Chapter Twenty-Five

ANGÈLE (Bismuth)

TO IRÈNE, the Curie lab at the Institut du Radium had long felt as much like her home as her place of work, with her mother presiding over both. Since her marriage to Frédéric, the lab had become an extension of the marital bed as well. In the autumn of 1928, Irène’s circle of lab intimates widened to include her best friend, Angèle Pompéï, who came to work alongside her.

The two young women had met in their early twenties on a geological field trip to volcanic regions of the Auvergne. Irène signed up seeking open-air exercise and science; Angèle was satisfying a requirement for her physics teaching degree from the École Normale Supérieure de jeunes filles de Sèvres. Together they mounted further adventures of their own design, from summer hikes in Angèle’s native Corsica to winter treks in the French Alps. After Angèle moved to Algiers in 1923 to teach in a girls’ school there, Marie and Irène visited her, stayed in the quarters she shared with two other teachers, and toured the surrounding countryside by rail and camel.

As soon as Angèle completed her service in Algeria, she returned to Paris to teach physics and chemistry at the Lycée de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and entreated Mme. Curie for a part-time research post at the Radium Institute. Marie, pleased to accept another eager Sèvrienne into her fold, assigned Angèle to a team studying beta emission from radium E.

Angèle suspected it might take her a while to learn the alphabet soup of names marking successive stages of transmutation, though their utility was easy to see. “Radium E” surely made convenient shorthand for “radioactive isotope of the element bismuth, with a half-life of five days.” And “radium E” further served to distinguish this radioactive isotope of bismuth from the other, heavier one, “radium C,” which formed earlier in the decay chain and had a half-life of less than half an hour. As yet, no one could explain the great differences in stability between isotopes of the same element.

Because Angèle earned a teaching salary from the lycée, and lived frugally with Madeleine and Marie Elichabe (the same pair of sisters who had been her housemates in Algiers), she did not request a Curie-Carnegie scholarship or other financial support. All she wanted was opportunity and a place for experimentation, both of which abounded at the Pavillon Curie. The building, spacious to begin with, had lately been expanded by the addition of a new wing.

In the cramped confines of the old Curie lab in the Annex, Marie had nearly turned away Ellen Gleditsch for want of space. Ellen, who still lacked a proper laboratory of her own, was awaiting completion of the new chemistry building at the Royal Frederick University. After careful study as a member of the planning committee, she had petitioned for ten rooms devoted to radiochemistry, including laboratories, a darkroom, a weighing room, and an office for herself. As she looked forward to those accommodations, the retirement of her colleague Heinrich Goldschmidt raised the possibility of her advancement to the rank of full professor. Ellen had been an associate professor for thirteen years. She could boast far more laboratory experience than any of the other candidates for the coveted position, as well as an unparalleled reputation as a lecturer. Working against her were the facts that she was fifty and female.

In March 1929, shortly before the faculty board voted on the chemistry professorship, Ellen left Norway to tour the United States in her capacity as president of the International Federation of University Women. The IFUW had grown to thirty-seven thousand members in thirty-one countries. It currently empowered twenty-two young women to do as Ellen had done—to travel abroad and profit from contact with foreign mentors. By lecturing for six weeks in venues from New York to San Francisco and Minneapolis to New Orleans, she hoped to raise additional fellowship funds.

Portrayed in the American press during her 1913 visit as a “pretty little woman” with “sweet and smiling lips,” Ellen was described this time by the Oakland Tribune as “a world famous scientist who can look Einstein’s formula in the eye, without blinking.” In technical talks she gave at colleges including Stanford and Yale, she detailed her ongoing research regarding the isotopes of chlorine. Although chlorine was not a radioelement, it existed in two distinct forms, one with atomic weight 35 and the other with atomic weight 37. Ellen was testing a variety of chlorine-containing compounds, such as sea water from different oceans, to see whether the two isotopes of chlorine always occurred in the same proportion, and so far it seemed to her that they did.

When speaking to nonscientific audiences, she stressed the rewards of international exchange. “A student returns from such a stay abroad greatly enriched,” she maintained, “not exactly in gold, but in noble goods.”

Interviewed about her second impressions of America, Ellen said she thought barriers to women’s lab access had fallen in the fifteen-year interim. “All of the younger scientific men have ceased to be either resentful or condescending towards their female colleagues,” the Tribune quoted her as saying, “and the older and more conservative ones are dying out, or are submitting to the new conditions.”

Ellen was thousands of miles from Oslo when the faculty board voted ten to three in her favor, granting her the much-desired promotion. But then a dean who preferred one of the junior candidates questioned certain steps in the selection procedure and succeeded in overturning Ellen’s election.

Stopping at Paris on her way home in May, Ellen asked the director of the Laboratoire Curie for a letter of recommendation. Madame’s word, coupled with the strong support of Professor Kristine Bonnevie and Ellen’s original champion, Eyvind Bødtker, restored her victory. “It’s been done,” Ellen wrote Marie on June 26. “Three days ago I was appointed professor.” At a celebration of her achievement arranged by the Norwegian organization of university women, Ellen told her well-wishers:

To me it is absolutely indifferent whether a piece of work is carried out by a small woman in Bulgaria or by a tall man in America, as long as it is done well. And this is what we have to do: do things so well that no one would dare to say, “this is good work for a woman,” but that everyone will say, “this is good work.”

MARIE ALSO REVISITED the United States in 1929, begging a second indulgence of the American people. She needed another nugget of radium for the new research institute and hospital nearing completion in Warsaw. When she queried Missy Meloney about the chances of getting one more gram as a gift, Missy rang up several members of the 1921 Marie Curie Radium Fund Executive Committee. One of these women, geologist and philanthropist Lou Henry Hoover, was now the country’s First Lady, following the election of her husband, Herbert, to the presidency.

Marie voyaged alone aboard the “floating palace” of the Île-de-France. With no protective companions, and knowing herself to be an object of curiosity, she took the air on the uppermost deck. There, she wrote Ève, the force of the wind sometimes stopped her in her tracks, but she chose the exposed, windy walk over the more crowded covered promenade. By staying out of the salons, often keeping to her cabin, she avoided awkward encounters with fellow passengers. These included entertainer Maurice Chevalier, whose performance during the crossing met with her approval.

The moment the ship arrived in New York, on October 15, Missy was at Marie’s side. She had scheduled several social gatherings in or near her apartment in the city, and once snuck Marie downstairs by the service elevator to escape reporters thronging the lobby. When it came time to move on to the next hostess, in Manhasset on Long Island, Missy organized a car ride with a police escort. They traveled by train to Dearborn, Michigan, for the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, and to Canton, New York, where Marie dedicated a new science building at St. Lawrence University. The main event—the brief but impressive radium presentation ceremony—took place at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, a day after the disastrous decline, on October 29, 1929, of the New York Stock Exchange.

In lieu of an elaborate treasure chest or a symbolic gold key, President Hoover handed Mme. Curie a bank check for $50,000. This sum represented the going price for a gram of radium. Increased supply, primarily from the Haut-Katanga region of the Congo, had cut the 1921 cost in half. A ton of African pitchblende yielded thirty to forty times more radium than a ton of Colorado carnotite—the source of Mme. Curie’s previous gram of radium.

At dinner that night in the White House, Marie grew positively chatty with President Hoover, and accepted two tiny elephant statuettes—the totem of his political party—to take home as souvenirs. She also collected a trove of scientific instruments on her travels, to replace antiquated ones in the Curie lab. A Leeds Northrup galvanometer, considered the dernier cri in electrometers, received special mention in a note to Irène.

“The financial catastrophe that erupted here seems calmed now,” Marie wrote home to Ève on October 31, when all but one of her official duties had been discharged. The quiet pause allowed her to reflect on the genuineness of her friendships in America. “I regret that the distance is too great to allow easy exchange,” her letter continued, not just from Europe to the States but even from one state to another.

Mme. Curie with President Herbert Hoover

Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

Missy, who likewise regretted the great gulf between them, sent Marie an address book as a Christmas gift, with the initials MSC stamped in gold on its green leather cover. Inside, Marie found the names and addresses of all her American friends already penned in.