Chapter Fifteen

MAURICE (Ionium)

PARTLY OUT OF RESPECT for Mme. Curie, partly as a show of friendship, and partly “to smooth things over” in case her feelings had been bruised in discussions of the radium standard, Ernest Rutherford entreated the University of Manchester to grant her an honorary degree. He had intended to make the presentation at the formal opening of his new laboratory extension, in February 1912, but she was too ill then to travel, and the diploma was simply mailed to her at home. The offer of another honorary doctorate, this one tendered by the University of Birmingham and timed to coincide with a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, took Marie to England in the late summer of 1913. From the London home of her friend Hertha Ayrton, she sent birthday greetings with “best kisses and deepest love” to her elder daughter, “ma chère grande Irène,” who turned sixteen on September 12. “I embrace you with all my heart, my child,” she wrote, “and I enclose a procedure for constructing an ellipse that you may not have met with before.”

Irène and Ève were vacationing with their uncle Jacques and his family in Langogne. On the morning of her birthday, Irène spruced up her cousin Maurice’s bicycle, then set off with him and Ève on a forty-five-kilometer ride. Eight-year-old Ève, who felt very much the little-sister tagalong, described the day-long excursion and picnic in a note to her mother, signed “Microscopique bébé.”

Marie deemed the investiture ceremony in Birmingham a strange rite. “They dressed me in a beautiful red robe with green trim,” she told Irène, “just like my companions in misery—that is to say the other scholars receiving the doctor’s degree.” She said she used the solemn occasion “to take note of the laws and customs of the University.” She had spoken English with everyone, including Messieurs Rutherford and Soddy, “whom you met at our house.”

While Rutherford was entertaining Mme. Curie, word reached him of her protégée Ellen Gleditsch. “I have a piece of news that will interest you,” wrote Bertram Boltwood from the Hague, where he was winding up his European summer travels. “Mlle. Gleditsch has written that she has a fellowship of the American Scandinavian Foundation (I never heard of it before!) and wishes to come and work with me in New Haven!! What do you think of that? I have written to her and tried to ward her off, but as the letter was necessarily delayed in forwarding to me, I am afraid she will be in New York before I get there. Tell Mrs. Rutherford that a silver fruit dish will make a very nice wedding present!!!”

Seated between Sir Oliver Lodge (left) and Dr. Gilbert Barling, Mme. Curie was honored at Birmingham with Robert W. Wood (standing, left), H. A. Lorentz, and Svante Arrhenius.

Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

Boltwood made no jokes about matrimony in his response to Ellen herself:

In regard to your carrying on scientific work in radioactivity at my laboratory in New Haven, I may state that I should be very glad to have you do so provided that the facilities I can offer are sufficient to make you feel that it is worth your while … I am not at all well supplied with radioactive preparations such as you must have become accustomed to have at hand during your experience in Madame Curie’s laboratory in Paris.

Undeterred, Ellen sailed for America. Over the summer she had prepared her two younger brothers to manage the little household without her, because, as she made them see, she desperately needed another stint in an established radioactivity laboratory abroad. Her home institution, the Royal Frederick University, provided neither fellow faculty members with similar expertise nor sufficient equipment for her experiments. Even with the backing of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, however, she needed to take the initiative to secure a placement with a well-known radioactivist in the United States. “No woman,” Theodore Lyman at Harvard wrote in reply to one of Ellen’s inquiries, “has so far set foot in the physics laboratory of Harvard.” The same held true at Yale, she was certain, but at least Boltwood did not bar the door.

A representative of the American-Scandinavian Foundation greeted its first woman fellow at dockside in New York. A reporter for the New York Press hailed her arrival with predictable disbelief: “That pretty little woman with the large brown eyes and the soft and smiling lips [is] one of the most remarkable feminine scientific investigators? Impossible! Where are her glasses, her severity, her aspect of independence? What have such words as radioactivity and gamma rays to do with such sweet lips?”

WHEN MARIE and her daughters reunited in Paris that fall, they made room for cousin Maurice Curie in their apartment on the quai de Béthune. Now twenty-four, and a graduate student in chemistry at the Sorbonne, Maurice proved an ideal older brother surrogate for Irène and Ève. Marie also found a place for him in her laboratory as a special attaché, and trained him to shoulder some of the certification work.

In addition to her own resumed duties at the Curie lab, Marie renewed her regular inspections of the new radium institute rising on the rue des Nourrices. Her stepped-up pace of activity cost her a relapse of kidney trouble, but she rallied quickly enough to attend the second Solvay Council, held in Brussels in October. While conferees at the first such meeting, in 1911, had addressed theories of radiation and quanta, the 1913 agenda concerned the structure of matter. Radioactivity and quantum theory had opened the atom to scrutiny. The select gathering attracted nearly all of the original Solvay participants, along with several new ones, including J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory and German physicist Max von Laue, who had recently shown X-rays to be a very short-wavelength variety of light. Once again Marie stood out in the group photo as the only woman.

After Brussels she traveled to Warsaw for the dedication of the new radium institute there, headed by Jan Kazimierz Danysz, her former assistant. Danysz had hesitated to leave Paris, he confessed at the time of his departure, and above all her laboratory, where he had spent four happy years. Here in Warsaw, he consoled himself, he was still working for her.

The return to her native city allowed Marie to stroll the banks of the Vistula and visit the cemetery where her parents and sister Zofia lay buried. A heavy air of oppression still cast its pall. “This poor country,” she reflected in a letter home, “massacred by an absurd and barbarous domination, really does a great deal to defend its moral and intellectual life.” At a banquet in her honor, she embraced the aged but still lively Jadwiga Sikorska, headmistress of the girls’ school she and Helena had attended. At the Museum of Industry and Agriculture, where Marie had acquired her taste for experimentation, she lectured on radioactivity to a large audience—in Polish—for the first time.

Her own long-promised Radium Institute of Paris still looked like a muddy construction site throughout the wet winter of 1913–1914. At her lab in the Annex, aided by her nephew and André Debierne, she continued to address the needs of researchers, doctors, geologists, prospectors—of anyone and everyone who required reliable assessments of the radioactivity of mineral deposits, thermal waters, and medical materials.

One day Monsieur Petit, who had been a lab assistant at the industrial school, came to tell Marie that the old hangar behind the building on the rue Lhomond was about to be torn down to make room for a new wing. She immediately went with him to see the abandoned shed one last time. After a decade’s absence, she found Pierre’s blackboard still standing in its remembered place, still bearing a few faint lines in his hand that no one had bothered to erase.

AT YALE, Bertram Boltwood challenged Ellen Gleditsch to determine the half-life of radium. He had previously estimated the figure to be two thousand years, but Rutherford, using a different technique, claimed a considerably shorter period of sixteen hundred years. Could Miss Gleditsch settle the four-century discrepancy?

Boltwood was an early convert to the “new alchemy” of radioactive transmutation. The natural occurrence of uranium with radium strongly suggested that the one decayed into the other, and he tested the idea by measuring the ratio of radium to uranium in minerals from different parts of the world. He found these to be wonderfully consistent—about three-tenths of a microgram of radium to every gram of uranium. Seeking further evidence of consanguinity, he watched over a piece of pure uranium in his lab, hoping to witness a radium birth, but thirteen months passed between 1904 and 1905 with no sign of such an event.

Boltwood’s failure to “grow” radium from uranium led him to suspect a missing link in the family line. Some other radioelement must arise from uranium breakdown and give rise in turn to radium. In 1907 he discovered “the direct parent of radium.” He named it ionium, in recognition of its potent ability to ionize (that is, excite) the air around it to conduct electric charge—a hallmark of radioactivity.

Ionium generated radium, which then transformed into emanation. Boltwood reached his value for the radium half-life by clocking the speed at which the radioactive gas accumulated. Rutherford, on the other hand, had counted the alpha particles that a sample of radium emitted per second by watching them scintillate in green on a zinc sulfide screen, and then extrapolated.

Ellen judged Boltwood’s approach the superior method and thought she could improve its accuracy. As she had done in the Curie lab while studying the radium-uranium ratio, she repeated Boltwood’s experiments, but with more materials than he had tested and under stricter constraints. She began with a sample of uraninite from North Carolina. She ground 110 grams of it into a fine powder, then dissolved the powder in warm nitric acid. Some two dozen steps later in her recipe, she was left with a residue of pure ionium, which she dissolved in dilute hydrochloric acid and sealed in a glass bulb. After eight days she boiled off the emanation and measured its volume. The quantity of emanation in the bulb indicated the amount of radium now present in the solution. At the end of six weeks, she again boiled off and remeasured. Now she had an inkling of the rate at which radium decayed. She would test several more times at different intervals in order to tabulate and interpret her results. Meanwhile she started a parallel procedure with a piece of the radioactive mineral cleveite from Norway. Already she sensed that Boltwood’s half-life estimate of two thousand years was too high.

As she acclimated to her new surroundings, she compared this second experience of research abroad to her first. Not only did she find herself the only woman in the Sloane Laboratory, but she rarely saw another woman anywhere on the Yale campus. Moreover, Boltwood, a bachelor, never hosted her at his home on Sundays as Mme. Curie had done in Paris.

Ellen sought social connections by venturing to some of the nearby women’s colleges, such as Vassar in New York and Smith in Massachusetts. The students there enjoyed her guest lectures on radioactivity. Aside from her good command of English and complete mastery of her subject, she knew how to frame her remarks and modulate her voice to keep an audience engaged. One invitation led to another. In February the president of the American Chemical Society, Theodore W. Richards, asked her to visit Harvard. By this point Richards’s colleague in the Harvard physics department, Theodore Lyman, had softened his attitude toward Ellen Gleditsch, and expressed himself willing to let her be the first woman to set foot in his lab. But she was embedded now with Boltwood at Yale.

The experiments were going well, with only occasional mishaps. She prepared a third ionium solution, this time from Norwegian bröggerite. She tested her original North Carolina solution again at eleven weeks and then at fourteen, and the cleveite according to a different schedule.

In April Ellen took the train to Washington, DC, to hear Ernest Rutherford inaugurate a prestigious lecture series at the National Academy of Sciences. He had recently been knighted in the 1914 New Year’s honors. Unfortunately, Ellen observed, Sir Ernest lost a number of interested listeners at the academy through his regrettable habit of swallowing the ends of sentences. She seized a moment with him after his talk to ask about his thoughts on her current research. After all, she might take issue with one of his published results, and she felt obliged to apprise him of that possibility. Without reservation, he encouraged her to forge ahead.

Ultimately, by employing Boltwood’s method, Ellen arrived at Rutherford’s figure of sixteen hundred years for the half-life of radium.[1] This made everyone happy. In June, Smith College awarded her an honorary doctoral degree for “exceptional intellectual attainments … in this new and important science.”

On her way home in June, Ellen stopped in England to spend a few days at Manchester with Curie-lab alumna Jadwiga Szmidt. Together they learned the shocking news that student revolutionaries in Sarajevo had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg.

The diplomatic fallout from the June 28, 1914, event reverberated across the continent. Although anxiety at the threat of war quickly pervaded private life, people tried to carry on as usual. In mid-July, for example, Irène and Ève set off, as planned, with Joséphine the cook and Walcia the Polish governess, to the family’s favorite seaside haunt at l’Arcouest on the Brittany coast. Marie promised she would follow the moment she finished transferring certain contents of the Curie lab in the Annex to the new Institut du Radium, which was finally ready to open its doors.

“Dear Irène, dear Ève,” she wrote on Saturday, August 1, still stuck in the city. “Things seem to be getting worse: we expect the mobilization from one minute to the next. I don’t know when I will be able to leave, and communications may be cut off. Don’t panic. Be calm and courageous. If war does not break out, I’ll come and join you on Monday. If it does, then I’ll stay here and send for you as soon as possible. You and I, Irène, we shall try to make ourselves useful.”