Marie Curie
A recent Le Monde/CSA poll in six European countries voted Marie Curie as the second most representative figure of European identity in the 20th century, after Winston Churchill and before Charles de Gaulle.
On International Womens Day 2003, Sarah Dry introduced her new biography of Marie Curie with a celebratory reading at Londons Institut Français.
Pierre Radvanyi, Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Research Scientifique (CNRS) joined Sarah Dry in exploring the legacy of Marie and Pierre Curie, who together won the Nobel price for Physics one hundred years ago.
Part 1. Sarah Dry:
In writing Marie Curies biography, I had to manage the competing demands of writing a good intimate portrait of the life of an individual, a good biography, and this new discipline of history of science. This discipline having until recently been largely concerned with writing the histories of great men, Marie Curie may perhaps be regarded as an honorary great man. Indeed, she was buried in the Panthéon recently.
What I really enjoyed was the challenge of showing Curies rise through the many institutions in which she played important roles: as a young Polish girl in the gymnasium in Warsaw, or her none-too-friendly reception at the Sorbonne. Women werent allowed to study for a higher degree at that time in Poland. But, in her own right, she went on to become an important member of the Sorbonne, where she was appointed the first female professor.
Educational institutions were important throughout Curies life. Urgently needing a job and extra money after her doctoral dissertation, and with a young family to attend to, she became the first woman teacher at the training school for women teachers in secondary education. My task was to put all these institutions in their own historical context, while linking them both with Curies personal life and her professional life as a scientist.
There is a section in the book that tells the story of Marie meeting Pierre, her husband who played an important role in her life. It is meant to give the reader some sense of how self-consciously Marie and Pierre thought of themselves, as dreamers and idealists.
Drawing of Marie by another Polish student in Paris done in 1892, some months after Marie enrolled at the Sorbonne. (Photo ACJC, see the Musee Curie exhibition)
Marie came to Paris as a young woman, a twenty-three-year old, to study at the Sorbonne, and received her licence degree, the equivalent of a masters, in 1893. She finished first in her class for physical sciences. She then got a scholarship to stay on and do another year in mathematical sciences. But the plan had always been to go back to Poland.
Enter a tall young man with auburn hair and large, limpid eyes
Sarah Dry reads aloud: Marie had always intended to return to Poland after finishing her studies in Paris. She felt a duty to contribute to her country, and, perhaps more acutely, to care for her ageing father. But in the spring of 1894, she met Pierre Curie, a tall young man with auburn hair and large, limpid eyes at the home of physicist and fellow Pole, Józef Zowalski.
Thirty years after their first meeting, Marie still remembered it vividly. As I entered the room, Pierre Curie was standing in the recess of a French window opening on a balcony. He seemed to me very young, though he was at that time 35 years old. I was struck by the open expression of his face and by the slight suggestion of detachment in his whole attitude. His speech, rather slow and deliberate, his simplicity, and his smile, at once grave and youthful, inspired confidence. Marie understood Pierres detachment as that of a dreamer absorbed in his reflections.
To Marie, for whom a studied disregard for everyday discomforts was becoming something of a creed, Pierres natural calm was attractive, his aloofness alluring. Pierre seems to have lived a life apart, heedless of the conventions by which other people lived. Even in his early years, Pierres family had noted his difficulty in shifting rapidly between subjects and his need to absorb a topic in isolation.
Instead of forcing him to adapt to the requirements of a normal curriculum, his family had found ways to foster his special brand of intelligence. He was kept out of the rigid French educational system and was taught at home until the age of 16 by his parents, his elder brother, and a tutor. Pierre thrived, receiving his bachelors degree at 16 and a licence in physics from the Sorbonne just two years later. He stayed at the Sorbonne for five years as an assistant in the laboratory of Paul Desains, the director of the university laboratory, gaining experience in experimental research, though he was unable to carry out any further formal studies for lack of funds.
Pierre Curie (upper right) with his brother Jacques and their parents. He called his family exquisite when he first talked about them with Marie Sklodowska. More here
Before he met Marie, Pierres closest relationships were with his parents, with whom he still lived at age 35, and his brother Jacques, his elder by three and a half years. Like Pierre, Jacques had been educated outside the formal French system. He too was drawn to the sciences, working as an assistant in the mineralogical laboratory at the Sorbonne. They pooled their interests in a study of crystals that quickly led to the discovery of piezoelectricity, a remarkable phenomenon that would serve Marie Curie well in the coming years.
Pierre did not neglect the formalities of courtship with Marie. Her serious personality, fair features, and plain dress accorded well with his view of life. Unlike some pairings, which thrive on the frisson of difference, the relationship that grew between Marie and Pierre Curie seems to have been founded from the start on shared interests and a common ethical code.
Following their initial meeting, Marie and Pierre became friends, spending time together at the Parisian Physics Society, in the laboratory, and in her student rooms. In the spring of 1894, Marie completed her second licence degree at the Sorbonne, placed second out of all students applying for the degree in mathematics. By mid-summer, when Marie left for her customary holiday in Poland, Pierre had expressed his desire to share his life with her. If Marie preferred, as he suggested in one letter, he would be content to occupy separate rooms in a shared flat. Marie was deeply divided. She had finished the degrees she had come to Paris to obtain, and felt obliged to care for her father, and contribute to a still-oppressed Poland. She returned home unsure of her plans, leaving Pierre the task of convincing a headstrong young woman to return to Paris, and to him, in the autumn.
Pierre sent Marie love letters that she would remember fondly 30 years later. He knew Marie well enough to avoid the sentiments of ordinary romance. He cast his plea for Marie to return to Paris in loftier terms, which reveal his astute study of Marie and her jostling passions. It would be a fine thing, he wrote, in which I hardly dare believe, to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams: your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream. Of all those dreams that last is, I believe, the only legitimate one. I mean by that that we are powerless to change the social order and, even if we were not, we should not know what to do; in taking action, no matter in what direction, we should never be sure of not doing more harm than good, by retarding some inevitable evolution. From the scientific point of view, on the contrary, we may hope to do something; the ground is solider here, and any discovery that we make, however small, will remain acquired knowledge.
Marie decided to stay in Paris. In a letter to her old friend Kazia, Marie resolutely outlined the bounds of her new life in blunt sentences that underline the distance between the young girl who had left Poland three years earlier and the grown woman living and now marrying abroad. It is a sorrow to me to have to stay forever in Paris, but what am I to do? Fate has made us deeply attached to each other and we cannot endure the idea of separating ... I hesitated for a whole year and could not resolve upon an answer. Finally I became reconciled to the idea of settling here. When you receive this letter, write to me: Madame Curie, School of Physics and Chemistry, 42 rue Lhomond. That is my name from now on. My husband is a teacher in that school. Next year I shall bring him to Poland so that he will know my country.
Pierre and Marie with their beloved bicycles in 1895, the year they were married
Scientific collaboration as romantic interaction
Part II: Pierre Radvanyi leads the discussion
A scientist receives his education not only from his university but through everything he learns afterwards in his interaction with other scientists, what he reads or hears in conferences, and so on. A chemist can subsequently become a physicist; a physicist can become a chemist. These consecutive experiences can interact very strongly.
Pierre was eight years older than Marie. When they met, she was doing her first experimental work on the magnetization of steel, while Pierre was already quite well-known. He had an international reputation for working on crystal, on symmetry and on magnetism. So at the beginning, they are not exactly at the same stage of their lives, of their evolution.
But it is very interesting to see how they became intimately related, not only as husband and wife but also as scientists.
They worked very closely together and their characters were not the same. Marie Curie was a strong, obstinate woman, who liked to aim for a clear goal. Pierre Curie was more mercurial, prone to shift easily from one subject to the other. He had a more interdisciplinary view of the development of his field, physics, which at that time was not as distinct from chemistry. Marie had had a very good education both in physics and in maths. So neither were chemists at that time: they learned chemistry on the job. They became chemists by working together on a new subject, on a problem which was their own discovery.
Pierre tutored Marie in certain techniques, especially one he developed himself, which triggered what is known as the discovery of Polonium and Radium. But the real breakthrough came when Marie decided after the birth of their first girl, Iréne, to do a degree in physics. She would be the first woman to have such a degree in France. They made the choice together to study the extraordinary phenomenon discovered one year earlier by Henri Becquerel, and at that time named uranic rays. (The name radioactivity was later given to this by Marie Curie. She invented this word. Radioactivity was in every sense her chosen subject.)
Caricature of Marie and Pierre Curie
Then came the experiments which you can read up in the notebooks preserved intact in the national library in Paris. They are still radioactive, so you must take some precautions. You can follow in detail how Pierre Curie showed Marie how to handle the equipment: electrometer, quartz and so on. Marie took it upon herself to look further for these curious rays of Becquerel in other materials. She chose the materials and persevered. She was quite obstinate about it, because there were no observable results in the first elements she tried. Only when she examined very heavy elements like Thorium did she notice that it was also radioactive.
She then had what was a truly brilliant idea to explore further not only the elements but the minerals. Minerals can contain some known elements but may contain something else. She discovered that some minerals of uranium, (in fact, as we now know, all minerals of uranium), are more radioactive than uranium itself.
At that point, Pierre Curie was engaged in his work on crystals. They decided to pool their efforts because neither of them knew much about chemistry. They both discovered this field by adding chemistry to physics. It was a completely new way of looking for a new element looking at the rays this element emits. They made a chemical separation and looked at the separated products to see which one emitted rays and which one did not. In that way, and with the help of a chemist in the École de Physique et de Chimie, Gustave Bemont, they first found Polonium, then Radium. The name Polonium was chosen because of Marie Curies homeland Poland. To name an element Radium was also a stroke of brilliance, because you immediately think of radiation.
Finally, Marie and Pierre Curie found out that radiation could only be explained by thinking about this new property of emitting rays as a characteristic not of materials in bulk but of the atoms themselves. It was the atoms which emitted radiation. This was at that time not at all obvious: some people still denied the very existence of atoms.
The Curies imported first kilograms, then tons of minerals from Bohemia (at that time part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire). The uranium mines were the property of the Austrian government. It was Pierre Curie who wrote the letters to the Austrian Academy of Science. They had not much money in Paris. What they purchased were the residues, not used by industry. When the Curies started requiring tons of this residue, Pierre Curie had to write increasingly convincing letters to the president of the Academy of Science in Vienna.
In time, this domain became so vast, so important: radioactivity was quite simply a new field of science. The Curies were obliged to divide their efforts and they agreed that Marie should continue to try to obtain pure Radium, while Pierre would press on in physics. At the time, they didnt know how dangerously radioactive Radium was. The division in a sense was arbitrary. They could have done the reverse, but they did it this way because Marie really could not wait to get her hands on this Radium, for her own thesis work.
Marie Curie at the Radium Institute. Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
Precision was something she believed in for the laboratory. And it was her techniques, the precision of her techniques, which allowed her to identify Radium. This really made her what she was. But taking the next step, to develop a theory, was something with which she was never really comfortable.
Pierre Radvanyi: Let me just venture one word here. In her book she actually credits Pierre with this quote about the vaguest theories being the best. That is from Pierre.
Sarah Dry: OK. I still think that it is noticeable given what she did in her life how little she published by way of theory. After her and Pierres discovery of Radium and Polonium, she precisely focused on accumulating radioactive elements and developing a chemistry of the elements. When they were in the laboratory together, they worked as equals. Now others, I think, looking at how they divided the work, may have occasionally seen Marie as the drudge in that partnership, doing the sort of busy work of purifying Radium. I dont think Pierre thought that. I think he deferred to her mathematical skills and her knowledge of physics, too.
But at home, you know, this was 1900, and regardless of their remarkable relationship in the lab, Marie Curie was responsible for the duties of a wife. She did the housekeeping, she did the cleaning, she took care of the kids.
Pierre Radvanyi: But they always had someone to help. Well, not in the first year, perhaps, but from 1898 onwards they had domestic help. Otherwise she would not have been able to do it. She had great responsibilities, after all. One should note from his letters and writings, especially when you consider the time, the 1900s, that Pierre really considered his wife as an equal. At that time this was not so usual.
Sarah Dry: Sure. I mean, thats why Marie married him. She had had relationships before. She fell in love with the son of a family she worked for as a governess in Poland. And she also had admirers in her early years in Paris. But I dont think, by the time she had gotten herself to Paris and met Pierre that she was really still on the look-out for romance. So it had a lot to do with the kind of man Pierre was. He was certainly remarkable.
Pierre Radvanyi: Well, lets look at their first Nobel prize in physics. The physics committee of the Nobel prize wanted to give it for the work on radioactivity. The chemistry committee said you should not give it for the discovery of Radium and Polonium because this was chemistry, We want to keep this for later. So already in 1903, there was some jostling between chemists and physicists in the Nobel committees. They finally decided to share the prize between Becquerel and the Curies, explaining carefully that it was given for their work on radioactive substances.
In 1903, it was already known that this field was becoming enormous, and that many very important discoveries had already been made or were on the verge of being made. Already and this was discovered by neither the Curies nor Becquerel you could see radioactive rays one by one, and that atoms were disintegrating at random. This was something completely new in microphysics at that time. By 1911, the chemistry committee decided that the discovery of Polonium and Radium was worth a Nobel prize in Chemistry. But of course, Pierre Curie was dead. No doubt that prize would have been shared between Pierre and Marie had Pierre still been alive.
Sarah Dry: Its true. But Marie Curie really was exceptional. And I dont just mean that as a cliché. I mean, she came out of a country, Poland, that was oppressed. So to start off she saw herself as a member of a nation that was struggling to break out. She was sort of selected out of this nation by her own will, patience and determination to raise the money to get to Paris.
By the time she got there, she was quite unusual, and then made herself more distinguished and distinct by what she did there. So, I guess, in a way, the world needs more women like Marie Curie. But we also just need the hordes. There is after all a certain strength of a different kind in numbers. Curie is certainly a model, but thankfully women today wouldnt have to make the kind of decisions that Curie made. I mean she was lucky. She found a man who she loved and who loved the work that she did, too. And I think, without that, it would have been difficult.
Pierre Radvanyi: I agree.
