Chapter 6
It Glows!
Now that Marie was a little bit famous, she hoped the scientific world would show her some respect. She and Pierre asked the Sorbonne for a bigger, better laboratory. They wanted a clean space with new equipment so she could continue her work.
The Sorbonne refused.
Instead, they said she could take over a huge, dirty, leaky, old building near the college. The building had been used by medical students to cut up dead bodies for experiments!
There was no heat in her lab. In the winter, the place was horribly cold. Marie and Pierre had to huddle around a small stove to keep warm, sipping cups of tea.
Some days Marie forgot to eat, she was so busy with her work. Some nights, she went home to see her daughter, but then went back to her lab after Irene was asleep.
For three long years, Marie sifted through tons of pitchblende. It was backbreaking work. The crushed rocks were delivered to the courtyard outside her lab. She stirred huge amounts of brown dust in a giant pot with other chemicals. She had to boil the mixture, then wash it to separate out the metals. It took fifty tons of water to wash one ton of crushed rocks! All together, Marie used eight tons of pitchblende and four hundred tons of water before she was done!
Little by little, Marie was succeeding. She was getting tiny amounts of radium out of the pitchblende. At first it wasn’t pure radium. It was just something called radium salts, but she kept working, trying to get a purer form of the metal.
The radium salts gave off a lovely glow each night in the dark lab. Marie and Pierre brought a glass jar of it home to keep beside their bed. They liked to watch it glow in the dark.
Marie didn’t know it at the time, but handling radium wasn’t a good idea. The rays it gave off were dangerous. Touching it damaged her skin, although slowly. Henri Becquerel had carried a glass tube of radium salts around in his jacket. A few weeks later, his skin was burned in the spot where the radium had been. Pierre found the same thing happened to him. Being around radium damaged the insides of their bodies, too. It was making them sick.
Still, Marie kept working and writing research reports about her discoveries. Sometimes she and Pierre wrote them together. Marie and Pierre were still not fully respected. Often, Becquerel was given more attention and respect. It must have been hard to work side by side with Becquerel, especially when Pierre thought that Becquerel was secretly trying to keep him out of the Academy of Sciences.
Finally in July 1902, after nearly four years, Marie had a few grains of pure radium! It was enough to prove it really existed. Other scientists tested the metal and agreed she was right.
Marie wrote another long research paper about her discovery. With this report, she could now get her PhD from the Sorbonne. Marie had never cared about clothes, but she bought a new dress for the occasion. In June 1903, she had a celebration dinner. Besides Pierre, several friends and famous scientists joined her, including Gabriel Lippmann. They were all so proud of her.
Now Marie and Pierre hoped that they would both be able to get good jobs with a decent laboratory. That’s all they wanted: a clean, quiet place to work. But they were about to receive something even more exciting. They were about to win the Nobel Prize!
