In July of 1898,
Marie Sklodoska Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie,
published their discovery
of a new substance they called polonium.
By declaring they had found ("une substance nouvelle radio-active").
Yeah, I got bad grades in French class, why do you ask?
Which translates to a new radioactive substance.
This is actually the origin of the term radioactive.
So why did they make up this new term?
Well, polonium was very radiation-active,
400 times more powerful than uranium.
And radio was very commonly used at this time
for any radiation in the air.
For example, wireless telegraphs
were often called radiograms.
Although some people used that term in the following years,
the phrase radioactivity only gained popularity
when Curie published her PhD thesis
titled "Radio-active Substances" in 1903.
But why would the world listen to a shy Polish immigrant,
who was, gasp, a woman?
To understand that,
we need to study why she knew so much about radioactivity
and how the world responded to her discoveries, ready?
Let's go.
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It all started when Henry Becquerel found,
to his frustration,
that the sun never really came out.
It was cloudy in Paris between February 26
and March 1st of 1896.
Why was this frustrating, you may ask?
Well, Becquerel had this theory
that when certain fluorescent salts absorbed sunlight,
they produced X rays.
And how could he validate that without the sunlight?
This wasn't a completely crazy idea.
X-rays were newly discovered,
and no one really knew what they were,
just that they were produced
when something called a cathode ray hit a solid.
Becquerel also felt the cathode rays were invisible light
that make glass and fluorescents glow.
Since cathode rays make X-rays,
and cathode rays made things glow,
it seemed logical to see if there's a connection
between things that glow,
like fluorescents and phosphorescents
(Fluorescents only glow when they're hit with light,
phosphorescents glow even after the outside light
is removed) and x-rays.
Anyway, after a few weeks of playing
with different glowing materials,
Becquerel was happy to report
that phosphorescent uranium salts that sat in sunlight
would produce invisible rays that would go through paper
and could be seen on film.
After publishing, Becquerel produced some more uranium salts
to do further experiments,
but he was irritated when the sample was ready,
but the sun was not.
So he just threw his uranium in a drawer
with his photographic plates.
The next two days were also cloudy,
and Becquerel realized that his uranium salts
were no longer fluorescent or phosphorescent.
Annoyed, he just decided to develop the film anyway,
as a baseline,
"expecting to find the images very weak."
Instead, to his complete surprise,
"the silhouettes appeared with great intensity."
By November, Becquerel found
that uranium didn't even need
to be fluorescent or phosphorescent,
all uranium would produce these rays.
And for this reason, he called the new rays uranium rays,
and he also determined that these rays
would make the air slightly conductive.
However, there wasn't very much interest
in these uranium rays,
and even Becquerel got bored and moved on to other subjects.
Fast forward 10 months till September of 1897,
Marie Sklodowska Curie was 29 years old
and had just given birth to a baby named Irene.
Her husband, Pierre,
had just finished getting his PhD with her help,
and it was now her turn.
Marie Curie recalled, "It became a serious problem,
"how to take care of our little Irene and 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."
Luckily, her father-in-law moved in
to help with babysitting.
While researching the latest papers,
she bumped into Becquerel's papers
about uranium rays and electricity,
and decided to study them more
with an electric meter device.
See, years earlier,
Pierre Curie had discovered that electricity
is related to pressure
for certain materials called piezoelectricity.
And he had used piezoelectric materials
to make the world's most sensitive electricity meter,
so it seemed like a good plan.
After a bit of electrical study on uranium,
with different chemical properties,
she determined that it seemed like these uranium rays
were just a property of the uranium itself.
It then seemed illogical to her
that only one substance in the whole world
would act like this.
So Marie Sklodoska Curie
then gathered all the substance that she could
and exhaustively studied them in an electroscope,
looking for more radioactive substances.
By April of 1898,
she found that a substance called thorium
was about as radioactive as uranium.
Before she could publish, however,
she found that a German scientist
had already discovered that thorium was radioactive
with photographic plates.
However, the electric method allowed her to determine
exactly how radioactive thorium was.
She then published her first paper on radioactivity
on April 12th, 1898,
where she mentioned how active the different materials were.
Marie continued to search.
While she was experimenting with the uranium ore,
also called pitchblende,
which was a mix of uranium with other materials.
Marie Sklodoska Curie was astonished to realize
that the ore was significantly more radioactive
than pure uranium,
and realized it must contain trace amounts
of a new material that was even more radioactive.
Pierre was so intrigued he dropped his own research
to join her in the laboratory.
And for the next several years, they worked side by side,
sometimes even filling in different sides
of the same notebook.
By July of 1898, as I said in the introduction,
they published their discovery of a new material, polonium,
named after Marie's home country of Poland.
In this paper,
the Curies also named the radiation rays Becquerel rays
in honor of Henri Becquerel,
which it was called for many years.
Becquerel was intrigued,
and he even introduced the paper to the Parisian Academy.
This paper also intrigued a German chemist
named Friedrich Giesel,
who began doing his own experiments
with uranium pitchblende.
Although, as he told the Curies a few years later,
"Even Roentgen," the man who discovered X-rays,
"did not believe in the existence
of Becquerel rays," at first.
Few months after the discovery of polonium,
in December 1898,
they discovered an even more radioactive substance
in the uranium ore, that they called radium.
named after radiation, as it was so strongly radioactive.
With only a little bit of isolation,
radium displayed some amazing properties.
It was always hot,
it would be burn the skin without hurting,
and it would glow continuously without any power source
and without any change in size and shape.
In addition, anything that touched the radium,
including the Curies themselves, became radioactive.
In Germany, Giesel realized that the new substance
that he had discovered
that glowed with a "most splendid light"
that he could read by, was also radio.
Now the race was on to isolate it.
The Curies were sure they could do it in a couple of weeks.
Instead, it took four years
to get enough to measure its atomic weight,
which was particularly daunting
as they were working in a literal shed
that was described by visiting chemists
as "a cross between a stable and a potato cellar."
In 1900 in Germany, Friedrich Geisel
had a friend named Walkhoff, who was a dentist,
and interested in studying the effects
of X-rays in dentistry.
Giesel then loaned the coveted 0.2 gram piece
of partially isolated radium to Walkhoff,
and Walkhoff then published his studies
of the effects of putting it on his skin
for a couple of hours,
noticing how the burn would last for many weeks.
Pierre Curie then read about Walkhoff
and Geisel's experiments,
and decided to one up it
and burn his skin for over 10 hours.
And Pierre Curie used to make burning his own arm
a regular part of his lectures.
After testing on animals,
Pierre Curie became convinced
that radium could cure tumors and certain kinds of cancer.
Although it was too expensive
to be a regular part of medical care,
and instead was used as specialty medicine
or as part of scams.
As Pierre and Marie Curie's daughter, Eve,
wrote many years later,
"Radium was useful, magnificently useful."
And, "The extraction of the new element
"no longer had merely experimental interest.
"Had it become indispensable.
"A radium industry was about to be born."
By April of 1902,
Marie and Pierre Curie managed to get 1/10 of a gram
of radium chloride salt
that was more than a million times
more radioactive than uranium,
which the Curies refused to patent
and gave away to universities for free.
In fact, they went so far that in 1921,
Marie Sklodoska Curie had to basically do a GoFundMe
to get one gram of radium.
Meanwhile, in Germany,
Friedrich Geisel had managed
to isolate radium in a simpler method
and put it on the market.
According to Ernest Rutherford,
Dr Geisel put pure radium bromide on the market
at one pound per milligram,
or a thousand pounds a gram.
Even at these exorbitant prices,
there was too much demand,
and guys would up the price by 12 times.
Now, 12,000 pounds in 1903 was the equivalent,
in 1903, of about $60,000.
To give you a sense of how expensive it was,
the Hope Diamond sold in 1909 for $80,000.
Geisel was wealthy, but the Curies were not.
Even worse, their health was faltering.
Geisel, by the way, was radioactive too.
For example, in 1905,
it was recorded that even his breath was radioactive
for 18 full hours after he left the laboratory.
However, despite being a walking biohazard,
he lived until he was 75 and then died of lung cancer.
Anyway, Pierre Curie was particularly ill
and his doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong.
We now realize it was radiation poisoning.
Both Pierre and Marie Curie were covered in burns.
Then, in August of 1903, Marie Curie suffered a miscarriage.
She wrote her sister,
"I am absolutely desperate and cannot be consoled.
"I had wanted the child so badly."
Meanwhile, Marie Sklodoska Curie had to hold it together
to publish her PhD thesis.
She titled it "Radio-active Substances"
and defended it on June of 1903,
where the committee told her she had produced
"the greatest scientific contribution
"ever made in a doctoral thesis."
Her thesis was translated into multiple languages
and was considered the Bible of radioactive research.
Marie, however, was still mourning the miscarriage,
and Pierre was pretty ill.
And they were both from exhaustion
from overwork and radiation poisoning.
It was around this time that Pierre learned from a friend
that he and Henry Becquerel
were being nominated for a Nobel Prize without Marie Curie.
Pierre had no interest.
Even with the sizable amount of money,
to win an award without his wife for this amazing work.
Luckily, a friend basically pulled some strings
and they ended up splitting Pierre's part in two.
So they both got a quarter of a Nobel Prize,
making Marie Curie the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
By the way,
there wasn't another winner of a Nobel Prize
for physics or chemistry,
not named Curie, for 60 years.
I say the last name, Curie,
as Marie Curie won another Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911,
and her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, won one in 1935.
The Curies were glad for the cash, but hated the publicity.
I mean, Pierre Curie called it his stupid life,
but the public was fascinated with Marie Curie.
Tiny, female scientist, a romance,
a mysterious substance that glowed and could cure diseases?
It was all too fascinating.
And everywhere, it was said that Marie Sklodoska Curie
discovered radium and radioactivity.
And we have used the term radioactive
and dropped the term Becquerel rays ever since.
So that's how radioactive and radioactivity got its name.
Now in Marie Sklodoska Curie's thesis, as I've explained,
she did not come up with the term radioactive,
as she came up with that term five years earlier.
But it was her thesis and her popularity,
and radium's popularity,
that made that term so commonplace.
However, she did come up with a new term in her 1903 thesis.
Curie came up with the term gamma rays
for the third type of radiation from a radioactive material.
Why she did that, and why she's not given credit for it,
and it's not sexism, is next time on "The Lightning Tamers."
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(calm music)