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Preface

Only four individuals aside from Marie Curie have been awarded two Nobel Prizes. They are John Bardeen, who won twice for physics, in 1956 and 1972; Linus Pauling, recognized for chemistry in 1954 and for peace in 1962; Frederick Sanger, for chemistry in 1952 and again in 1980; and K. Barry Sharpless, also for chemistry, in 2001 and 2022.

To date, only 5 women can be counted among the 225 Nobel laureates in physics, and only 8 out of 194 chemistry laureates.

Not all the women mentored by Mme. Curie are included in this book. Some, such as Janina Garczynska from Poland, R. Gourvitch of Lithuania, and “Mlle. Larche,” darted through the lab too quickly for their careers to be traced in any detail. The best source for capsule biographies of the female members of the Curie lab is Les femmes du laboratoire de Marie Curie by Natalie Pigeard-Micault (see Bibliography).

Chapter 1

Before Dmitri Mendeleev published his periodic table in 1869, many other scientists compiled lists and systems aimed at organizing the components of the material world. William Prout suggested in 1816 that all elements were multiples of hydrogen atoms. Systematic approaches were put forward in the nineteenth century by Johann Döbereiner, Leopold Gmelin, Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois, John Newlands, William Odling, and Julius Lothar Meyer, to name a few. Mendeleev’s plan triumphed because he did more than anyone else to develop and promote the idea that ordering the elements by their atomic weights revealed periodic repetitions of their properties.

The theories and experiments that led to informed atomic weight designations include the work of Amedeo Avogadro, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Stanislao Cannizzaro, Henry Cavendish, John Dalton, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Alexander von Humboldt, Joseph-Louis Proust, and William Prout.

The prefix “eka” that Mendeleev used in his provisional names for as yet undiscovered elements means “one” in Sanskrit. “Eka-silicon,” for example, appeared one row below silicon, and indeed germanium turned out to fit right there. Although Mendeleev predicted the existence of several new elements, he did not discover any himself.

Chapter 2

The École Municipale de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles was founded in 1882 by the city of Paris. Its distinguished alumni include André Debierne, Frédéric Joliot, Paul Langevin, and Georges Urbain. Today, under the new name of École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie, it is a coeducational institution for undergraduate and graduate-level education and research, part of the Université PSL (Paris Sciences et Lettres).

Chapter 3

After Pierre and Jacques Curie discovered the piezoelectric effect in 1880, Gabriel Lippmann posited that the effect should be reversible—not only would certain crystals generate an electric charge when mechanically stressed, but also the application of an electric charge to those same crystals would cause a mechanical change in structure. The Curie brothers proved Lippmann correct in 1881.

Paul Langevin later applied piezoelectricity to the problem of submarine detection by sonar. Today, all sorts of devices, from inkjet printers to quartz watches, from scanning probe microscopes to electric guitars rely on piezoelectricity.

Chapter 4

The science of spectroscopy was born in 1859 when chemist Robert Bunsen and physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, colleagues at Heidelberg, heated known elements to incandescence, passed the light through a slit, a lens, and a prism, and then examined the emission through a magnifier fitted with a scale. They noted that each element produced an individual signature in colors (wavelengths) of light.

The first electroscopes contained a pair of gold “leaves” that spread apart to register the presence of a charged object. By measuring the speed and degree of the leaves’ separation, via a scale mounted in the instrument, the observer assigned a quantity to the charge.

Chapter 5

Radium owed its glow—the soft bluish halos that enveloped the flasks and crucibles in the hangar—to the excitation of atoms in the surrounding air by radioactive emissions from radium and radon. Some scientists think the Curies also observed Cerenkov radiation (a phenomenon named for Pavel Cerenkov in the 1930s), which is the visible-light equivalent of a sonic boom, responsible for the blue glow seen around nuclear reactors.

The “induced radioactivity” that contaminated the Curie lab was an accumulation of the products of radioactive decay. Objects in the vicinity of radium did not become radioactive themselves. Rather, the gaseous emanation (radon) wafting through the room transmuted, and coated objects with a residue of solid daughter products.

The many discoveries of Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) include the first dental anesthetic (nitrous oxide, or laughing gas) and several elements (potassium, sodium, chlorine). The Davy Medal was first awarded in 1877 to the founders of spectroscopy, Bunsen and Kirchhoff, and in 1882 to Dmitri Mendeleev and Julius Lothar Meyer.

The original 1901 Nobel Prizes were five in number. A sixth prize, in economics, was established by Sweden’s central bank in 1968 and is officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Chapter 6

Historians wonder what portion of Pierre’s bodily ills might have accrued from radiation exposure. Even his fatal accident has been blamed, by some, as much on his faltering gait as on the inclement weather or momentary carelessness while crossing the street.

Chapter 7

The various titles of workers in the Curie lab, from chef de travaux to travailleur libre, are outlined in “The Research School of Marie Curie in the Paris Faculty, 1907–14,” by J. L. Davis of the Unit for the History, Philosophy and Social Relations of Science at the University of Kent, Canterbury, published in Annals of Science 52 (1995).

Chapter 8

Sir William Ramsay’s discoveries of noble gases presented the first serious challenge to the periodic table. Radioactivity—both the phenomenon of transmutation and the apparent abundance of radioelements—posed the second. The noble gases were originally accommodated in a column at the far-left end of Mendeleev’s table. They have since been moved to the far right. The plethora of radioelements remained problematic till 1913, when many were shown to be isotopes, or chemically identical forms of the same element, differing only in atomic weight (and half-life). The existence of isotopes thinned the population of elements and preserved the structure of the periodic table. The understanding of isotopes remained incomplete until the discovery of the neutron in 1932.

Chapter 9

Claude Louis Berthollet (1748–1822), namesake of the street where Ellen Gleditsch lived in Paris, was a French chemist and senator. In Ellen’s later years she described his research in a biographical sketch—one of twenty-five such sketches she authored about French scientists, including a book-length treatment of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, which was published in Oslo in 1956. The rue Cuvier, site of the Curie lab in Ellen’s day, honored the great naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832).

Actinium B, described as an alpha-particle emitter in Lucie Blanquies’s paper, is now known to be the lead isotope Pb211, and to decay by beta emission.

The Hughes Medal, named for British-American inventor David E. Hughes and awarded annually since 1902 for outstanding contributions to the field of energy, went first to J. J. Thomson. Hertha Ayrton remained the only woman to win this recognition for more than a century—until 2020, when Dame Clare Grey, a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, became the second. Other recipients include Alexander Graham Bell, Hans Geiger, and Stephen Hawking.

Chapter 10

The Exhibition of 1851 Scholarship, which brought May Sybil Leslie to the Curie lab, was created from the large surplus of funds raised for the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. The scholarships, which are still awarded today, also enabled the young Ernest Rutherford to leave New Zealand in 1895 for the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.

Chapter 11

The Académie des Sciences was established in 1666. By 1910, full membership in the Academy was strictly limited to six Frenchmen in each of eleven sections (geometry, mechanics, astronomy, geography and navigation, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, rural economy, anatomy and zoology, and medicine and surgery), plus two perpetual secretaries and a maximum of twelve foreign associates.

Chapter 12

Ernest Solvay, a wealthy Belgian chemist and industrialist, indulged his scientific curiosity by funding a series of exclusive conferences, at which he could hear the world’s foremost scientists debate the latest, most controversial theories and discoveries. The first physics council lasted from October 30 to November 3, 1911. He added a triennial chemistry conference in 1922, at which point Jean Perrin switched his allegiance from the physics council to the chemistry.

Chapter 13

Marie Curie’s kidney ailment may have been a manifestation of tuberculosis, which is known to affect the spine, kidneys, and brain, as well as the lungs. If the child Manya Sklodowska inhaled the Mycobacterium tuberculosis during her mother’s long illness, which seems likely, she could have become infected without developing any symptoms. It is also possible that she transmitted the disease to her daughter Irène.

Chapter 14

Jean Perrin first suggested an atomic structure resembling a miniature solar system in 1901. Hantaro Nagaoka independently proposed a Saturn-with-rings structure in 1903. But J. J. Thomson, who identified the atom’s negative particles in 1897, believed they were embedded among their positively charged counterparts. Instead of a ringed planet or a planetary system, he pictured a “plum pudding” model of the atom that prevailed for about a decade, until Rutherford’s discovery of concentrated positive charge at the atomic center revived the earlier conception of electrons as exterior orbiters.

Chapter 15

Ionium does not appear on the modern periodic table. Although it was still considered an element at the time of Boltwood’s death in 1927, it later proved to be an isotope of thorium.

Zinc sulfide screens, which figured in the discovery of X-rays, provided the first way to visualize alpha particles. Each alpha striking the screen produced a momentary flash of light, or scintillation. These scintillations were counted, with difficulty, by an observer—until the process was automated.

Chapter 17

Nicole Girard-Mangin was apparently mobilized in error, due to some clerical confusion about her name. Nevertheless, the young doctor was more than willing to serve her country. She fought hard to convince the army to let her do so—and to compensate her properly according to her rank.

Nurse Edith Cavell, a native of England who worked in Belgium, cared for wounded soldiers regardless of their national allegiance. She was executed by a German firing squad on October 12, 1915.

Chapter 18

The scientists responsible for the conceptual leap from atomic weight to atomic number include Charles Barkla; William Bragg and his son, Lawrence Bragg; Henry Moseley; and Antonius van den Broek.

In 1949, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemists elided the given name of element 91, proto-actinium, to protactinium. An intense alpha-emitter, protactinium is one of the rarest elements.

Modern notations for the numerous isotopes of lead are written as the symbol Pb (from the Latin plumbum) with the atomic number 82 as a subscript at the lower left and a superscript at right denoting atomic weight. For example, thorium D became ₈₂Pb²⁰⁸. The atomic weight of ordinary lead is 207. In common parlance among scientists, isotopes are identified simply by their name and atomic weight, such as uranium-235 and uranium-238.

Chapter 19

The International Federation of University Women exists to the present day, though its name has changed to Graduate Women International. In 1984, the Norwegian chapter created a scholarship named in honor of Ellen Gleditsch.

Chapter 20

Dr. Florence R. Sabin, who shared the spotlight with Mme. Curie at Carnegie Hall, was the first female professor at Johns Hopkins, the first woman to join the Rockefeller Institute as a researcher (studying the pathology of tuberculosis), the first woman to serve as president of the American Association of Anatomists, and the first woman elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

The Association to Aid Scientific Research by Women, headquartered in Boston, named its annual prize in honor of Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman admitted as a full-time student to MIT, where she studied chemistry, established the Women’s Laboratory, and served as assistant professor in several disciplines, including industrial chemistry and applied biology.

A plaque at the Standard Chemical Company’s Pittsburgh headquarters states that the radium given to Mme. Curie in 1921 was extracted according to a process invented and supervised by Glenn Donald Kammer of the University of Pittsburgh. Kammer, a chemist, later worked in the manufacture of luminous paint, and died of leukemia in 1927.

MacMillan published Pierre Curie, translated into English by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, in 1923.

Chapter 21

Mesothorium, not found on the modern periodic table, was discovered and named an element by Otto Hahn in 1907. Subsequent research showed that it occurred in two forms: mesothorium 1, with a half-life of about six years, turned out to be an isotope of radium, and mesothorium 2, with a half-life of about six hours, was an isotope of actinium.

Marie’s election to the Académie de Médecine in 1922 was a singular event; more than twenty years passed before another woman, Lucie Randoin (1885–1960), entered its ranks in 1946.

Albert Einstein’s on-again, off-again attitude toward the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation continued for two years, until he attended the plenary session of July 25, 1924.

Chapter 22

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, established in 1919, grew out of a conference held in 1860 in Karlsruhe, Germany, where chemists from many countries met to establish international standards for their science. One of their key objectives was a nomenclature system for elements and compounds.

Many textbooks and websites credit German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn with the discovery of radon (Rn). Dorn himself, however, never claimed that distinction, which in fact belongs to Ernest Rutherford and the Curies. It was Rutherford who gave the name “emanation” to the gases given off by radioelements. Thorium emanation, radium emanation, and actinium emanation were considered separate elements—thoron, radon, and actinon—until 1923, when all three proved to be isotopes of radon. Nevertheless, their individual names persisted into the 1940s.

“Undark,” the trade name of the self-luminous paint produced by the U.S. Radium Corporation, contained just enough radium to ensure a release of alpha particles, which caused the white pigment zinc sulfide to luminesce.

Chapter 23

Several radioactivists contributed to the “laws of displacement” describing the zigzag course of radioactive decay. Kasimir Fajans, Georg von Hevesy, Alexander Russell, and Frederick Soddy all worked on the problem. Later they argued with each other over credit for the discovery. When asked to reconcile the conflicting claims, Ernest Rutherford said, “I personally feel that the whole question is a very tangled one, for nearly all the people concerned have talked over the matter … The consequence is that it is almost impossible without a judge and jury to examine everyone to state the exact origin of the ideas.” Rutherford’s statement, dated April 2, 1913, and quoted in Radioactivity by Marjorie C. Malley, applies equally well to many other theories and discoveries. Rarely can a scientific breakthrough be attributed to a lone individual or an isolated laboratory. Rather, findings build on one another over time and across boundaries.

Chapter 24

Industrialist and philanthropist Ernest Solvay had died in 1922, but his foresight provided for the continuation of the pivotal meetings that bore his name. In May 1912, he created a foundation, the Institut International de Physique, to encourage “the researches which would extend and deepen the knowledge of natural phenomena.” Two committees, one administrative and the other scientific, directed the foundation’s activities. Mme. Curie served on the International Scientific Committee along with Hendrik Lorentz, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and five others. Although Solvay envisioned a thirty-year lifespan for his physics institute, his heirs recognized its value and extended its tenure, so that the gatherings continue to the present day. The most recent one, dedicated to “The Physics of Quantum Information,” took place in 2022.

Chapter 25

Francis W. Aston of the Cavendish Laboratory discovered the two-isotope nature of chlorine in 1919. The apparatus he devised to separate isotopes of elements according to their atomic weights, called the mass spectrograph, earned him the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the early 1930s, pitchblende deposits from Great Bear Lake in northwestern Canada posed the first serious challenge to ore from Haut-Katanga. Competition between the Belgian and Canadian processors drove the price of radium down to $40,000 per gram by 1938.

Chapter 26

The city of Kristiania changed its name to Oslo in 1925.

Chapter 28

Cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 by Austrian physicist Victor Hess, who ascended in a series of balloon flights and found the air at altitude to be far more highly ionized than at sea level. Cosmic rays are protons and light nuclei originating elsewhere in the Solar System or even beyond it. When the high-speed particles strike the atmosphere, they generate a cascade of effects, including ionization and the creation of particles now known as pions and muons.

The electrometer used by Irène on the Jungfraujoch was devised by German physicist and Jesuit priest Theodor Wulf, one of the first individuals to detect cosmic rays. Frédéric’s electrometer was of a type designed by Robert Wichard Pohl of the University of Göttingen.

The invention of the cloud chamber gained Scottish meteorologist C. T. R. Wilson half of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics. The other half went to Arthur Holly Compton, in recognition of the “Compton effect,” i.e. the lengthening of wavelengths of photons scattered by collisions with electrons.

Chapter 30

Geiger counters, first conceived by Ernest Rutherford and Hans Geiger at Manchester in 1908 and later refined by Geiger’s collaboration with Walther Müller, entered the Curie lab in January 1933, when a postdoctoral fellowship brought Wolfgang Gentner to Paris from Frankfurt. The counter registers the ionization of gas atoms, whether by alpha particles or other types of ionizing radiation.

Neither Frédéric nor Irène cared much for the term “artificial radioactivity,” as there was nothing artificial about the radioactivity produced. They preferred the more descriptive, more accurate “synthesis of artificial radioelements.”

By the time Irène was recognized as a Nobel laureate in chemistry, two Nobel Peace Prizes and three Nobel Prizes in Literature had been awarded to women. Maria Goeppert Mayer became the second female laureate in physics in 1963, and Dorothy Hodgkin the third in chemistry in 1974.

Epilogue

Only four women in history have discovered or codiscovered naturally occurring elements. Marie Curie was first, in 1898, when she intuited and then identified polonium and radium. She was followed by Lise Meitner (protactinium, 1917), Ida Tacke Noddack (rhenium, 1925), and Marguerite Perey (francium, 1939).