Pierre Curie

Such a lifestyle is not much improved by making professional necessities prohibitively expensive.

By 1920, Pierre Curie had passed away, but Marie was still living a shockingly humble life.

A fact that became especially apparent when she sat down for a rare interview with an American journalist, Marie Brown Maloney.

Curie didn't know it at the time, but Maloney was about to change her fortunes.

L'elisir atomico è l'ombra del Raditor sul corpo di Eben Byers.

Negli anni venti del Novecento la scoperta della radioattività da parte di Marie e Pierre Curie scatenò un'autentica febbre commerciale per le terapie radianti, considerate erroneamente acceleratori di vitalità cellulare.

Il preparato più celebre, il Raditor, consisteva in fiale d'acqua distillata arricchite con isotopi di radio due due sei e radio due due otto, vendute con certificazione medica come corroborante per l'organismo debilitato e rimedio universale contro l'invecchiamento.

La vicenda del magnate americano Eben Byers ne costituisce la testimonianza più cruenta: convinto dei benefici del tonico, Byers ne assunse circa 1400 flaconi nell'arco di tre anni, accumulando una quantità letale di materiale fissile nelle ossa scheletriche.

She lived in a garret, and by her own account sometimes fainted from hunger.

She came first in the physics degree and second in mathematics, and she married a shy, gifted French physicist, Pierre Curie, who had the sense to see what she was.

Her first discovery was simple and profound.

She tested every element she could lay hands on and found that the strength of the rays depended on only one thing, how much uranium was in the sample, not what it was combined with, not whether it was hot or cold, wet or dry, powder or lump.

Then she noticed that one uranium ore, a black mineral called pitchblende, was far more radioactive than its uranium could explain.

There had to be something else in it, something unknown in tiny amounts and fantastically active.

To find it, she and Pierre worked for four years in a shed with a leaking glass roof that the medical school had previously used for dissecting corpses.

It had no proper ventilation.

You know, Madame Curie is the only lady that won two Nobel prizes.

This is named for her husband, Pierre Curie, and he found that any time cold is linked to temperature, You have more magnetic effect the colder something gets.

So this is the reason why heavier temperatures are signs when magnetism begins to leave either a biotic or abiotic system.

And this is true, you know, if we had metals that we're using, if we cool them, they would be more magnetic.

The lady who was the wife of the orthopedic surgeon, she worked for a biotech company out here in California.

And she goes, look, I think I know why this happened to you.

My husband says, you're a smart guy.

I'm going to send you a book and six papers.

This gentleman is immortal or dang well close to it.

Um, and so I, I've been talking to a lot of the people in Paris by email and correspondence and, and they're, they all suggest they have pictures of, uh, uh, you know, uh, Marie, uh, Madam Curry, who at that time was known as, uh, Marie and, and the last name I can't pronounce is a Polish name, but, um, She, before she married Pierre Curie, was, spent some time with this 2,800-year-old gentleman, and they attended very social occasions, and one of those social occasions, there was photographers, and he was part of the group with Marie, at that time, again, unmarried, Marie Curie, and he told me the description of what was in the picture, which I don't want to reveal at this time, because I want people to, if they have some of that, but I would be most interested in even being Interesting reward if that's necessary.

If someone can find one of these old pictures back then, I'd have to, of course, verify that it really is an authentic picture, but there is a specific picture or two of him with Marie Curie from about 1890, I think he said 93, 91, somewhere in there when she was in Paris.

That's unbelievable.

But what about the companies that employed them? What did they know? While the women had been told that the tiny amounts of radium they were working with were safe, the dangers of radiation weren't completely unknown.

Remember, Marie and Pierre Curie, years earlier, they discovered that exposure to radioactive material could damage human tissue.

Pierre had deliberately exposed his skin and developed a lesion.

Other researchers working closely with radioactive materials suffered burns and injuries.

We'll discuss exactly what happened to their health in a moment, but the question is, how much did people know about radium's deadly health effects? Kate says there are records of the girls literally asking their employers if this stuff will hurt us, and they were reassured.

Madame Curie obviously eventually dies from radiation poisoning herself because of all the work that she's been doing, Pierre Curie, her husband who was working with her on it, he said in 1903, which is 15 years before radium dial painting has really taken off, he said he would not care to leave himself alone in a room with a kilo of pure radium because it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him.

So they knew they were dangerous.

And the fact even the radium companies knew there were dangers can be seen in the fact that the lab workers working with large amounts of radium are issued with safety equipment.

It remained incredibly slow.

But despite all this, radioactivity had at last been discovered, and the intensity of its energies was recognized and pointed out in 1902 by Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, 1859 to 1906.

Where then did the energy come from? Could it come from the outside? Could the radioactive atoms somehow collect energy from their surroundings, concentrate it several million-fold, and then let it out all at once? To concentrate energy in this fashion would violate something called the second law of thermodynamics.

This was first proposed in 1850 by the German physicist Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, 1822 to 1828, and had proved so useful that physicists did not like to abandon it unless they absolutely had to.

In fact, the most dramatic result of alpha particle bombardment had nothing to do with energy production, but rather the reverse.

New nuclei were produced that had more energy than the starting nuclei, so that energy was absorbed by the nuclear reaction rather than given off.

This first came about in 1934 when a French husband and wife team of physicists, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, 1900 to 1958, and Irène Joliot-Curie, 1897 to 1956, were bombarding aluminum-27, atomic number 13, with alpha particles.

The result was to combine part of the alpha particle with the aluminum-27 nucleus to form a new nucleus with an atomic number two units higher, 15, and a mass number three units higher, 30.

And you even look at her life.

There are certain things that if they just didn't go this way, like if she doesn't meet Pierre Curie, maybe they don't get together.

Maybe she doesn't find someone in France that she can really settle down with.

Maybe she goes back home, Poland or whatever or crazy things.