. We’re very happy in spite of the difficult conditions under which we work. We passed our days at the laboratory, often eating a simple student’s lunch there. A great tranquility reigned in our poor shabby hangar; occasionally, while observing an operation, we would walk up and down talking about work, present and future. When we were cold, a cup of hot tea, drunk beside the stove, cheered us.”

On April 14, they ground up one hundred grams of pitchblende to prepare it for crystallization, knowing full well that they were searching through an agglomeration of thirty or so elements arrayed in multiple compounds, yet having no idea that the elements they wanted were so rare that seven tons of ore would have to be processed to extract one gram. With advice from their school’s chemists, they heated, distilled, pulverized, and precipitated with ammonium, until Marie’s samples registered 300 times as radiant
as uranium’s, and Pierre’s 350 times. Each time they thought they were done, however, the spectroscope refused to produce clear lines revealing a new element. Inside of a month, they were able to isolate two concentrations of ore radiant enough to publish findings. In their report of July 1898, “On a New Radio-Active Element Contained in Pitchblende,” they announced the discovery of a new member of the periodic table named for the home where Marie couldn’t live, yet couldn’t say farewell to: polonium. The same paper coined a new term for the emanation of Becquerel rays—“radio-active”—and called matter that emanated “radio-elements.”

The more Marie learned about uranium and its emanations, the more in love she fell. Manya Skłodowska may have renounced religion with the death of her mother and sister, but she seemed a penitent in the arms of the Lord when it came to her approach to science: monastic, devoted, chaste, she lived her life in what Pasteur had called “the temples of the future”: laboratories. This would be especially true after Bronya and Casimir decided to leave France and open a tuberculosis sanitarium in their beloved Zakopane, Poland. Marie was brokenhearted, writing to Bronya on December 2, 1898,
“You can’t imagine what a hole you have made in my life. . . . I have lost everything I clung to in Paris except my husband and child. It seems to me that Paris no longer exists, aside from our lodging and the school where we work.” Yet in that period, she would also say, “Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence with ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

After three months of vacation in Auvergne, the Curies returned to work in November and made rapid progress, a barium concentrate producing results nine hundred times as strong as uranium’s. One of the school’s chemists could finally see their second element through the spectroscope, and around December 20 they named it: radium. After four years, forty tons of chemicals, and four hundred tons of water, on March 28, 1902, they produced one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

In time, English chemist Frederick Soddy would work with New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford to discover the secret of uranic rays, the remarkable ability of radioactive elements to, through the spontaneous loss of subatomic particles, change into other elements, producing an emanation of alpha, beta, or gamma rays over the course of what they called a half-life. Subatomically bloated, these elements are forced to constantly shed neutrons or electrons until they achieve a stable, nonradioactive form and are at nucleic peace. It was, to Rutherford and Soddy’s great dismay,
the transmutation that alchemists had pursued for centuries . . . dismay, as alchemy had been a laughable topic for generations. But half-lives themselves are pretty funny, when they aren’t being cosmically grand, such as what happens to the most common form of uranium over its many lives as it ejects subatomic particles and alchemizes into various elements and isotopes:

Uranium-238 has a
¹
/
₂
life of 4
¹
/
₂
billion years, after which it turns into

Thorium-234, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 24 days, after which it turns into

Protactinium-234, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 1.16 minutes, after which it turns into

Uranium-234, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 245,500 years, after which it turns into

Thorium-230, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 75,380 years, after which it turns into

Radium-226, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 1,620 years, after which it turns into

Radon-222, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 3.8 days, after which it turns into

Polonium-218, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 3 minutes, after which it turns into

Lead-214, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 26.8 minutes, after which it turns into

Bismuth-214, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 20 minutes, after which it turns into

Polonium-214, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 0.164 microseconds, after which it turns into

Lead-210, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 22.3 years, after which it turns into

Bismuth-210, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 5 days, after which it turns into

Polonium-210, with a
¹
/
₂
life of 138 days, after which it turns into

Lead-206, which is stable, not radioactive, and has no
¹
/
₂
life.

While Pierre investigated radium’s signature properties (including that it generated enough continuous heat to melt its own weight in ice in under sixty minutes—the first clue to nuclear power), Marie experimented with the industrial-chemistry recipes needed to isolate her new elements. They tried finding an atomic weight by measuring unrefined against refined samples, but couldn’t, and from this they knew the element was in tiny amounts and very, very powerful. Three years later they would discover it was less than one-millionth of 1 percent, and this was only the start of its magic. Marie: “The chloride and bromide, freshly prepared and free from water, emit a light which resembles that of a glow-worm. . . . A glass vessel containing radium spontaneously charges itself with electricity. If the glass has a weak spot, for example, if it is scratched by a file, an electric spark is produced at that point, the vessel crumbles like a Leiden jar when overcharged, and the electric shock of the rupture is felt by the fingers holding the glass.” Marie would then note the remarkable property that Irène would investigate and that in time would revolutionize both medical diagnosis and treatment:
“Radium has the power of communicating its radioactivity to surrounding bodies. When a solution of a radium salt is placed in a closed vessel, the radioactivity in part leaves the solution and distributes itself through the vessel, the walls of which become radioactive and luminous.”

At that moment, there was no greater scientific achievement than adding new elements to the periodic table. The Curies had discovered two, publishing their proofs in nine months. Also, both elements brilliantly luminesced, radium with an aquatic shimmer reminiscent of absinthe. When the couple pressed glowing radium against their eyelids, they saw fireworks and meteors flashing across the retinas.

The other scientist investigating radium was a German organic chemist employed by a quinine factory, Friedrich Giesel, who said the blue light it produced was so powerful it could be employed as a night-light for reading. He advised the Curies to try bromide salts instead of chlorides during crystallization, and was able to deflect the path of Becquerel waves with a magnet, proving that they were, in fact, a form of matter. He also revealed that, when he fired the alluring radium with his Bunsen burner, it didn’t ignite with a green flame, like barium, but with a blaze that was the color of Christmas cherries. Marie’s beloved radium, then, had a sapphire light, but a carmine flame.

A little house at boulevard Kellermann 108 was now home to Pierre, Marie, the four-year-old Irène, and Pierre’s widowed father. One evening at nine o’clock, after her daughter was put to bed, Marie turned to Pierre and asked if they could go back to the shed, to their radium. They went to look, making sure to not turn on the lights. There, in shelves and on tables, the aquatic glow of their babies shone in the night:
“Sometimes we returned in the evening after dinner for another survey of our domain. Our precious products, for which we had no shelter, were arranged on tables and boards; from all sides we could see their slightly luminous silhouettes, and these gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment. . . . The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.” She loved the radiance so much that she would wait a few minutes before turning on the lights in her lab after arriving on dark, wintry mornings, to enjoy her shimmering vials. Other visitors noticed that, even after the samples were removed, the walls themselves continued to glow.

Only a heavy blanket of lead could contain the powerful rays of the Curies’ greatest discovery. Radium produced light, heat, and helium; it ionized the air and excited photographic plates; it tinted glass a delicate purple
and dissolved paper into ash; and it could infect other substances with its emanations. Diamonds when treated would phosphoresce brilliantly; imitations, poorly, if at all. Sir William Crookes (of the Crookes tube that had originally served Röntgen) prepared for the Royal Society a 1903 demonstration of radioactivity:
“Viewed through a magnifying glass, the sensitive [zinc sulfide] screen is seen to be the object of a veritable bombardment by particles of infinite minuteness, which, themselves invisible, make known their arrival on the screen by flashes of light, just as a shell coming from the blue announces itself by an explosion.” Marie called the process a “cataclysm of atomic transformation,” and she tried to explain the magic through science: “The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionized, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy . . . luminous energy . . . and once more we are forced to recognize how limited is our direct perception of the world which surrounds us, and how numerous and varied may be the phenomena which we pass without a suspicion of their existence until the day when a fortunate hazard reveals them. . . . If we consider these radiations in their entirety—the ultra-violet, the luminous, the infra-red, and the electromagnetic—we find that the radiations we see constitute but an insignificant fraction of those that exist in space. But it is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist, and whenever some chance discovery extends the limits of our knowledge we are filled with amazement. We cannot become accustomed to the idea that we live in a world that is revealed to us only in a restricted portion of its manifestations.”