Chapter Three

MADAME CURIE
(Tungsten and Molybdenum)

PART OF BECOMING Madame Curie meant learning how to cook. This proved neither difficult nor mysterious, merely time-consuming. Bronya supplied recipes for a few familiar dishes, along with some hands-on demonstrations. Marie also purchased a cookbook and worked through it methodically, making marginal notes on her success or failure in each culinary effort. Pierre, who barely heeded what he ate, discerned no difference between her successes and her failures, so that in this regard, as in other areas of their lives, they seemed ideally matched.

As Pierre’s wife, Marie was permitted to move her magnetized steel project into the industrial school where he taught. Pierre still lacked his own designated lab space, even after his promotion to professor, but he continued to set up his experiments in the student laboratories, or, when those were occupied, in the corridor leading from the laboratories to the stairway. Here he carried out his research on the growth of crystals, trying to determine the factors that promoted their development. Here Marie installed the equipment for testing magnets made from various brands of steel.

After working within sight of each other through the day, they linked arms and walked the five blocks home to their sparsely furnished flat on the rue de la Glacière, where they dined at opposite ends of a white wooden table that doubled as a shared desk space.

In the evenings Pierre wrote out the lectures for his new physics course. These alternated at first between crystallography and electricity. Years before, in 1880, he and his brother, Jacques, had united these two disciplines by discovering that certain crystals generated an electric current when pushed or pulled out of shape. The brothers named the effect piezoelectricity, meaning electricity due to pressure.

Marie, who planned to become an instructor like Pierre, spent the after-dinner hours studying for the competitive qualifying exams, the agrégation, which would gain her the necessary certification for teaching at a girls’ secondary school.

“Everything goes well,” she assured her brother, Józef, in November.

We are both healthy and life is kind to us. I am arranging my flat little by little, but I intend to keep it to a style which will give me no worries and will not require attention, as I have very little help: a woman who comes for an hour a day to wash the dishes and do the heavy work. I do the cooking and housekeeping myself.

Every few days we go to Sceaux to see my husband’s parents. This does not interrupt our work; we have two rooms on the first floor there, with everything we need; we are therefore perfectly at home and can do all the part of our work that cannot be done in the laboratory.

When it is fine we go to Sceaux by bicycle; we take the train only when it is raining cats and dogs.

At the laboratory she had the use of ovens, baths, batteries, galvanometers, and other apparatus for putting her steel samples through a variety of trials. At home or at Sceaux she analyzed her observations, calculated, interpolated, tabulated, and planned what experiment to try next in the lab.

One by one she turned each of her forty-seven steel samples into a magnet with the aid of current-carrying wires. The flowing electricity in the wires created a magnetic field capable of inducing magnetism in susceptible materials. Steel, by its nature, was eminently susceptible to magnetization. Soon Marie could document which samples—that is, which chemical recipe for steel, as revealed to her by the individual manufacturers—acquired the greatest magnetic strength. She also sought to determine which physical treatments—which specific combinations of heat, cold, and pressure—would best preserve and prolong the much-desired magnetism. For example, some commercial manufacturers subjected their magnetized steel to percussive shocks, which Marie mimicked by intentionally dropping samples to the floor or hitting them with a hammer.

The summer of 1896 found her sitting for the teaching examinations, which lasted several weeks from July through mid-August and coincided with her first wedding anniversary. True to her academic record, she passed in first place. She and Pierre celebrated by taking another bicycle vacation. One evening on their travels south, “lingering until twilight in the gorge of the Truyère,” she recalled years later,

we were enchanted to hear a folk song dying away in the distance, carried to us from a small boat descending the stream. We had taken so little notice of the time that we did not reach our lodging before dawn. At one point on our way back there through the dark we encountered some carts drawn by horses that were frightened of our bicycles, obliging us to cut across the tilled fields. At length we regained our route on the high plateau bathed in the unreal light of the moon. And cows that were passing the night in enclosures came gravely to contemplate us with their great, tranquil eyes.

THE SECOND YEAR of marriage passed much like the first. Marie had her teaching certification now, but no teaching position, and continued her study of steel full-time.

In early March of 1897 she apologized to her girlhood friend Kazia for being late with her annual birthday greetings but gave good reasons for her tardiness. “I am going to have a child,” she wrote. “For more than two months I have had continual dizziness, all day long from morning to night. I tire myself out and get steadily weaker, and although I do not look ill, I feel unable to work and am in a very bad state of spirits.”

Her weakened condition troubled her all the more because of the worrisome situation in Sceaux. As she explained to Józef, “My husband’s mother is still ill, and as it is an incurable disease (cancer of the breast) we are very depressed. I am afraid, above all, that the disease will reach its end at the same time as my pregnancy. If this should happen my poor Pierre will have some very hard weeks to go through.”

After the early phase of discomfort and dizziness that she reported to Kazia, she felt well enough to resume her experiments. By July she was ready to apply the final test—the test of time. How long would the “permanent” magnets she had produced by her best methods retain their magnetism? This phase offered a prime opportunity for a restful vacation break. Marie arranged to meet her father at a small hotel on the rocky beach in Brittany’s Port Blanc, where Pierre would join them after giving his final lectures of the semester.

It was the first time either of them had spent more than a few hours away from the other since their marriage. Pierre pined for her in his best beginner’s Polish: “My little girl, so dear, so sweet, whom I love so much, I had your letter today and was very happy.”

“My dear husband!” she replied by postcard, mindful of his limited vocabulary in her language. “Fine weather here, the sun is shining and it’s warm. I’m very sad without you. Come quickly. I wait for you from morning till evening and still don’t see you coming. I’m fine. I work as much as I can, but Poincaré’s book is more difficult than I expected. I need to talk with you about it and look together with you at the parts that are giving me trouble.”

Delayed by the need to stay in Sceaux with his ailing Maman, Pierre reverted to French in longer letters. “I think of my dearest who fills up my life, and I long to have new powers. It seems to me that in concentrating my mind exclusively on you, as I am doing, that I should succeed in seeing you, and in following what you are doing; and also to make you feel that I am entirely yours at this moment,—but the image does not come.”

At last his brother’s arrival from Montpelier freed Pierre from his filial duties, and he reached Port Blanc in August. He and Marie, now in her eighth month of pregnancy, set off together for Brest in their usual fashion, by bicycle. They loved “the melancholy coasts of Brittany,” as she described them, but on this occasion she lacked the stamina to fully appreciate “the reaches of heather and gorse, stretching to the very points of Finistère, like claws or teeth burying themselves in the water that forever rages at them.”

Cutting their ramble short for a hasty return to Paris ahead of schedule, Marie gave birth on September 12. The new parents named their daughter Irène. Pierre splurged on a bottle of champagne and a few telegrams to Warsaw.

Four days after Irène’s birth, Marie returned to the lab to check the strength of her magnets. To her satisfaction, she found no detectable change from her early-summer measurements. Ideally she might have continued the trial for a much longer time, but she had enough data in hand to begin writing up her results with specific recommendations.

Before the end of September, as Marie had feared, Pierre’s mother died, and the mood of the family shifted from joy to mourning. Sophie-Claire Depouilly Curie was laid to rest in Sceaux, not far from the house where she had raised her two fine boys. She was the first of the Curies to be buried in the Sceaux cemetery, as her husband’s people hailed from Alsace in the northeast. Dr. Curie chose a simple headstone for his wife’s grave, with her name at the rounded top and room below for his to be added later:

Madame CURIE

née Sophie-Claire

DEPOUILLY

1832-1897

The bereaved did their best to rebalance their lives after the loss. “I am still nursing my little Queen,” Marie wrote her father in November, just after turning thirty, “but lately we have been seriously afraid that I could not continue.” The child’s weight had been decreasing, so that Irène “looked ill, and was depressed and lifeless. For some days now things have been going better. If she gains weight normally I shall continue to breastfeed her. If not, I shall take a nurse, in spite of the grief this would be to me, and in spite of the expense; I don’t want to interfere with my child’s development for anything on earth.”

Another week went by before Marie took the difficult step of hiring a wetnurse. She clung, however, to the rest of Irène’s care—bathing her, dressing her, recording daily notes on her growth, singing her to sleep at night. Old Dr. Curie, who had delivered the child, now doted on her, finding respite from his grief in her every tiny gesture. He offered to move in with Marie and Pierre, to lend a hand in raising his new granddaughter.

Thus supported, Marie prepared a forty-page summary of her steel research. She pointed out that the steels with the highest content of tungsten tended to hold on to their magnetism most tenaciously, and she defined the optimal tungsten content of magnet steels to be 5.5 percent. Varieties of tungsten steel that also contained 1 to 2 percent molybdenum, she added, had performed even better in her tests. She suspected this finding might surprise people in the industry, since no one else had named the element molybdenum as an aid to magnetization. Having specified the ideal chemical composition, she judged the optimal finishing process to include slow-baking the magnets at sixty to seventy degrees Celsius for about two days.

In December she submitted her report to the Société pour l’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale. The society announced her findings immediately in its monthly bulletin, praising her work as “important,” and published the full text of her paper soon afterward. The 1,500 francs she received as compensation for her research enabled Marie to repay a kindness. She well remembered how the 1893 Alexandrovitch Scholarship of 600 rubles had allowed her to live another year in Paris, to work toward a second university degree, to accept a challenge from the steel industry, and to enjoy all that had followed from those experiences.

Here was an opportunity to give someone else a chance at advancement.

Her show of gratitude startled the granting agency and made Marie the anonymous patroness of another deserving student—someone as impoverished as she had been, and whose identity she would never know.

Marie’s advice on magnetized steel reappeared in numerous abstracts and translations. While some reviewers faintly praised the work as “patient and systematic,” and a few metallurgists objected loudly to a newcomer’s intrusion into their field, a summary appraisal issued several years later by British industrialist and inventor Rookes Crompton acknowledged the overall positive effect of her contribution: “All instrument-makers are deeply indebted to Marie Curie for the excellent work she has published in regard to the saturation and persistence of magnetism in steel bars. Madame Curie has pointed out how much depends on the exact temperature to which the magnet steel must be heated before being plunged, and if her directions are closely followed excellent and concordant conditions invariably follow. The work that she has given to the world in this respect is almost unique in its character and accuracy.”

Toward the end of the Curie family’s eventful year, on December 16, 1897, when Irène was three months old, Marie recorded the first notes regarding the new research direction she had chosen for her doctoral dissertation. She happened to jot them down in a lab notebook of Pierre’s. At home she kept two notebooks of her own for recording household expenditures and Irène’s progress (often measuring the infant’s weight both before and after feedings). To take up the unused pages of her husband’s notebook for the new project seemed the expedient thing to do, and not at all unreasonable in the context of their shared existence.

“In our life together,” she wrote in retrospect, “it was given to me to know him as he had hoped I might, and to penetrate each day further into his thought. He was as much and much more than all I had dreamed at the time of our union. My admiration of his unusual qualities grew continually; he lived on a plane so rare and so elevated that he sometimes seemed to me a being unique in his freedom from all vanity and from the littlenesses that one discovers in oneself and in others, and which one judges with indulgence although aspiring to a more perfect ideal.”