SEARCHING FOR TREASURE on on a cold day in early 1899 Marie Curie stood in the courtyard outside her run-down laboratory in Paris France The 31-year-old scientist watched workers unload sack after sack from a truck onto the ground Impatient with the pace of the work she walked over to one of the bags and opened it Then reaching into the sack with both hands she scooped out a handful of brown dust and held it to her face The material was pitchblende a mineral compound consisting of up to 30 elements including uranium Many tons of pitchblende had been scrapped in the forests of Bohemia present-day Czech Republic after the uranium had been extracted from it At the time uranium was commonly used in ceramics and photography Marie Curie and her husband Pierre would soon become famous for their work 5 ONE CHAPTER
Curie and her husband Pierre had convinced the Austrian government which then ruled Bohemia to ship the pitchblende scraps to them in Paris What remained of the mineral was still mixed with dirt and pine needles But Curie didn’t care She knew this mineral also contained treasure The treasure she sought wasn’t gold silver or any other known element She was after something more mysterious She hoped to find an element no one had yet discovered an element some people did not believe was real Uranium Uranium is a metallic silver-white element that was discovered in 1789 by German chemist Martin Klaproth Traditionally elements were named for their discoverer But Klaproth instead decided to name the new element after the newly discovered planet Uranus which was named for the Greek god of the sky Uranium metal tarnishes when exposed to air In powder form it can spontaneously ignite Found largely in central Europe uranium was long used to color ceramics and glassware In 1896 it became the first element in which radioactivity was discovered THE NEED FOR PROOF Less than a year earlier Curie had researched a newly discovered phenomenon which she named radioactivity This term referred to the spontaneous release of energetic rays from certain elements such as uranium and thorium But if Curie’s findings were correct a mysterious new element in pitchblende gave off rays hundreds of times 6
stronger than those of uranium She called the mysterious element radium But radium’s existence was only theoretical To prove it was real Curie had to break down the pitchblende into its component elements This would allow her to isolate enough radium to determine the element’s atomic weight defined as the average mass of one atom of an element Establishing an atomic weight would in turn prove the element was real Curie knew the job wouldn’t be easy but she was determined to prove her theory was correct As she told her sister Bronya The element is there and I’ve got to find it We are sure 1 BACKBREAKING LABOR The facilities for the job were far from ideal Pierre who was also Curie’s research partner taught at Paris’s School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry which was called École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles ESPCI in French The couple had secured the use of an old shed at the school The shed’s uninsulated walls did little against the heat of summer or the cold of winter and rain poured through its leaky skylights onto the dirt floor The room contained a few wooden tables a blackboard and a cast-iron stove well past its prime After visiting the Curies lab German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald described it as a cross between a stable and a potato-cellar 2 7
