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In early June 1903 both Curies were invited to London as guests of the prestigious Royal Institution. Her sister Bronya made the difficult trip from Poland to celebrate Marie's academic triumph.
Bronya had insisted that the first woman to receive a doctorate in France should acknowledge the special event by wearing a new dress. Characteristically, Marie chose a black dress. Like the navy wedding outfit she had chosen eight years earlier, the new dress could be worn in the lab without fear of stains.
The Curies became research workers at the School of Chemistry and Physics in Paris and there they began their pioneering work into invisible rays given off by uranium.
Marie was convinced she had found a new chemical element - other scientists doubted her results.
Pierre and Marie Curie set about working to search for the unknown element. Eventually, they extracted a black powder 330 times more radioactive than uranium, which they called polonium. Polonium was a new chemical element, atomic number 84. When the Curies investigated further, they found that the liquid left behind after they had extracted polonium was still extremely radioactive.
In 1898, the Curies published strong evidence supporting the existence of the new element - which they called radium - but they still had no sample of it. Marie set about processing the pitchblende to extract the tiny quantities of radium. This involved working on a much larger scale than before, with 20 kg batches of the mineral - grinding, dissolving, filtering, precipitating, collecting, redissolving, crystallising and recrystallising.
The work was heavy and physically demanding - and involved dangers the Curies did not appreciate. During this time they began to feel sick and physically exhausted; today we can attribute their ill-health to the early symptoms of radiation sickness. At the time they persevered in ignorance of the risks, often with raw and inflamed hands because they were continually handling highly radioactive material.
In 1902 Marie eventually isolated radium (as radium chloride), determining its atomic weight as 225.93. The journey to the discovery had been long and arduous.
Marie Curie was twice awarded the Nobel Prize: for Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. She died in 1934.
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| Marie's Nobel prize |
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