This event attracted international attention and indignation. Now it was a matter of her private life and her relations with her colleague Paul Langevin, who had also been invited to the conference.
He had had marital problems for several years and had moved from his suburban home to a small apartment in Paris.
Marie was depicted as the reason. Both were described in slanderous terms. The scandal developed dramatically. Marie stands up in her own defence and managed to force an apology from the newspaper Le Temps. The same day she received word from Stockholm that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
However, the very newspapers that made her a legend when she received the Nobel Prize in Physics in , now completely ignored the fact that she had been awarded the Prize in Chemistry or merely reported it in a few words on an inside page. The Langevin scandal escalated into a serious affair that shook the university world in Paris and the French government at the highest level. Madame Langevin was preparing legal action to obtain custody of the four children. Her friends feared that she would collapse.
There was no proof of the accusations made against Marie and the authenticity of the letters could be questioned but in the heated atmosphere there were few who thought clearly. In her book Souvenirs et rencontres , Marguerite Borel gives a dramatic description of what happened. Marie had to be fetched from Sceaux and live with them until the storm was over. Marie sat stiff and deathly pale throughout their journey.
Marguerite wanted to take her hand, but did not venture to do so. If Borel persisted in keeping his guest, he would be dismissed. He was furious that the Borels have gotten mixed up in the matter. He revealed that with several other influential people he was planning an interview with Marie in order to request her to leave France: her situation in Paris was impossible. Fighting a duel was a usual way of obtaining satisfaction in France at that time, although scarcely in academic circles.
Newspaper publishers who had come up against each other in this dispute had already fought duels. Swords were generally used and a duellist was usually content with inflicting a thorough scratch on his opponent for the duel to be considered decided. But fatal accidents did in fact occur. The duel, with pistols at a distance of 25 meters, was to take place on the morning of November Langevin, who had first raised his, then lowered it. No shot was fired. The journalists wrote about the silence and about the pigeons quietly feeding on the field.
In the midst of all its gravity, the duel had turned into a farce. However, the publication of the letters and the duel were too much for those responsible at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Marie received a letter from a member, Svante Arrhenius , in which he said that the duel had given the impression that the published correspondence had not been falsified.
He asked her to cable that she would not be coming to the prize award ceremony and to write him a letter to the effect that she did not want to accept the Prize until the Langevin court proceedings had shown that the accusations against her were absolutely without foundation. Of those most closely affected, the person who remained level-headed despite the enormous strain of the critical situation was in fact Marie herself.
On December 6, Langevin wrote a long letter to Svante Arrhenius, whom he had met previously. He described the whole situation, explained what circles were behind the smear campaign.
He appealed to the Nobel Committee not to let it be influenced by a campaign which was fundamentally unjust. Nor, in fact, was it so influenced. Marie gathered all her strength and gave her Nobel lecture on December 11 in Stockholm. The lecture should be read in the light of what she had gone through. She made clear by her choice of words what were unequivocally her contributions in the collaboration with Pierre. She declared that she also regarded this Prize as a tribute to Pierre Curie.
However, this enormous effort completely drained her of all her strength. She sank into a depressed state. On December 29, she was taken to a hospital whose location was kept secret for her protection.
When she had recovered to some extent, she traveled to England, where a friend, the physicist Hertha Ayrton, looked after her and saw that the press was kept away. A whole year passed before she could work as she had done before. Legal proceedings were never taken. We shall never know with any certainty what was the nature of the relationship between Marie Curie and Paul Langevin.
Marie had opened up a completely new field of research: radioactivity. Various aspects of it were being studied all over the world. In they were close to the discovery of isotopes. However it was the British physicist Frederick Soddy who in the following year, finally clarified the concept of isotopes.
Eva Ramstedt, who took a doctorate in physics in Uppsala in , studied with Marie Curie in and was later associate professor in radiology at Stockholm University College in When, in , Marie was in the process of beginning to lead one of the departments in the Radium Institute established jointly by the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute, the First World War broke out.
She herself took a train to Bordeaux, a train overloaded with people leaving Paris for a safer refuge. But Marie had a different reason for her journey. She had with her a heavy, kg lead container in which she had placed her valuable radium.
Once in Bordeaux the other passengers rushed away to their various destinations. She remained standing there with her heavy bag which she did not have the strength to carry without assistance. Some official finally helped her find a room where she slept with her heavy bag by her bed.
The next day, having had the bag taken to a bank vault, she took a train back to Paris. It was now crowded to bursting point with soldiers. Throughout the war she was engaged intensively in equipping more than 20 vans that acted as mobile field hospitals and about fixed installations with X-ray apparatus.
Marie driving one of the radiology cars in She trained young women in simple X-ray technology, she herself drove one of the vans and took an active part in locating metal splinters. Sometimes she found she had to give the doctors lessons in elementary geometry. After the Peace Treaty in , her Radium Institute, which had been completed in , could now be opened. In the USA radium was manufactured industrially but at a price which Marie could not afford. She had to devote a lot of time to fund-raising for her Institute.
She also became deeply involved when she had become a member of the Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and served as its vice-president for a time. She frequently took part in its meetings in Geneva, where she also met the Swedish delegate, Anna Wicksell. Marie regularly refused all those who wanted to interview her. However, a prominent American female journalist, Marie Maloney, known as Missy, who for a long time had admired Marie, managed to meet her.
This meeting became of great importance to them both. Marie told Missy that researchers in the USA had some 50 grams of radium at their disposal. Missy, like Marie herself, had an enormous strength and strong inner stamina under a frail exterior. She now arranged one of the largest and most successful research-funding campaigns the world has seen. First of all she got the New York papers to promise not to print a word on the Langevin affair and — so as to feel safe — unbelievably enough managed to take over all their material on the Langevin affair.
Due to the press, Marie became enormously popular in America, and everyone seemed to want to meet her — the great Madame Curie. Missy had to struggle hard to get Marie to accept a program for her visit on a par with the campaign. Finally, she had to turn to Paul Appell, now the university chancellor, to persuade Marie. In spite of her diffidence and distaste for publicity, Marie agreed to go to America to receive the gift — a single gram of radium — from the hand of President Warren Harding.
When all this became known in France, the paper Je sais tout arranged a gala performance at the Paris Opera. It was attended by the most prominent personalities in France, including Aristide Briand , then Foreign Minister, who was later, in , to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Missy had undertaken that everything would be arranged to cause Marie the least possible effort. In spite of this Marie had to attend innumerable receptions and do a round of American universities.
Outwardly the trip was one great triumphal procession. She became the recipient of some twenty distinctions in the form of honorary doctorates, medals and membership in academies. Great crowds paid homage to her.
But for Marie herself, this was torment. Where possible, she had her two daughters represent her. Marie and Missy became close friends.
The inexhaustible Missy organized further collections for one gram of radium for an institute which Marie had helped found in Warsaw. She lived to see their discovery of artificial radioactivity, but not to hear that they had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in Marie Curie died of leukemia on July 4, It is worth mentioning that the new discoveries at the end of the nineteenth century became of importance also for the breakthrough of modern art.
X-ray photography focused art on the invisible. The human body became dissolved in a shimmering mist. Wassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract painting, wrote about radioactivity in his autobiographical notes from He claimed that in his soul the decay of the atom was synonymous with the decay of the whole world.
She coined the term "radioactivity" to describe this unique effect, which she also found in thorium compounds. Intrigued by his wife's findings, Pierre joined forces with her. She had found that two uranium ores, pitchblende and chalcolite, were much more radioactive than pure uranium, and concluded their highly radioactive nature was due to as yet undiscovered elements.
As a team, the Curies worked to separate the substances in these ores and then used the electrometer to make radiation measurements to "trace" the minute amount of unknown radioactive element among the fractions that resulted. They discovered that one fraction was strongly radioactive, so even though it chemically behaved like bismuth, it had to be something new. They named this new element "polonium. In December , they discovered a second new element in a barium fraction, which they named "radium.
It took Marie over three years to isolate one-tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride, and she never succeeded in isolating polonium because of its very short half-life: days. Even as she was performing her experiments the polonium in her raw material was rapidly decaying. Their combined work led almost immediately to the use of radioactive materials in medicine, since isotopes are more effective and safer than surgery or chemicals for attacking cancers and other diseases.
Even today, radioactive isotopes are used as "tracers" to track chemical changes and biological processes. Pierre also quickly realized the potential for radioactive decay for dating materials; the age of the earth was determined to be several billion years, thanks to a study of uranium decay. A Swedish mathematician named Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler, a member of the nominating committee and an advocate of women scientists,—intervened, and Marie was included in the nomination.
Marie sat at one of the worktables with a flimsy apparatus of rods, cylinders and wires. On February 17th, , she tested a sample of heavy black pitchblende a naturally-occurring mineral containing uranium which she found was emitting unexpectedly strong radiation. Her husband, who, meanwhile, had been turned down for a professorship at the Sorbonne, joined her to continue the experiments in which the Curies laid the foundations of nuclear physics.
By July they had discovered an element they christened 'polonium' in compliment to Marie's Polish homeland Marie also coined the ominous term 'radioactivity'. Polonium, however, did not account for all the pitchblende's radiation. They announced their discovery of radium in a paper read to the French Academy of Sciences on December 26th, , which informed that august body of 'a new strongly radioactive substance contained in pitchblende'.
The unit of radioactivity was eventually named the 'curie' in honour of Pierre, who was tragically killed in a Paris street accident in , when he was only forty-six. Marie worked on, and the Curie family accumulated Nobel prizes in the most astonishing quantities. Pierre and Marie had won the prize for physics in jointly with Henri Becquerel.
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