(upbeat music) - How and why
was radium discovered
in an unventilated shed?
And in fact, how was radioactivity discovered
and named in the first place?
What was the world's most important PhD dissertation?
Well it all has to do with a fascinating woman named,
Marie Sklodowska Curie.
Ready for her story?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity electricity ♪
(upbeat music) Maria Sklodowska
was born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland.
And was the fifth child of a science and math school teacher
and a school principal.
However, Marie's family suffered
because they were fiercely patriotic to Poland
while it was under the regime of the Russian empire.
In fact, her father lost his job because of his politics.
A series of further tragedies followed.
Her father lost their savings in bad investments,
requiring them to rent to boarders.
Then her older sister died of typhus, from a boarder.
And then her mother died of tuberculosis.
When Maria, who was nicknamed Manya, was 17,
she and her sister Bronya, made a pact.
Manya would work as Governess and earn enough money
for Bronya to get an education in Paris.
And then Bronya would support Manya
in her education later on.
The only higher education available to women
at the time in Poland was an illegal night school called,
The Flying University.
Which had limited effect and as it was illegal
proffered no degrees.
Maria then took a job as a Governess.
First for a family in Krakow which she described as
sunk in the darkest stupidity
as she felt that she quote,
"Shouldn't like my worst enemy to live in such a hell."
She switched to a different family
that seemed like a much better fit.
All that changed when the oldest son came home from school
and they fell in love and wanted to marry.
The parents loved Maria as a Governess,
but hated her as a future daughter in law
and forbade the marriage.
After much dithering with her feelings,
the son decided to heed his parents wishes.
Maria wrote to her cousin complaining quote,
"Let him go to the devil."
She then tried to devote herself to self study.
In October of 1888, she wrote her brother quote,
"I'm learning chemistry from a book.
"You can imagine how little I get out of that.
"But what can I do?
"As I have no place to make experiments
"or do practical work."
This was to be a lifelong complaint.
However, despite her irritation with her lover
she continued to see him
and when his parents found out they fired her.
Despondent she went home.
By March of 1890 when her sister invited her
to finally come to Paris to start her studies,
she delayed it for months hoping that the man
would change his mind.
Writing her sister quote,
"I have been stupid, I am stupid,
"and I shall remain stupid all the days of my life."
Finally after receiving a nasty break up letter
Maria Sklodowska moved to Paris in the fall of 1891
to study at the Sorbonne.
In France, she renamed herself Marie
and lived a monostatic existence,
subsiding on so little food that she often fainted.
Finally in 1893, a Polish friend moved heaven and earth
to get her a scholarship.
With that money to eat and to study
she decided to do some independent research
and went looking for a research facility.
It is for that reason the two met a French physicist
named Pierre Curie.
They quickly fell in love and Pierre wanted to get married.
But Marie felt she had to go back to Poland saying quote,
"Poles have no right to abandon their country."
Pierre wrote Marie, "It would be a beautiful thing.
"A thing I dare not hope if we could spend our life
"near each other hypnotized in our dreams.
"Your dreams for your country, our dream for humanity,
"our dream for science.
"But we are powerless to change the social order.
"With science however, perhaps we can accomplish something."
Maybe it was Pierre's love letters
or maybe it was her home country's refusal
to let her teach or study at the university.
Even with degrees in math and physics,
but Marie decided to return to Paris, marry Pierre,
and attempt to get a PhD.
Note at the time,
no woman in the world had a PhD in science.
In the meanwhile, Marie earned money teaching science
to young women and working with industry
on the magnetism of metals.
She wanted to earn money to pay back the scholarship.
To all that was the joyous news
that they were expecting a baby.
Marie gave birth to Irene Curie in September of 1897.
Marie recalled quote, "It became a serious problem,
"how to take care of our little Irene
"and of our home without giving up my scientific work.
"Such a renunciation would have been very painful to me
"and my husband would not even think of it."
They had just enough money to hire a servant
and Pierre's father moved in to help with childcare.
Marie then looked for a subject for her Doctorate.
Luckily, just the previous year,
1896 a French physicist named Henri Becquerel
had learned that x-rays were created when invisible
cathode rays hit glass and made it fluoresce.
Now Becquerel had gotten his Doctorate in fluorescence
and phosphorescence.
Fluorescents glow only when hit with visible
or ultraviolet light
and phosphors glow when the light is removed.
Becquerel thus wondered if maybe fluorescence
or phosphorescence would produce x-rays.
By February 24th, he happily reported
that phosphorescent uranium salts would produce
invisible rays that would go through paper
and could be seen in film.
Just two days later, Becquerel made some uranium salts
but the day was cloudy so he decided to put the sample
in a desk drawer.
The next two days were also cloudy
and frustrated he decided to develop the film
as a baseline for his experiments quote,
"Expecting to find the images very weak."
Instead to his complete surprise quote,
"The silhouettes appeared with great intensity."
He immediately decided that the uranium
was making these rays without any input.
The very next day, March 2nd, 1896 Becquerel published
on the invisible rays emitted by phosphorescent bodies.
Where he quite rightly said that his discovery quote,
"Seems to me quite important and beyond the phenomena
"which one could expect to observe."
Becquerel then found that the uranium
didn't even need to phosphorescent and therefore
called them uranium rays.
Becquerel was excited but the rest of the world was not.
Because radiation from uranium has such high energy
that the rays go through bones just as well as flesh.
So it was useless for medical purposes.
However, Marie Sklodowska Curie was interested.
She also recalled that 17 years earlier,
her husband and his brother
had discovered piezoelectricity.
The physics property where changing the pressure
creates electricity in certain crystals.
And that applying electricity to those crystals
will cause them to deform.
The brothers then used this knowledge
to create a sensitive electroscope
or a device that measured very low currents.
By measuring the pressure on these crystals
which would then tell you the current going through them.
Now Becquerel found that uranium rays
could make gases slightly conductive.
So Marie decided to use her husband's device
to detect radioactivity with electricity.
Marie recalled quote, "Instead of making these bodies
"act upon photographic plates I preferred to determine
"the intensity of their radiation by measuring
"the conductivity of air exposed to the action of the rays."
In this way,
Marie determined that the amount of radiation produced
was dependent on the amount of uranium present
and nothing else.
Now Becquerel had come to the same conclusion
but with much less formal proof.
But then Marie Curie took it to another level.
She wondered if maybe the uranium was emitting rays
because of something that was happening with the atoms.
She then thought that there must be other materials
that make these rays.
Saying years later that quote, "It was scarcely possible
"that radioactivity considered as an atomic property
should belong to a certain kind of matter to the exclusion
of all other.
Marie Curie then collected every known substance
and exhaustively studied them on the electroscope.
By April of 1898 she found that thallium
was about as radioactive as uranium.
As there were two substances that displayed
this phenomena,
she thought it inappropriate to call them uranium rays
and instead called it radioactive.
As in radiation active and the name stuck
although without the dash.
While she was studying every material
she could get her hands on,
she also studied many minerals and ores
which were composed of many elements put together.
She was not surprised to find that ores
made of uranium and thallium were radioactive.
However, she was astonished to find
that some uranium ores were significantly more radioactive
than pure uranium.
Marie Curie, "I then made the hypothesis
"that the ores must contain in a small quantity
"a substance much more strongly radioactive
"than either uranium or thorium."
This substance could not be one of the known elements
because these had already been examined.
It must therefore be a new chemical element.
Pierre was so intrigued that he dropped his research
and joined in her studies.
For the next several years they worked side by side
sometimes filling in the different sides
of the same notebook.
By July of 1898 the Curies published their theory
that there must be a new radioactive material
that they named Polonium after Poland.
Marie and Pierre decided to work with an ore pitchblende
which was a uranium ore that was about four times
more radioactive than pure uranium.
Because they got a ton of it from the Austrian government
who wanted to get rid of unwanted mining waste.
At the same time,
Pierre's university said that the only room
they could use to research in was an old abandoned shed
that used to be
the School of Medicine's old dissection room quote,
"There was no question of obtaining
"the needed proper apparatus in common use by chemists.
"We simply had some old pine wood tables
"with furnaces and gas burners."
Yet Marie recalled years later quote,
"It was in this miserable old shed that we passed
"the best and happiest years of our life."
By December they had found another substance
hidden in the ore.
And this one they called radium after radiation.
Now the race was on to try to isolate these new elements
radium and or polonium.
By doing chemical experiments and seeing if the results
had higher radiation or lower radiation.
They thought it would be easy.
Quote, "Perhaps a few weeks would suffice
"to solve the problem."
Instead it took almost four years
to partially isolate radium.
In fact, Marie didn't completely isolate radium until 1910
and she never isolated polonium.
In 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie
managed to get 1/10 of a gram of radium chloride salt
from several tons of ore.
The salt turned out to be fascinating.
They found it to be a million times more radioactive
than uranium.
In addition, radium would naturally glow.
Marie recalled how she and Pierre enjoyed working at night
when quote, "The feebly luminescent silhouettes
"of the bottles or capsules containing our products
"look like faint fairy lights."
It's terrifying isn't it?
They really had no idea how dangerous radium was.
Well over a hundred years later their notebook
is still so radioactive you're required to wear
protective clothing to touch it.
Even her cookbooks and furniture are still tainted.
And their bodies are buried in lead lined boxes
so that visitors can honor them unharmed.
They didn't know it was dangerous
but they immediately knew it produced heat.
A lot of heat.
Marie found quote, "Radium can melt in an hour
"its weight in ice."
Even though the radium was producing this heat continuously
it didn't seem to be changing in shape or weight.
What was going on?
By 1903,
Marie started to think that, "Maybe radioactivity," quote,
"is due to a transformation in the atom itself."
Although if that was true Marie worried that quote,
"We should be forced to abandon the theory
"of the invariability of atoms,
"which is the foundation of modern chemistry."
On June 25th, 1903 Marie Sklodowska Curie
published her findings in a PhD thesis.
Where the committee told her she had produced quote,
"The greatest scientific contribution ever made
"in a Doctoral thesis."
But how did radioactivity work?
Well one of the problems with understanding radioactivity
in the early 1900's is they had no idea
of what was going on inside the atom.
Electrons had been discovered in 1897
but nobody had any idea about the existence of the nucleus.
Let alone that a nucleus could decay.
It was actually their discover of radium
that led a boisterous kiwi
to accidentally discover the nucleus
while bombarding gold foil with radiation.
How Ernest "Ern" Rutherford discovered
we are all almost completely nothing
is next time on "The Lightening Tamers".
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