The Elements of Marie Curie

Chapter Seventeen

MARTHE (Chlorine)

WHILE MME. CURIE traveled through France in her voiture radiologique during the first year of the war, the enemy introduced a new way of felling combatants: by fouling the air they breathed. An onslaught of lethal chlorine gas released at Ypres in the early spring of 1915 took Allied soldiers unawares and choked many of them to death. In May, barely a fortnight after this event, Madame’s English friend Hertha Ayrton conceived the idea for an ingenious hand-operated fan that could both repel and clear poisonous vapors from the trenches. She made the prototype “Ayrton Fan” in her private laboratory in London, based on her previous observations of vortices in water. The device, weighing only a few ounces, consisted of paper flaps, or blades, connected by leather hinges and mounted at the end of a wooden stick. It bore a certain resemblance to an oversized flyswatter. Mrs. Ayrton admitted that she “laughed aloud at the simplicity of the solution.” But others laughed, too. Indeed, although she offered her invention free of charge to the War Office, she was ignored and even ridiculed for months before being invited to demonstrate the fan at Chatham in September 1915. An official report enthusiastically endorsed the flapper’s surprising utility, but did not, unfortunately, spur the armed forces to begin mass production.

“Tomorrow morning,” Maurice Curie wrote to his aunt in mid-November, “they will close us in a room and the atmosphere will be charged with asphyxiating gases, tear gases, etc. We are trying on the new protective masks.”

In January 1916, Mrs. Ayrton dispatched her assistant, C. E. Greenslade, to the front to demonstrate the fully realized fan, in which the paper blades had been replaced by waterproof canvas stiffened with cane. Greenslade showed how incoming clouds of gas could be driven back by beating the fan against the parapet of the trench. Then he voluntarily entered a dugout in which a cannister of deadly gas had been exploded. Wearing no mask or other protective gear, he walked through the pit, pushing the gas before him by flapping the fan along the dirt floor. He emerged minutes later into a crowd of men stupefied to see him still alive.

For the purpose of clearing gas from trenches, observers judged the Ayrton fan twice as effective as the “sprayers” in use by the Allied armies. Even so, four more months passed before the first shipment of five thousand fans arrived in France.

“I suppose,” Mrs. Ayrton fumed to her friend and biographer, Evelyn Sharp, “if I had invented something to destroy life instead of saving it, it would get taken up at once as a military proposition!”

By now Mme. Curie’s war experience had convinced her that X-ray examination had to be offered to the sick as well as to the wounded, and extended from the obvious injuries to every part of the body. At one hospital she visited, she met a soldier who had a fractured pelvis. Already bedridden for weeks, he was not expected to live. X-ray examination, though slow and very painful on account of his poor condition, revealed a piece of shrapnel above his knee, inside a large pocket of pus. On the very day that surgeons removed this foreign body and drained the infected area, the youth’s overall health started to rebound, and soon his broken bones knit back together.

The Ayrton Fan

In order to recruit more of the desperately needed X-ray operators to man the mobile units and staff the radiology outposts, Mme. Curie approached professors, engineers, and university students who were either free from military service or stationed conveniently where she needed them. Too often frustrated by losing these men to military transfer orders, she decided to train women as well, and tapped her network of former assistants. Suzanne Veil, who had exited the Curie lab almost as soon as she entered it in 1913 due to the director’s protracted absence, now got to work under her at last. Because Mlle. Veil already understood the physics of X-ray generation and the calculus required for localization, she learned quickly. Soon she qualified to train others.

Eugénie Feytis, who studied physics in Madame’s class and later taught the subject at Sèvres, recommended several of the school’s recent alumnae as likely radiologists. Eugénie herself, however, was unable to participate in the X-ray work. In the summer of 1913, at the end of her studies in Switzerland with Pierre Weiss, she had married Aimé Cotton, a physicist twelve years her senior, whom she knew through the Sunday gatherings of scientists in the Curies’ garden. As she had seen Marie do, Eugénie kept working after she wed, both as a teacher at Sèvres and in pursuit of her doctoral degree at the Sorbonne. Her own widowed mother, Émilie Menant Feytis, came to live in the apartment below the Cottons, where she helped care for little Eugène, born on July 21, 1914, about two weeks before the war broke out. Although Aimé’s age excused him from active duty, he collaborated with his friend Pierre Weiss on methods and instruments for pinpointing the location of enemy artillery by sound-ranging, then trained groups of physics students to employ their techniques. Aimé was with the army near Verdun in February 1916, coaching and encouraging these specialists in the trenches, when Eugénie gave birth prematurely to their second son, Paul. Had an incubator been available, then perhaps, despite the wartime privations and the winter cold, the infant might have lived.

THE RADIUM STASHED for safekeeping at Bordeaux at the start of the war returned to Paris in 1916 under orders from medical authorities in the military. Dr. Regaud and Dr. Béclère felt confident that radioactivity, already proven a boon in the treatment of cancer, could also ameliorate the vicious scars, adhesions, arthritis, and neuritis that followed battle wounds. Like a medicinal plant with balm in its leaves, roots, and seeds, radium released a variety of potential remedies, including penetrating gamma rays and gaseous emanation. A gram of radium, properly milked in the new Curie lab at the Radium Institute, would yield a steady supply of emanation, which could be bottled and distributed in therapeutic doses to soothe a battalion of injured soldiers.

“Having no assistants,” Mme. Curie wrote of this effort, “I had, for a long time, to prepare these emanation bulbs alone, and their preparation is very delicate.”

To provide care for many thousands, more radium and more personnel would be needed. Production at Sels du Radium had ceased during the war for lack of manpower, but when Mme. Curie sounded its owner, Émile Armet de Lisle, she found him amenable to reopening if skilled workers could be found. On June 22, 1916, she appealed to Ellen Gleditsch in neutral Norway. “I write to you today to ask you if you would like to come to France in order to work in the laboratory at the Armet de Lisle factory. Mr. Armet would be very happy to have you here and to restart the work of the factory, and I think he will offer you good conditions.”

While waiting for Ellen’s reply, Marie applied for and obtained her driver’s license. Irène completed her Sorbonne certificat in physics, again with distinction, and went to work as a nurse in Montereau. In July Marie sent Ève to l’Arcouest with Henriette Perrin and her children, Aline and Francis. Ève wrote home chastising herself for losing her wristwatch on the train, a mishap that made her feel she was not yet mature enough (at age eleven) to own precious things. Soon she forgot the trinket in the grip of adventures one could have at l’Arcouest, such as running the rowboat aground on a sandbar and needing to wait hours for the sea to float it free, or setting off with three companions on an all-day hiking excursion that covered thirty or forty kilometers and included an elaborate picnic lunch. Even without her mother’s on-site supervision, however, Ève could not escape math lessons, and found fifteen-year-old Francis Perrin a stern professor. “Today I solved a first-degree equation all by myself,” she wrote ma douce Mé, “and without errors, and then we also did other exercises in algebra, and he made me memorize three formulas by heart.”

ELLEN GLEDITSCH had recently secured the newly created post of docent in radiochemistry at her university when she received Mme. Curie’s invitation. Mindful of the war dangers, to say nothing of her concern and ongoing responsibility for her youngest brother, she recognized the need and agreed to go. Her route to Paris took her across the North Sea and the English Channel—two bodies of water now menaced by German submarines.

All Allied attempts at anti-submarine warfare had failed thus far, but Ernest Rutherford in England and Paul Langevin in France were determined to develop means for detecting these vessels by sound. Paul had begun experimenting with acoustic apparatus in March 1915 in his laboratory at the École Municipale de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, where he once studied under Pierre Curie. A promising first trial on the Seine in April 1916 prompted the Navy Department to transfer Langevin’s group to Toulon, on the Côte d’Azur. Now he was testing an active sonar model in actual sea conditions, somewhat hampered by the unusually cold and rainy weather.

When Ellen got to Paris in July, she found parts of the city utterly changed by war and other parts exactly as she remembered them. Much of daily life went on as usual, so that those with means and leisure could still dine out in restaurants or see films at the cinema. Everyone Ellen had met at the old Curie lab was engaged in war work of some kind. May Sybil Leslie, a college chemistry instructor in Wales before the onset of hostilities, was now chemist-in-charge of explosives at a government munitions factory near Liverpool. She supervised a staff of six in her department but assigned the most dangerous jobs to herself. Eva Ramstedt, who stayed in close touch with Ellen, had left the Nobel Institute to teach radiology at the University of Stockholm. The two Scandinavians were coauthoring a book about radioactivity based on Mme. Curie’s lectures and publications.

At the factory in Nogent-sur-Marne, Ellen resumed some of the first procedures she had learned as a novice radioactivist, albeit with new precautions gained from long practice. Radiation’s effect on the skin, as she and Eva pointed out in their soon-to-be-published text, “is considerably weaker if the preparation is held at a distance, and especially if the rays have first to pass a metal screen. Therefore, when you are carrying radium salts with you, these should be kept in lead capsules.” They advised using tongs to handle vials or bottles of radium salts in the lab, and also switching the tongs periodically from one hand to the other. In general, they counseled, one should never hold anything radioactive in the same position for any length of time.

In the fall Mme. Curie issued an open call for women to enroll in a new course of study at the Radium Institute, aimed at training female X-ray operators, or manipulatrices radiologistes. She believed that a reasonably intelligent young woman with only an elementary education could, if properly motivated, master the knowledge and skills for providing X-ray examination in about two months. Applicants needed to be native or naturalized French citizens, in good health, and at least twenty-one years of age. Irène had only just turned nineteen when the first session got under way in October 1916, but she was a teacher in the program, not a student. At the same time, she continued her own studies at the Sorbonne, concentrating next on chemistry.

Each class of twenty aspiring manipulatrices submitted to a packed six-week curriculum of electricity, measurement of electric current and potential, electromagnetic induction, theory and function of X-ray tubes and valves, and methods of examination by radioscopy and radiography. Anatomy lessons with Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the sole female physician in the French armed services, took place at the newly established Edith Cavell Hospital.

In theory, Marie was preparing these women to serve as aides to physicians, though she thought several of them quite capable of working independently. Doubtless the war would accord them that opportunity.

AS PROMISED, Ellen Gleditsch oversaw production at Sels du Radium for six months. Heading back to Norway shortly before Christmas, she retraced her route across the Channel, through England, and over the North Sea. Although the waters still roiled with submarines, Paul Langevin had hit on a new detection approach based on the piezoelectric effect discovered by Jacques and Pierre Curie. He would use the piezoelectric properties of quartz to transform sound waves generated by moving ships into electrical oscillations that could be amplified for playing into headphones. He also planned to employ the quartz as a transmitter, to send out supersonic waves and, he hoped, thereby locate the underwater enemy. In April 1917, when the United States entered the war, Langevin prepared to share his thinking with English and American naval authorities, to avoid anyone’s duplication of efforts. The first such inter-Allied meeting took place in Paris in May. When Ernest Rutherford arrived, Marie toured him through the new Radium Institute. Hers was the only building in the city surrounded by walls of stacked sandbags, installed by the army to safeguard the Emanation Service from the shock of falling shells.

“Mme. Curie gave me some Lab. tea,” Sir Ernest wrote home to his wife, Mary Newton Rutherford. “She is looking rather grey and worn and tired. She is very much occupied with radiology work, both direct and for training others.”

Various Sèvres connections led Mme. Curie to a new assistant. Although the thirty-two-year-old Marthe Klein came with no prior laboratory experience, she had studied physics under Eugénie Feytis and finished first in her class. Since her graduation in 1908, Mlle. Klein had taught mathematics at girls’ schools in several cities, from Saumur to Marseilles to Bordeaux, hoping all the while for an appointment in Paris, where she could pursue her own higher education at the Sorbonne. A scholarship took her to the University of Cambridge for the 1913–1914 academic year, but after that one taste of advanced study, which was all she could afford, she returned to France and resumed teaching at Bordeaux. In October 1916, when her fellow Sèvrienne Lucie Blanquies became director of the lycée Racine, Marthe filled Lucie’s old slot at Versailles. Finally she was in proximity to the university. In the summer of 1917, she began volunteering at the Institut du Radium, lecturing to a new wave of manipulatrices.

Marthe immediately proved herself indispensable. Marie, dreading Marthe’s September return to the classroom at Versailles, appealed to the undersecretary of state in charge of the Service de santé to keep her employed as an instructor of radiology for the duration of the war.

The need for manipulatrices grew along with the number of X-ray outposts and voitures radiologiques patrolling the battlefront. Marie personally outfitted eighteen such cars. The army versions of these so-called petites Curies grew to the size of trucks. They not only carried X-ray equipment but also functioned as rolling darkrooms for developing the radiographs. The number of soldiers examined by X-ray was nearing one million.

THE EARLY MONTHS of 1918 saw an intense bombardment of Paris but left the Curie home and lab intact. “One is so overcome by the precarious living conditions,” Marie wrote to Ellen Gleditsch in January, “that one doesn’t have a moment of satisfactory peace of mind to gather thoughts about one’s friends.” Nevertheless, she acceded to a request from the Italian government to visit that summer and assess the country’s natural resources in radioactive materials. She left in mid-July for a month in northern Italy.

Irène spent part of July in Langogne with the Jacques Curie family. After going over some of the formulas in the text by Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt, the 1904 Nobel Prize winner in physics), she wrote her mother, “I then reviewed, with a little help from Maurice’s copy of Nernst, the calculation of the speed of diffusion of ions of both signs.”

Ève, at l’Arcouest awaiting her mother, was content to sweeten her coffee with saccharine instead of sugar, to do without green vegetables, and to accept jam as the only available form of fruit. In one of her letters, she described a convoy of fifty-three sailboats, accompanied by torpedo boats, heading for England in the hope of coming back with coal.

July in Toulon found Paul Langevin’s group completing successful demonstrations of their active sonar device based on the piezoelectric effect. Paul wrote a detailed technical report, which he delivered at the next Inter-Allied Conference on Submarine Detection, held in Paris in October 1918. Days later the war ended, rendering his design instantly obsolete.

“It is going to be so pleasant,” Curie lab préparateur Fernand Holweck wrote to Marie on November 12, “not to speak constantly of submarines, grenades and torpedoes. Radioactive projectiles are much more sympathiques.”

Marie had stuck to her work throughout the war, but when a fusillade of guns signaled the signing of the armistice, she dropped everything to run, together with Marthe Klein, in search of a French flag to fly over the Radium Institute. Other patriots had beaten them to the shops, however, and snatched up every last one. Undaunted, Marie bought bolts of red, white, and blue fabric, and enlisted Mme. Bardinet, who kept the laboratory clean, to sew some banners, which they hung from the large windows.

The next morning Marie and Marthe rode through the city-wide victory celebration in the original voiture radiologique. At the Place de la Concorde, crowds blocked the old Renault for several minutes. A dozen jubilant celebrants climbed aboard its roof and fenders, to be carried along as though on a parade float. People sang the Allied anthems. Church bells rang out everywhere.

Eugénie Feytis Cotton observed the festivities from the open window of her apartment. “I stood listening for a long time to the bells of Sèvres,” she wrote, “whose sound rose to our wooded hills. And because a tiny new life had recently announced itself inside me, these bells of peace produced a profound emotion.”