On December 26, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie presented a paper announcing their discovery of the radioactive element Radium. Their research had begun just two years earlier when Marie Curie had gone to work for noted French physicist Henri Becquerel, who, like most French scientists at the time was caught up in trying to find phenomena similar to that of the x-rays Willian Röntgen had discovered the previous year. To achieve this, Becquerel tried laying different minerals out on photo paper and placing them in the sun to see how they affected the recorded image. It wasn’t until he carelessly left some uranium salts on a piece of photo paper inside a darkened drawer that he found a strange result; even though there had been no sunlight on the paper, there were stark outlines around where the uranium salts had lain. While Becquerel was encouraged and intrigued by the findings, he left the research up to his bright student Marie Curie, who attacked the problem with determined vigor.
In her home laboratory and in her free time, Curie worked to try to understand what exactly was being emitted by the uranium salts that was creating marks on the photo sensitive paper. To an observer with no knowledge of radiation, all she could surmise was that there was some form of energy inside the uranium that was being thrown out. She continued testing other materials against the photo paper and found that another mineral, pitchblende, had even more energy within than uranium. She and her husband worked tirelessly to determine which component of the pitchblende material was casting off this energy and the two wound up discovering two radioactive materials, polonium and radium. Through the comparison of these new materials and the already known uranium, the Curies reasoned out the existence of radioactivity, and the notion that certain elements contained different levels of this form of energy.
Radium would prove to be not just a breakthrough discovery and the foundation of our understanding of the nature of radiation, but also a popular health aid among consumers. The ill-understood effects of radiation were picked up by companies and advertisers seeking to sell curatives and other products with bold promises. Radium toothpaste was sold with the promise that it would make your teeth brighter, while radium lined water containers would enrich your drinking water with the fortifying goodness of Radium. There were even spas, some still operating today around the world, that proudly advertise the presence of curative Radium in their waters. On the other hand, it soon became clear that radiation, which mutates and kills the cells it comes into contact with, in fact had negative effects of human life. It is especially pernicious when ingested as the body treats the radium as calcium and directs it to the bones, where it mutates cells and incites cases of bone cancer. An effect Curie noted in her experiments was that while Radium killed all cells, it seemed to attack tumor cells much more quickly and vigorously, an observation that presaged the world of radioactive medicine.
Marie Curie made immeasurable contributions to the world of science with her discoveries. Despite working directly with radioactive materials for years and suffering the ill effects of exposure, she carried on with her research for over three decades before succumbing to leukemia. She would win Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, the only scientist to ever do so, and coined the term “radioactive” to describe the mysterious energy that radiated from these substances. Ultimately, she received one of the greatest honors a physicist can aspire to when element number 96 was named Curium in her and her husband’s honor.