2/28/2023 0 Comments Radium and polonium![]() Several newspapers wrote scathing editorials protesting the election choice-but the results were final. The buzz of the news spread backward, forward and outward. Branly even knew the pope.īy late afternoon on that January day, a member of the election committee read the ballots. Branly was also well-regarded as a family man who lived his life on a solid moral high ground –a direct slam on Curie’s personal life decisions. In this Catholic nation, he was devoutly religious and the physics professor at the Catholic University in Paris Curie was too busy in her lab to sit in church. Socially, Branly had many more attractive features to his candidacy. Marie had moved to France in the 1890s after her early life in Poland. Like their European and American colleagues, French scientists wanted their work to help advance their national and international agendas, and to honor their own discoverers-as did Germans and Italians and the British. Branly’s work was eclipsed by Guglielmo Marconi- who shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.” In 1911, Curie’s only competition was a physicist named Edouard Branly, who pioneered the development of radio waves and transmission. Even relative newcomers, such as the French physicist Emile Hilaire Amagat who was elected in 1902, boldly bellowed, “Women cannot be part of the Institute of France.” For starters, one member had to die in order to vacate a seat for a newcomer. Especially after Pierre died in a roadway accident in 1906, the French press loved reporting on her personal affairs, romances, foibles, her Polish origins and other nonscientific, gossipy subjects.Īttaining membership in the French Academy was difficult, at best. READ MORE: ‘I Have Seen My Death.’ How the World Discovered the X-Rayįor Marie, fame was costly. It was also used to manufacture “glow-in-the-dark” wristwatches, games, and even X-ray precision shoe-measuring devices. Radium was then used in medicine to determine or reduce the size of malignant tumors. By the end of 1898, the Curies had made a series of discoveries, including radium and polonium. Nearly four centuries later, in 1859, Louis Pasteur spoke on behalf of germ theory and destroyed the prevailing sentiment in favor of spontaneous microbial generation.Ī few years before the Curies began studying radioactivity, the physicist William Roentgen discovered X-rays, and Becquerel observed the same phenomenon as he watched uranium salt crystals fog up a photographic plate. In the 1760s, the Enlightenment chemist Antoine Lavoisier argued against a theoretical element called “phlogiston,” which was supposedly released during combustion. Every week, the nation’s premier scientists met to debate, refute and develop new theories. The role and power of the Academy have changed much over its long and distinguished history, but in Curie’s day, it was very much a marketplace of important scientific issues. In 1666, Louis XIV established the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, with the primary purpose of advising the monarch on scientific matters. How could this ever happen? Surely, it was not a matter of her accomplishments, her application studded with world class honors. Yes, you just read that last sentence correctly: One hundred and ten years ago today, Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie was formally rejected for membership by the French Academy of Sciences. At their meeting on that cold, winter day, Marie Curie was proposed for membership - and promptly voted down. 23, 1911, the French Academy of Sciences made a grave error against both history and science. Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for physics (shared in 1903 with her husband Pierre and fellow scientist Henri Becquerel) for isolating the element, and she became the Sorbonne’s first woman professor of general physics in 1906.īut on Jan. ![]() In the early 20th century, radium was the hot “medicinal” product, and Madame Marie Curie its chief ambassador.
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