Factory workers, mostly young girls seeking an independent income, ingested the metal while applying the paint to watch faces. This led to the tragedy of the radium dial painters in New Jersey – an all too familiar story of the promise of profit over safety, and denial of the facts. It became widely used in quack treatments and elixirs, from therapeutic waters to soap to chocolate bars, where the buyer was only safe if the mixtures contained no radium at all.Īmong other uses, entrepreneurs used radium to create “glow-in-the-dark” paint. Yet the metal’s strange blue glow convinced some that it had other benefits. It became used as one of the first radiation treatments for cancer and other skin diseases. Among a slew of papers that the Curies published in the years after its discovery, one showed that radium could treat cancer by killing cancer cells more quickly than healthy cells. The boom and bust of radium over the first three decades of the 20th century remains one of the great cautionary tales of our times. Marie Curie took his professorship and continued with their research, later isolating pure radium metal and receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. Pierre was tragically killed in a coach accident in 1906 (he was also deeply unwell from the effects of his work with radiation). They received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for this work, sharing it with Becquerel. Having originally worked with 100g of the ore, equivalent to a tenth of a bag of sugar, they would need a tonne of ore to isolate just a tenth of a gram of radium dichloride. Yet it would still take the Curies another three years to produce a pure radium salt. It is so radioactive that it gives off a pale blue glow. This substance is the most radioactive natural element, a million times more so than uranium. The radioactivity of radium then must be enormous. The new radioactive substance certainly includes a very large portion of barium in spite of that, the radioactivity is considerable. On Boxing Day, it was published in a paper read to the French Academy of Sciences: By December 21 of that year, they had made the discovery. This was the cold and damp environment in which they had to grind, crush, dissolve, precipitate, filter, wash and painstakingly measure what they found. The university had only given them a shed next to the departments of chemistry and physics for their work. They were working with an ore called pitchblende which they had sourced from a mine in the Ore Mountains that separate Germany from the Czech Republic, in what was still part of the Austrian empire. Corrosive acids, strong alkalis and hard labour were required as the Curies performed many separations to tease away the tiny quantities of radium from the 30 or so other elements present. Yet it became apparent to the Curies that there was another substance in the ores that was considerably more radioactive than either uranium or polonium. They named it polonium after Marie’s home country, coining the term “radioactivity” in the process. In July of 1898, they showed that the ore contained a new element that was giving off similar radiation. Soon Pierre, a professor of physics at the university, set aside his own research to help her explain why. In testing countless rocks and minerals for radiation emissions, using measuring equipment invented by her husband Pierre and his brother Jacques, she noticed that uranium ores gave off greater emissions than pure samples of uranium. She reached this conclusion on the back of a curious observation. But Marie Curie, a young Polish-born doctoral student at the University of Paris, suspected there was much more to be discovered from Becquerel’s “uranic rays”. ![]() Many scientists, doctors and inventors – including Thomas Edison – were fascinated by X-rays and their ability to make the invisible observable. Several months later, while researching these new X-rays, the French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally discovered another new mysterious type of ray when he detected radiation emitting from uranium. X-rays had been discovered in Germany just a few days before Christmas in 1895. Scientific discovery can be achingly slow, but it was moving swiftly in the 1890s.
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