Curie et Cie

The world has waited long for a first-hand account of the life and work of Pierre Curie and his distinguished collaborator and widow, Marie Sklodowska Curie. Fortunately this greatest and most modest of living women has at last been prevailed upon to set down, not only a narrative of her husband's life--, but extensive autobiographical notes, without which the story would be a truncated cone. It contains a chapter on her American visit of 1921, and an illuminating introduction by Mrs. William Brown Meloney, former editor of The Delineator, who conceived and engineered Mme. Curie's trip and the raising by American women of $100,000 to purchase a gram of radium to be presented (by President Harding) to Mme. Curie for her personal use.

The details of the years 1897-1906 in which radium was discovered form a saga of heroism. Not long after her marriage in 1895, Marie Curie, became interested in the experiments of Henri Becquerel on the salts of the rare metal, uranium. He had found that they emitted certain penetrating rays. Marie Curie took up this work, found that another element, thorium, behaved similarly, and that certain complex minerals also showed radioactivity, which was not, however, proportionate to the quantities of uranium or thorium in them. Pierre Curie, whose main researches up to that time had been on the physics of crystals (as was the early work of Louis Pasteur), became so interested that he abandoned his own work for his wife's subject. They chose the costly orefi pitchblende, and were able after much difficulty to secure several tons from a pitchblende mine in Bohemia, from which uranium was extracted by the Austrian Government. By a new method of chemical analysis based on measuring the radioactivity of various fractions with delicate electrical apparatus, they were able to announce in July, 1898, the existence of a new radio-active element, polonium (named for Mme. Curie's native country, Poland), and, in December, of the most powerful of all such elements, radium. It was not until 1902, however, that they could prepare a decigram of chloride of pure radium, and from its spectrum determine its atomic weight.

Pierre Curie was killed in the prime of life, April 19, 1906, by a Paris truck --one of the most irreparable and unnecessary losses ever suffered by science. Madame Curie struggled on with her two small daughters, and continued their great work until, in 1910, she isolated the mysterious white metal of radium itself. That her own achievements were as great as her husband's was attested by the Nobel Award in Chemistry (1911) to her alone, eight years after the Physics Prize had been given jointly to Becquerel, Pierre Curie and herself. The Sorbonne appointed her to the chair left vacant by Pierre--the first woman to be so elevated.

-PIERRE CURIE--Marie Curie--Translated by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg--Macmillan ($2.25).