The Element That Glows

On December 21, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of radium. They had been working in a converted shed at the School of Physics in Paris, processing tons of pitchblende ore to isolate the new element. Radium was intensely radioactive -- about 3,000 times more so than uranium. It glowed in the dark.

The Curies had already discovered polonium earlier that year. Radium was their second find. The element emitted energy continuously, seemingly from nowhere. This violated the established understanding of energy conservation. Where was the energy coming from? The answer, which wouldn't be fully understood for decades, was that radium's atomic nucleus was unstable, releasing energy as it decayed. The Curies had stumbled onto nuclear physics.

Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize when she and Pierre shared the 1903 Physics prize with Henri Becquerel. In 1911, she won a second Nobel, this time in Chemistry, for isolating pure radium. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

the curie laboratory, a converted shed where radium was discovered. source: wikimedia commons

Radium was initially celebrated as miraculous. It was used in medicine, painted on watch dials, and added to consumer products as a supposed health tonic. The dangers weren't understood until workers began dying from radiation exposure. Marie Curie herself died in 1934 from aplastic anemia caused by years of handling radioactive materials. Her notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without protection.

Radium showed that the transistor would later show something similar: discovery opens doors you can't close. The atom held energy. Releasing it would change medicine, warfare, and power generation. The glow in the dark was just the beginning.