In 1896 Marie Curie decided to complete her doctoral dissertation in a totally new field: radiation. It was exciting. It was something no one had ever seen or studied before.
Scientists knew that electrically charged radiation flooded the air around uranium, but not much else was known.
Marie used a device her husband, professor Pierre Curie, invented to detect electric charges around mineral samples. She named this pro cess radioactivity and concluded that radioactivity was emitted from inside a uranium atom.
Since the Curies had had no money of their own to pay for her research, and since the university refused to fund a woman's graduate level physics research, Marie scrounged for free lab space. She found an abandoned shed that had been used by the Biology Department to hold cadavers. It was unbearably hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter, with a few wooden tables and chairs and a rusty old stove.
In 1898 Marie was given a puzzling uranium mineral ore called pitchblende, which her tests showed gave off more radioactive emissions than expected from the amount of uranium it contained.
She concluded that there must be another substance inside pitchblende
that gave off the extra radiation.
She be gan each test with 3.5 ounces of pitchblende. She planned to re move all of the known metals so that ultimately all that would be left would be this new, highly active element. She ground the ore with mortar and pestle, passed it through a sieve, dissolved it in acid, boiled off the liquid, filtered it, distilled it, then electrolyzed it.
Over the next six months Marie and her husband, Pierre, chemically isolated and tested each of the 78 known chemical elements to see if these mysterious radio active rays flowed from any other substance be sides uranium. Most of their time was spent begging for tiny samples of the many el ements they could not afford to buy. Oddly, each time Marie removed more of the known elements, what was left of her pitchblende was always more radioac tive than before.
What should have taken weeks, dragged into long months because of their dismal working conditions. In March 1901, the pitchblende finally gave up its secrets. Marie had found not one, but two new radio active elements: polonium (named after Marie's native Poland) and radium (so named because it was by far the most radioactive element yet dis covered). Marie produced a tiny sample of pure radium salt. It weighed .0035 ounces, less than the weight of a potato chip but it was a million times more radioactive than uranium!
Because the dangers of radiation were not yet understood, Marie and Pierre were plagued with health troubles. Aches and pains. Ulcer-covered hands. Continuous bouts of serious illnesses like pneumonia. Never-ending exhaustion.
Finally, the radia tion Marie had studied all her life killed her in 1934.
