Chapter Twenty

MISSY (Silver)

MARIE MATTINGLY MELONEY—known as “Missy” to her friends—needed nearly a year, and the help of an army of American volunteers, to raise $100,000. By late January 1921, she had the requisite sum in hand. For her next feat, she intended to import Mme. Curie and her daughters, and take them on a cross-country publicity tour highlighted by a stop at the White House to accept her gram of radium from the president of the United States.

Marie felt she could spare at most a couple of weeks for these diversions, but Missy Meloney wanted six weeks, or better yet, eight. Marie chose October as the ideal time to travel, after the summer vacation she needed and before the start of the academic year. Missy preferred May, when the visitor could be feted at the commencement exercises of select colleges and universities. Missy prevailed on both counts. She planned to sail to France in spring, then shepherd the Curies over the Atlantic and across America, accompanying them on all but the return leg of their two-month itinerary.

Marie, grateful for the great gift and the opportunity to thank her American benefactors in person, feared herself unequal to the physical and social demands of such a trip. The prospect of the numerous public appearances cowed her.

By now it seemed likely that a few of Marie’s bodily ills, perhaps even her cataracts, were due at least in part to excessive radiation exposure. She had conducted her early exploits in the shed with scant concern for personal safety. The sight of the nighttime glow of radium exuded so much benevolent promise that she dismissed her injured fingers and the burn on Pierre’s arm as manageable risks of exploring the unknown. Nor were the Curies alone in their disregard for radium’s dangers. Ernest Rutherford once lost a tube of radium salt on the train between Montreal and Ottawa, and casually estimated that the tube would continue releasing radium emanation for several thousand years. In 1921, however, both the Institut du Radium and the Cavendish Laboratory initiated programs of regular blood testing. When lab members’ red or white blood cell counts dipped below normal, they were advised to take a few days off to “rebuild” them.

Marie saw Sir Ernest again the first week of April, in Brussels, when the third Solvay Council convened to ponder “Atoms and Electrons.” A young Danish physicist named Niels Bohr was expected to attend the conference to expound his theory of the way an atom’s electrons distributed themselves around the nucleus in a series of nested orbital shells. But unfortunately Bohr pled illness from overwork and stayed home in Copenhagen. Albert Einstein, the only German-born scientist asked to enter Belgium so soon after the war, declined the invitation and sent a written contribution. Two Americans, Albert Michelson and Robert Millikan, were the first of their countrymen to join the exclusive gathering. Once again, Mme. Curie stood out as the only woman among the twenty-five participants.

“I’m not doing too badly, but I am tired,” she wrote her daughters midway through the week. The discussions went on all day, she said, and the topics were so interesting that one wore oneself out taking everything in. “With meetings like this, I could visit Brussels a hundred times and never know the city any better than I did the day I was born.” She hoped that her stay in America would allow her to see some of that nation’s storied natural wonders.

From her Olympic cabin in mid-Atlantic on May 10, she wrote her friend Henriette Perrin, “I found your sweet letter on board, and it did me good, for it is not without apprehension that I have left France to go on this distant frolic, so little suited to my taste and habits.” Indeed, even before she stepped ashore in New York, a crowd of thousands had assembled at the pier to welcome her with music, flags, flowers, and other signs of adulation.

The moment proved an awakening for Irène and Ève. Upon their arrival in New York, as Ève recalled in her biography of her mother, the two sisters “discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world.” Ève herself, now sixteen and easily the most attractive and fashionable member of the family, earned a press epithet as the girl with “the radium eyes.”

Missy Meloney, Irène, Marie, and Ève Curie arriving in New York

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The Curies’ first sightseeing excursions took them to several women’s colleges in bucolic settings—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke. Marie marveled at the attention these institutions lavished on exercise and well-being. “A very complete organization of games and sports exists in every college,” she observed. “The students play tennis and baseball; they have gymnasium, canoeing, swimming, and horseback riding. Their health is under the constant care of medical advisers.” At the Sorbonne, in contrast, the recently opened sports park was limited to men only. “Don’t our daughters need exercise and good health?” Professor Curie had demanded in a formal complaint to the rector. Now she could not help but notice “important differences between the French and American conception of girls’ education, and some of these differences would not be in our country’s favor.”

Ève, soon to begin her own higher studies, said she saw “white-robed girls in line along the sunny roads; girls running by the thousand across grassy slopes to meet Mme. Curie’s carriage; girls waving flags and flowers, girls on parade, cheering, singing in chorus … Such was the dazzling vision of the first days.”

Administrators and alumnae of the women’s colleges were major contributors to Missy Meloney’s “Marie Curie Radium Fund,” and many of them numbered among the more than three thousand attendees at the tribute to Madame in New York’s Carnegie Hall on May 18. The evening focused on women in science, with guest speakers including Dr. Florence R. Sabin of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and a presentation of the Ellen Richards Research Prize of $2,000 to Mme. Curie. Another New York event in her honor drew several hundred representatives of American scientific societies to a luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria.

Next the entourage moved on to Washington, DC, for the official presentation ceremony. Barely a week into her US visit, Marie had already been embraced and congratulated so repeatedly and enthusiastically that her right wrist was sprained and she needed to keep her arm in a sling. On May 20, in the Blue Room of the White House, before secretaries of the cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, foreign diplomats, and high-ranking officers of the army and navy, President Warren Harding made a speech affirming the historic bonds of friendship between the peoples of Poland, France, and the United States.

Mme. Curie with President Warren Harding

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

“The radium itself was not brought to the ceremony,” Marie noted in her account of the event. “The President presented me with the symbol of the gift, a small golden key opening the casket devised for the transportation of the radium.” This turned out to be a mahogany treasure chest, about one foot square, weighing more than one hundred pounds (forty-six kilograms) because of its lead lining, and custom-fitted to nestle ten tiny glass tubes containing a gram’s worth of radium.

The precious content remained for the time being in safekeeping at the National Bureau of Standards, where Marie got a glimpse of it two days later. She understood—better than anyone—the need to certify her radium against the American secondary standard held at the bureau. Besides, she could not conveniently tote the material from place to place along her route.

America’s gift of radium in its lead-lined box

Musée Curie (coll. Institut du radium)

The gift of her radium came from carnotite ore mined in Colorado and processed at the Standard Chemical Company’s plant in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. When Marie toured the facility with the company president and plant manager, she learned that carnotite was a much poorer source of radium than the St. Joachimsthal pitchblende she had sifted en route to her great discovery. And yet, she was pleased to point out, “the means of extraction of radium are still the same” as the ones she originated and explicated in the text of her 1903 dissertation.

At Canonsburg, as at the Bureau of Standards and the Laboratory of Mines, she conversed energetically with employees who pledged their allegiance to scientific research. What drained her were the rounds of banquets and pageantry. Her entry into each new city stirred up more excitement than she could withstand, even before the scheduled formalities began. She was repeatedly asked to don academic robes to receive an honorary degree, either Doctor of Law or Doctor of Science, from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago, Pittsburgh University, Northwestern, Yale, Columbia, Smith College, Wellesley College, and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Marie found it impossible to sit through so many commencement exercises and accept every diploma, so sometimes Irène or Ève stood in for her. And still Marie could not get enough rest to counter her fatigue. At length Missy canceled half the engagements and gave her guests time off to cross the country by train and gape at the Grand Canyon. While Irène and Ève and other tourists rode mules to the bottom of the world’s widest, deepest river gorge, Marie steeled herself for the final few obligations back East. She collected enough mental pictures “of the great falls of Niagara and of the magnificent colors of the Grand Canyon” to keep both vivid in her mind.

In a lengthy letter to Ernest Rutherford, Bertram Boltwood reported on his meetings with Marie in the United States.

I saw the Madame first at a luncheon given in her honor in New York shortly after she landed. Then I saw her again at New Haven when she came for Commencement. Kovarik and I had her for a couple of hours at the Sloane Laboratory and I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that she was quite keen about scientific matters and in an unusually amiable mood, although she is in very poor physical condition and was on the verge of a breakdown all the time she was over here. She has learned a lot of English since we saw her in Brussels [in 1910] and gets along quite well in a conversation. She certainly made a good clean up over here and took back a gram of radium and quite a tidy number of thousands of dollars. But I felt sorry for the poor old girl, she was a distinctly pathetic figure. She was very modest and unassuming, and she seemed frightened at all the fuss the people made over her.

On June 28 she and her daughters reboarded the Olympic, homeward bound. The box of radium, delivered dockside, found a berth in the purser’s safe for the weeklong voyage. No throngs of admirers crowded the port at Cherbourg to greet the ship, and the welcoming committee in Paris at the Gare Saint-Lazare consisted solely of Marcel Laporte, a rising physicist from the Laboratoire Curie. Though the hour was late, Laporte took the radium directly to Madame’s office at the institute.

Throughout their travels together in America, Missy had pressured Marie to write her autobiography. This was an alien concept to Marie, who protested that her life story could be summed up in a single paragraph, and she dictated it flatly to prove her point: “I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.” She still believed what she had told the reporters who invaded the shed after the 1903 Nobel Prize: “In science, we should be interested in phenomena, not in individuals.” Missy, equally tenacious, persevered and also contacted several publishers she knew. The Macmillan Company offered the reluctant author 50,000 francs as an advance against royalties. Marie could not refuse such a bounty for her laboratory, desperate though she was to step out of the spotlight. She compromised by consenting to write a biography of Pierre, with just a brief sketch of her own life tacked on as an appendix.

But first she needed to finish her work in progress—a handbook of about 150 pages, aimed at laboratory researchers and summarizing the current knowledge of isotopes. She worked on the manuscript that summer in Paris, while her daughters swam at l’Arcouest, and proofread it at Cavalaire during a working holiday in September. The Society of Physics published L’isotopie et les éléments isotopes before the close of the year. Another, even shorter book she wrote about her experiences as a radiologist during wartime, La radiologie et la guerre, was also published in 1921, by the firm of Félix Alcan.

“It is not without hesitation,” Marie allowed when she approached her most challenging assignment, “that I have undertaken to write the biography of Pierre Curie. I should have preferred consigning this task to some relative or friend of his infancy who had followed his whole life intimately and possessed as full a knowledge of his earliest years as of those after his marriage.” Pierre’s brother, Jacques, helped her along by generously sharing his memories, as did Pierre’s friends, and of course Pierre himself had told her many tales of his youth. Thus armed, she recreated Pierre’s family of origin, his progress from childhood to first scientific work, the discovery of piezoelectricity, and his early experience as the director of student laboratories in the School of Physics and Chemistry, where he found time and space for his own studies of symmetry and magnetism. She needed no assistance to recall or express “the profound impression his personality made upon me during the years of our life together.”

While she could not build a complete narrative, and certainly not a perfect one, she hoped that her portrait of Pierre would “conserve his memory” and “remind those who knew him of the reasons why they loved him.”