employed by a quinine factory, Friedrich Giesel, who said the blue light it produced was so powerful it could be employed as a night-light for reading. He advised the Curies to try bromide salts instead of chlorides during crystallization, and was able to deflect the path of Becquerel waves with a magnet, proving that they were, in fact, a form of matter. He also revealed that, when he fired the alluring radium with his Bunsen burner, it didn’t ignite with a green flame, like barium, but with a blaze that was the color of Christmas cherries. Marie’s beloved radium, then, had a sapphire light, but a carmine flame.
A little house at boulevard Kellermann 108 was now home to Pierre, Marie, the four-year-old Irène, and Pierre’s widowed father. One evening at nine o’clock, after her daughter was put to bed, Marie turned to Pierre and asked if they could go back to the shed, to their radium. They went to look, making sure to not turn on the lights. There, in shelves and on tables, the aquatic glow of their babies shone in the night:“Sometimes we returned in the evening after dinner for another survey of our domain. Our precious products, for which we had no shelter, were arranged on tables and boards; from all sides we could see their slightly luminous silhouettes, and these gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment. . . . The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.” She loved the radiance so much that she would wait a few minutes before turning on the lights in her lab after arriving on dark, wintry mornings, to enjoy her shimmering vials. Other visitors noticed that, even after the samples were removed, the walls themselves continued to glow.
Only a heavy blanket of lead could contain the powerful rays of the Curies’ greatest discovery. Radium produced light, heat, and helium; it ionized the air and excited photographic plates; it tinted glass a delicate purpleand dissolved paper into ash; and it could infect other substances with its emanations. Diamonds when treated would phosphoresce brilliantly; imitations, poorly, if at all. Sir William Crookes (of the Crookes tube that had originally served Röntgen) prepared for the Royal Society a 1903 demonstration of radioactivity:“Viewed through a magnifying glass, the sensitive [zinc sulfide] screen is seen to be the object of a veritable bombardment by particles of infinite minuteness, which, themselves invisible, make known their arrival on the screen by flashes of light, just as a shell coming from the blue announces itself by an explosion.” Marie called the process a “cataclysm of atomic transformation,” and she tried to explain the magic through science: “The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionized, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy . . . luminous energy . . . and once more we are forced to recognize how limited is our direct perception of the world which surrounds us, and how numerous and varied may be the phenomena which we pass without a suspicion of their existence until the day when a fortunate hazard reveals them. . . . If we consider these radiations in their entirety—the ultra-violet, the luminous, the infra-red, and the electromagnetic—we find that the radiations we see constitute but an insignificant fraction of those that exist in space. But it is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist, and whenever some chance discovery extends the limits of our knowledge we are filled with amazement. We cannot become accustomed to the idea that we live in a world that is revealed to us only in a restricted portion of its manifestations.”
During the age of the séance, this was a resonant notion, and radium, with its magical properties, appeared as an element of the otherworld. Electric lights, radio, telegraph, spiritualism—all unseen forces that were both
A little house at boulevard Kellermann 108 was now home to Pierre, Marie, the four-year-old Irène, and Pierre’s widowed father. One evening at nine o’clock, after her daughter was put to bed, Marie turned to Pierre and asked if they could go back to the shed, to their radium. They went to look, making sure to not turn on the lights. There, in shelves and on tables, the aquatic glow of their babies shone in the night:“Sometimes we returned in the evening after dinner for another survey of our domain. Our precious products, for which we had no shelter, were arranged on tables and boards; from all sides we could see their slightly luminous silhouettes, and these gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment. . . . The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.” She loved the radiance so much that she would wait a few minutes before turning on the lights in her lab after arriving on dark, wintry mornings, to enjoy her shimmering vials. Other visitors noticed that, even after the samples were removed, the walls themselves continued to glow.
Only a heavy blanket of lead could contain the powerful rays of the Curies’ greatest discovery. Radium produced light, heat, and helium; it ionized the air and excited photographic plates; it tinted glass a delicate purpleand dissolved paper into ash; and it could infect other substances with its emanations. Diamonds when treated would phosphoresce brilliantly; imitations, poorly, if at all. Sir William Crookes (of the Crookes tube that had originally served Röntgen) prepared for the Royal Society a 1903 demonstration of radioactivity:“Viewed through a magnifying glass, the sensitive [zinc sulfide] screen is seen to be the object of a veritable bombardment by particles of infinite minuteness, which, themselves invisible, make known their arrival on the screen by flashes of light, just as a shell coming from the blue announces itself by an explosion.” Marie called the process a “cataclysm of atomic transformation,” and she tried to explain the magic through science: “The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionized, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy . . . luminous energy . . . and once more we are forced to recognize how limited is our direct perception of the world which surrounds us, and how numerous and varied may be the phenomena which we pass without a suspicion of their existence until the day when a fortunate hazard reveals them. . . . If we consider these radiations in their entirety—the ultra-violet, the luminous, the infra-red, and the electromagnetic—we find that the radiations we see constitute but an insignificant fraction of those that exist in space. But it is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist, and whenever some chance discovery extends the limits of our knowledge we are filled with amazement. We cannot become accustomed to the idea that we live in a world that is revealed to us only in a restricted portion of its manifestations.”
During the age of the séance, this was a resonant notion, and radium, with its magical properties, appeared as an element of the otherworld. Electric lights, radio, telegraph, spiritualism—all unseen forces that were both
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