Half Lives E-Book

Lucy Jane Santos

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 435

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'Half Lives shines a light on the shocking history of the world's toxic love affair with a deadly substance, radium. Unnerving, fascinating, informative and truly frightening.' Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five 'The story of this supposed cure-all in everyday 20th century life is fascinating and well told.' Brian Maye, Irish Times Lucy Jane Santos presents the surprising history of radium in everyday life. Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal. Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item - a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt, a glow-in- the-dark dance costume - to its role as a supposed cure-all in everyday 20th-century life, when medical practitioners and business people (reputable and otherwise) devised ingenious ways of commodifying the new wonder element, and enthusiastic customers welcomed their radioactive wares into their homes. Historian Lucy Jane Santos - herself the proud owner of a formidable collection of radium beauty treatments - delves into the stories of these products and details the gradual downfall and discredit of the radium industry through the eyes of the people who bought, sold and eventually came to fear the once-fetishized substance. She reveals a new history of radium, one in which the stories of those previously dismissed as quacks and fools are brought to life, as part of a unique examination of the interplay between science and popular culture.

Leseprobe

‘Half Lives shines a light on the shocking history of the world’s toxic love affair with a deadly substance, radium. Unnerving, fascinating, informative and truly frightening.’

—Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five

‘In Half Lives, Lucy Jane Santos transports us back to a time when consumers wondered whether mixing radium into chicken feed might result in eggs that could hard-boil themselves; when diners cheerfully drank radioactive cocktails that glowed in the dark; and when people used toothpaste containing lethal thorium oxide in the pursuit of healthy gums. Santos unpicks fact from fiction and exhibits a masterful grasp of a complex area of science history that is so often mistold. Half Lives is a delightfully disturbing book that reminds us all of the age-old Latin maxim, “caveat emptor”.’

—Dr Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art

‘With verve and vivacity, Lucy Jane Santos conducts her readers on a unique tour of the twentieth century’s most significant scientific discovery. Before the R-word threatened destruction, it offered hope for the future – teeth would glow white, cocktails would shine in the dark and cancer would be vanquished. This evocative account puts people and their emotions centre-stage of science’s past.’

—Dr Patricia Fara

‘There was a time when radioactivity seemed to promise the future. It was the stuff that twentieth-century dreams were made of, before those dreams turned sour. This marvellous book explores the ways radioactivity stood for a better future, worked its way into moneymaking schemes of all kinds and offered hope to saints and charlatans. By doing all that – and doing it so well – it also offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting too much faith in simple technological solutions to all our problems.’

—Prof Iwan Rhys Morus

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroductionChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixEpilogueAcknowledgementsBibliographyIndexPlatesAbout the AuthorCopyright

RADIUM

Have you heard of radium?

Latest, greatest thing on earth;

More than coal the stuff is worth;

An ounce brings a corking sum.

And the things that it can do

Easily would fill a book;

Anything but boss the cook

If the tales we hear are true.

With diseases it has fun;

Cures consumption while you wait

And in manner up to date

Slaughters microbes by the ton.

Wrinkles, patches, freckles, tan.

Cannot in the house remain

If you have a single grain

Of this newest friend of man.

Burglars it will hold at bay,

Strange dogs frighten from the yard,

Always keep the butter hard,

Coax the wayward hens to lay.

Neatly cut the children’s hair,

Wash the windows, scrub the floor,

Run on errands to the store,

Daily scour the silverware.

Firmly, but with grim intent,

Fire agents through the gate,

Keep the family records straight,

Hustle round and pay the rent.

Thirty million, not a sou

Less for one grain, C.O.D.

But it’s worth it, you can see,

If the tales we hear are true.

Duncan M. Smith, 1904

INTRODUCTION

If you are scared of radioactivity – a radiophobe – then I am going to start with some bad news: it is everywhere.

This book, for example, is radioactive.

From your first cup of coffee to that refreshing pint of beer in the evening, you are regularly ingesting tiny particles of naturally occurring radioactivity.

If it contains Brazil nuts, your lunch won’t be safe either – they are a thousand times ‘hotter’ than other food. Nor should you be consuming avocados, beans, coffee or bananas (a tiny amount of the natural potassium found in these foods is radioactive).a And indeed, don’t reheat that coffee in your radioactive, thorium-containing microwave if you are implementing a zero-exposure policy.

Naturally occurring radioactive materials (in the form of ores) are present in the Earth’s crust, the floors and walls of your home, office or school.

You are radioactive.

Our bodies emit radiation because everyone absorbs the radioactive particles that are naturally present in the environment. These substances – that trace of uranium, dash of carbon-14, smidgen of potassium or pinch of radium – are absorbed by our bodies into our tissues, organs and bones and are constantly replenished by ingestion and inhalation. Night and day you breathe in radioactivity from the air: from the person you slept next to last night and that person who was just that bit too close to you on the train this morning. Even your pets are radioactive.

Radioactivity is naturally so omnipresent in our daily lives that it goes almost unnoticed until the word is spoken in a public place. Then radioactivity suddenly becomes a bright yellow warning sign; an explosion and a poison. Decades of fiction have fed our imaginations with creatures irradiated into monsters, or ordinary mortals given superpowers by a spider’s bite, and it has combined with real-life fears: of nuclear power plants, of mushroom clouds and of unimaginable loss and devastation. Artificial radioactivity (the kind made in a laboratory that revolves around nuclear reactors and bombs) – for that is what we are all so scared of – is the threat of the end of the world.

Of course, we are ALL radiophobes, now.

But this book tells a different story, one of perceptions of radioactivity at a time when it was revered, not feared; when it seemed that everyone was clamouring for more of it, not less.

It was in the late 19th century that Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation that was invisible to the human eye. This type of ray, which no one (including Röntgen) fully understood at the time, was so mysterious that he simply named it ‘X’. In 1896, working from Röntgen’s findings, Henri Becquerel identified the phenomenon of radioactivity – both as a concept and as a force – and Marie Skłodowska Curie would later give it a name. In 1898, with her husband Pierre, Skłodowska Curie identified two new materials, which they named polonium and radium, and which would later confirm the existence of a new type of substance challenging traditional scientific models of what an element should be.

Almost a century of modern chemistry had taught scientists what seemed to them at the time to be certain irrefutable rules. It was almost universally accepted that an element was made out of extremely small particles known as ‘atoms’. These atoms were the smallest unit of matter and they were resolutely indivisible (that is, they couldn’t be made any smaller).b Therefore, it was evident that a ‘pure’ element was a stable, fixed substance which couldn’t be broken down or converted into anything else.

The newly identified radioactive elements – uranium, thorium, polonium, radium, and actinium – were different. Unlike previously identified elements, they were shown to be capable of change: spontaneously turning into totally different substances without any intervention. The discovery of radioactive elements seriously challenged scientists’ understanding of the behaviour of elements (which make up most of the universe) and the seemingly irrefutable rules of chemistry which had held sway for so long.

Out of all these radioactive elements, one – radium (represented by the symbol Ra) – had the most momentous impact of them all. It is not hard to pinpoint exactly why it was this substance (which Marie Skłodowska Curie referred to as ‘my beautiful radium’) that eventually became the focus both of public fascination and of entrepreneurial zeal. It was not the first known radioactive element (that honour went to uranium); thorium was the preferred material of many early investigators into the properties of radioactivity. Polonium had been identified as an element several months before radium but was found to be too intensively radioactive to be of real use for experimental purposes. Actinium was too chemically similar to other elements, which often confused scientists’ results. Radium, to quote Goldilocks, was ‘just right’: it gave off a steady but intense energy (almost 3,000 times stronger than uranium), its half-life (the average time it takes half of the element to change/decay into a new element) lasted slightly longer than 1,600 years which meant it decayed slowly enough to be easy to use in experiments and once isolated essentially lasted forever. It was rare and hard to produce but that only seemed to add to its desirability.c

Scientists and, in turn, medical practitioners and entrepreneurs would struggle to understand the complicated properties of these new elements, which behaved very strangely indeed. By the early 1900s the curious and still mostly unfathomable properties of radium would find expression in a wide range of products and services that were aimed at the general consumer: from the deadly (Radithor radioactive water) to the bizarre (the O-Radium Hat-Pad: ‘whenever you are wearing your hat, you are subjecting your hair to beneficent rays’)1 to the simply fraudulent (Radol, which claimed to be a radium-impregnated cancer cure). And sometimes, as in ‘Nutex Radium Condoms’, there was no suggestion that the product contained any radium but it didn’t stop the company using the name. This has left us with an incredibly rich material culture that can be glimpsed through advertisements and the objects themselves – which survive in surprising numbers.

With our 21st-century hindsight it seems inconceivable that people would ever touch, let alone buy these obviously dangerous goods. It would be tempting, as well as highly reassuring, to assume that only a few radioactive products were ever on sale. It is true that some of these goods existed only as patents or trademarked ideas and were never actually made. But far beyond the hospital or the laboratory, many were widely available to buy: in department stores, via mail order or in beauty salons.

This particular book is primarily about radium in Britain, with a number of transatlantic and other overseas forays, but a version could have been written about practically any other country in the world: such was the scope and the excitement surrounding radium. A whole new range of products and stories are to be found in North America, New Zealand, Australia, India, France and Germany to name but a few.

Famously, Marie Skłodowska Curie used to say: ‘In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons’2 – but this book aims to tackle both. I will look at the producers and customers who had the courses of their lives changed by their use of radium, and at the products themselves.

The stories of the heroic scientists and medical professionals who pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge through their experiments with radium have been told on numerous occasions, their failures and successes presented as part of a noble journey towards scientific understanding. By contrast, the entrepreneurs and consumers in radium’s history are usually associated with accusations of fraudulent practices and naivety, the products they made (and sold in their hundreds of thousands) mentioned only in passing: colourful stories of wacky products that no one in their right mind would ever use, surely?

Radium became part of culture in non-material ways. Its properties were picked apart and speculated upon in newspapers. In books and films it could be the basis of the entire story or just a MacGuffin (that is, some sort of object that drives the plot because everyone wants to get their hands on it for some reason).d In the theatre it might be found as part of a costume, a song or a type of dance. It even entered the vernacular as the name of a range of colours (from an iridescent silver – which referenced the colour of radium in its metallic state – to the deep green of the form of firework known as ‘radium’). It became the name of a milestone wedding anniversary and was a signifier of excitable personality traits and behaviours (to be described as being ‘like radium’ was a compliment to your enthusiasm and drive).

The history of radium, irrational, confusing and conflicting as it is, is still a subject that impinges on important social and political issues of today. Because Half Lives is also about our relationship to radioactivity in the 21st century. How did we get from the enthusiastic use of radium beauty treatments by Mayfair society ladies to the revulsion we feel at that prospect today? Why does Boots the Chemist no longer stock radium water syphons or belts filled with radium mud? Why are we now so very (and often unnecessarily) fearful of something that was so commonplace before?

Half Lives tells the story of radium and radioactive rays in Britain, partly through the lens of those who were deemed quacks or those considered merely gullible. It is through their stories that a new history of radium is revealed: one situated at the ever-evolving interface of medicine and science. Within these stories are a host of fascinating characters, both scientists and non-scientists, who helped shape public discourse at the time and our understanding of radium and radioactivity today.

Using this everyday material culture to explore the history of radioactivity can shed light on the interplay between scientific discoveries and popular culture in Britain. Far from signifying ignorance, the use of radium by consumers can actually indicate the complexities of the relationship between people and science and shed some light on the choices we make every day when we do not totally understand the risks and benefits or the science behind what we are being sold – something that remains true today.

Notes

1.Illustrated London News, 17 May 1919, p. 729.

2. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén. Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information, University of Chicago Press, 2015, p. 1.

a These are tiny amounts: you would need to eat about a million bananas all at once to receive a lethal dose.

b The first coherent atomic theory of the modern scientific age is considered to have been the work of the English scientist John Dalton, who published a series of papers outlining his theories in 1803. Dalton thought that all matter was made of tiny particles called atoms, which he understood to be minute spheres that could not be divided. By the 1930s it was known that atoms are not indivisible because they are actually made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.

c By 1901 there were five known radioactive elements uranium, thorium, polonium, radium and actinium. In April 1898 Skłodowska Curie had determined that the element thorium gave off radioactivity, a discovery that was made a few weeks after Gerhardt Carl Schmidt, a Professor of Physics at the University of Münster had also come to the same conclusion. In 1899 André Debierne separated another radioactive element from pitchblende and named it Actinium after the Greek aktis meaning ray. It was, however Friedrich Giesel who first chemically isolated pure actinium and identified its atomic number (89).

d The term was made popular by director Alfred Hitchcock.

CHAPTER ONE

ST JOACHIMSTHAL, BOHEMIA

Every story starts somewhere, and this one begins with mounds of rocks and rubble carelessly discarded in St Joachimsthal: a large town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic. You see, this history of everyday radium doesn’t start with the bang of discovery – it begins rather more slowly than that.

St Joachimsthal had become prosperous because of the valuable minerals found deep within the ‘Ore Mountain’ range, which dominates the skyline behind the town and runs along the northwest border between the Czech Republic and Germany. This range, Erzgebirge in German and Krušné hory in Czech, had been heavily mined for silver, zinc and copper since the 16th century and the population of the town had grown accordingly as the mountains were plundered for their mineral-rich rocks. Often found among these highly valued materials was a substance known to the miners as Pechblende – the ‘bad luck mineral’– which became ‘pitchblende’ in English. Pitchblende was considered unlucky because it had no commercial value, so it was either unceremoniously dumped at the side of the mountain or left in situ.a

The life of a miner is never an easy one but for those working in the Ore Mountains there was an added hazard: Schneeberger Krankheir, or mountain sickness – a respiratory illness that seemed to affect miners in the region in abnormally large numbers. Local folklore attributed the sickness and deaths to goblins who lived underground attempting to protect their buried treasures.

Georg Bauer – a mineralogist better known by the Latin version of his name, Georgius Agricola – was appointed as the physician of St Joachimsthal in 1527, only ten years after the foundation of the town. Bauer produced an immense twelve-volume study of minerals and the mining industry which was published as De re metallica (‘On Metals’) after his death. Bauer, who also devised apparatus to improve the working conditions of the miners in the town, wrote about the dreaded illness: ‘the dust has corrosive properties, it taxes your lungs and leaves consumption in the body … You find women who have wed seven men, all of whom have been taken through untimely death.’1

By the early 18th century the mines of St Joachimsthal had become largely redundant as richer excavation sites for silver and other minerals had been found elsewhere. The town itself had reduced in size and prosperity,b but a discovery in 1789 ensured that its decline was short-lived. In September of that year Martin Heinrich Klaproth, a lecturer in chemistry from Germany who specialised in the analysis of minerals, extracted a black powder from a sample of pitchblende and, since his experiments showed that it was chemically indivisible (i.e. he couldn’t separate anything else from the sample), he announced that he had found a new element. As Klaproth wrote: ‘Up till now seventeen individual metals have been recognised. I now propose to increase this number by adding a new one.’2 This he named ‘uranium’ after Uranus, the most recent planet to have been discovered.c

Klaproth’s discovery went unchallenged until 1841, when the French chemist Eugène-Melchior Péligot, using more sophisticated techniques, chemically produced pure uranium and confirmed that what Klaproth had actually discovered was in fact, a compound of uranium: a substance found when two or more elements (in this case uranium and oxygen) are chemically joined.

Uranium ore, while being one of the more common metallic substances in the Earth’s crust, is usually found fused with other types of rocks, in different levels of concentration. Although the process of extraction has changed since Klaproth’s time, the principle remains the same: to isolate the pure element you need to break the chemical bonds of the compound and separate it into its constituent parts. Typically, this form of chemical conversion can be made using heat, electrolysis (a process that employs an electric current which is used to extract the actual metal from ore) or acids: anything that causes a chemical change within the compound.

At the time of Klaproth’s discovery the most effective way of extracting uranium from pitchblende was to ‘prepare’ it with nitric acid.d The uranium nitrate (uranium salts) that this produces is very soluble in water and, as such, is the most useful form of uranium to work with. Long before the radioactive properties of uranium could even be guessed at (in fact no one even knew that radioactivity existed at this point), scientists, medical professionals and manufacturers were eager to experiment with the new, exciting substance.

Because uranium was known to be a ‘heavy metal’ (a dense metallic element)3 like mercury or lead, it was assumed that, like them, it would also be toxic or poisonous at low concentrations. Other heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic had already been used in medical treatments, with varying levels of enthusiasm, for centuries and in a foreshadowing of what would eventually happen with radium, the newly discovered chemical compound uranium nitrate began to be trialled in medicine. The solubility of uranium nitrate made it easy to get inside the body – either through injections or by drinking it.

These early experimental medical trials were very suggestive to Samuel West, a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. West was an advocate of homoeopathy, a system that had been devised by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the late 18th century. Disillusioned with the dominant medical practices of his day, Hahnemann had experimented on himself by administering a variety of substances in order to test their effect on a healthy body. He found that certain drugs induced the symptoms of certain diseases in healthy people – and from this, he hypothesised that these could be used as a treatment for the same symptoms in ill people. This idea (which had its roots in much earlier practices) came to be known as similia similibus curentur (‘let like be cured by like’), the cornerstone principle of homoeopathy.

In 1896 West conducted experiments on eight patients with diabetes to see whether uranium salts might work to reduce the level of glucose in their bodies: especially the levels found in urine which could lead to kidney damage. West’s treatment programme was to prescribe one or two grains of uranium salt dissolved in water to be drunk after meals. The results of these experiments were mixed: most of West’s patients showed some reduction in their glucose levels under this regime, but the experiment was terminated after some of them developed severe intestinal irritation. West’s experiments were not the only ones of their kind in which similar effects were recorded: other researchers also reported side effects such as dyspepsia to medical journals. More worryingly it was also reported the treatment also often affected the nervous system, leaving patients in terrible pain.

In spite of this, uranium salts continued to be used sporadically in medicine well into the middle of the 20th century, but the treatments were never commonly adopted by medical practitioners as they were unreliable and often had unintended outcomes with severe consequences.

In addition to its limited medical uses, uranium was also eagerly adopted by 19th-century glassmakers, who had found a way of making beautifully coloured glass by adding the salts to the molten glass mixture. This concoction was used to give vases and decorative glassware a range of colours, but it was a yellowish-green effect that became the most popular: resulting in the name ‘Vaseline glass’ due to the product’s resemblance to the famous brand of petroleum jelly. Vaseline glass remained popular for glasses, vases, cocktail shakers and even car hood ornaments until the 1940s and is now a highly collectable (and slightly radioactive) object – especially as it also glows fluorescent green under UV light.e

There were many factories in Europe producing this colourful glass using uranium salts, but the most famous was the one in St Joachimsthal. This novel industry had helped to revitalise the town and its newly reopened mines.

And that would have been the end of the story of these pitchblende residues – if it hadn’t been for a (then) little-known German, who made the discovery of a new type of ray that would almost immediately change the face of physics, chemistry and medicine, and set off a series of revelations which would ultimately lead scientists back to the mountains of St Joachimsthal.

WÜRZBURG, GERMANY

The journey to the discovery of both X-rays and, shortly after, radioactive emissions started with the popular 19th-century scientific preoccupation of the study of rays (which initially was used to mean any beam of light). During this period of intense investigation the definition of what constituted a ray had been extended from only referring to visible light to include other forms like ultraviolet and infrared, which had been discovered in 1801 and 1800 respectively. These invisible electromagnetic radiations (the terms ray and radiation were used interchangeably) could not be seen with the naked eye, but they could be detected using scientific equipment.

Among the plethora of ‘new’ rays discovered during the 19th century, the most studied was the cathode ray, which was first identified in the early 1860s. Experiments into the properties of cathode rays fascinated physicists and many would go on to research with them, using their own variations of the ‘Crookes tube’ in an attempt to understand how the phenomenon worked.4 This scientific instrument, developed by the flamboyant British chemist and science journalist William Crookes in the early 1870s, is a glass tube which has a metal plate (cathode) at one end and another metal plate (anode) at the other. Once the air in the tube is pumped out, a near-vacuum is left inside. When a high-voltage electrical current is passed through the tube, what were then known as ‘cathode rays’ (and were later identified as electrons) move through the tube and produce a glowing light.

Like many of his contemporaries, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who at the time was a professor of physics based at the Physical Institute at the University of Würzburg in Germany, was fascinated by the properties of the cathode ray. Röntgen would have ensured he was kept informed of the latest developments in research into the rays since there was a lively scientific exchange of experiments and investigations as scientists tried to answer the basic question of the nature of cathode rays.

On a late afternoon in November 1895 it was Röntgen who, in his own words, discovered ‘something interesting’.5 According to one popular account,f while experimenting with an adapted Crookes tube covered in lightproof paper, Röntgen realised that a nearby screen of cardboard that had been painted with a fluorescent material (which he used in his hobby of photography) would glow each time he passed an electrical current through the tube – as if in response to an invisible energy.g Abandoning his planned experiments into cathode rays Röntgen began to investigate the mysterious glowing screen.6 Since there was nothing known at the time that would cause something to fluoresce at such a distance (about a metre in this case), Röntgen tentatively suspected that he was onto something new.

He repeated his experiments many times over the course of the next few weeks using different variants of cathode ray tubes and each time observed that the screen fluoresced. There seemed to be no doubt that the screen was glowing in response to something that was emanating from the tube. Neither cathode nor any other rays he could think of could account for the phenomenon. Röntgen noted that whatever was emanating from the tube could be blocked by dense materials, but that it penetrated paper, books and the flesh of his hand. And when he used his hand to attempt to block the rays, Röntgen was particularly excited to note that he could see a shadow of his own bones on the coated screen. He had indeed found something very interesting – a form of electromagnetic radiation invisible to the eye.

Although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, Röntgen wasn’t the only scientist who had witnessed this phenomenon while experimenting with cathode rays. Even William Crookes had sent ‘fogged’ photographic plates back to the manufacturer thinking they had sold him faulty equipment.

It had so far been assumed that the Crookes tube only emitted one single type of radiation – the cathode ray. As what Röntgen had observed had different properties and could travel much further outside of the tube, he realised that the Crookes tube must also generate a second, hitherto unknown type of ray. Given that the primary interest for other scientists at the time was what was happening inside of the tubes, they did not think to follow up their observations. Röntgen, however, thought differently – or as he told the story later: ‘I didn’t think, I investigated.’7

On 22 December 1895, after they had eaten dinner together, Röntgen took his wife, Anna Bertha Ludwig, into his confidence and asked her to come down to his laboratory, which was in the basement of their house. Husband took wife’s hand and placed it on a photographic plate, then beamed the invisible rays at it for fifteen minutes before developing the picture. This, the world’s first X-ray photograph, a very blurry shadow image, revealed Anna’s bone structure, which showed some signs of arthritis, and her wedding ring apparently floating around one fleshless finger. While Wilhelm was delighted, she was horrified, exclaiming: ‘I have seen my death.’8 Röntgen’s shadow photographs, or ‘radiographs’, provided dramatic visual proof of the new type of radiation he had theorised: one that could see inside the human body. He called the rays ‘X’ because he found them so mysterious and thought they represented the unknown, like the symbol ‘x’ in mathematics.

Shortly after Christmas Röntgen sent a preliminary report on his findings to the Würzburg Physical-Medical Society (via a friend of his who was the editor), to be published in their Proceedings.9 Owing to the Christmas holidays and because the members were not due to meet in person for several weeks, the Society took the unusual decision to publish first and have Röntgen present the oral report afterwards. Their helpful intercession was an essential favour to Röntgen so that he could establish the primacy of his discovery in this crowded research field where new advances were being made almost daily. His groundbreaking paper was published on 28 December 1895, with the title ‘On a New Kind of Rays’.10

Once the Proceedings were published, Röntgen sent copies of the report, along with reprints of the image of Anna Bertha’s hand (which were not included in the original) to those he considered the greatest scientists of the day, including Arthur Schuster and Lord Kelvin in Britain, the mathematician Henri Poincaré in France and colleagues in Leipzig and Vienna.11

The Viennese newspaper the Neue Freie Presse ran an account of Röntgen’s discovery on its front page of 5 January 1896. The idea of X-rays seemed so astonishing that the Presse assured its readers that the report was not a joke and that it was ‘a serious discovery by a serious German professor’.12 A British reporter based in Vienna sent the story to London where it appeared the next day in a couple of major newspapers, and then the communication travelled across Europe and to North America.

With no straightforward explanation of what caused X-rays, the exhilaration triggered within the physics community by Röntgen’s paper was considerable.

Röntgen abhorred both publicity and the idea of profiting from science and he never tried to patent nor seek any financial gain for the commercial development of X-rays, believing that scientific discoveries should be the property of everyone.13 In this decision he was at odds with many of his colleagues, who often, quite frankly, welcomed the money. Röntgen, though, considered the practical applications of scientific discoveries to be best left to others.

This principle, however, left the field open for more commercially minded inventors like Thomas Alva Edison, who had no such qualms and built his own X-ray generator only four days after learning about the discovery.h Röntgen’s findings were simple to replicate, as experimenters only needed a cathode ray tube and a power source. Anyone with access to those two things could knock up an X-ray machine. Within a few weeks Röntgen’s experiments had been successfully replicated at the universities of Harvard (31 January), Dartmouth (3 February) and Princeton (6 February) as well as in mainland Europe and in Britain.

Thomas Edison’s team designed an improvement on Röntgen’s initial technology and immediately licensed this new equipment to a nearby manufacturer for marketing as a ‘Fluoroscope’ – which was eventually launched as the ‘Thomas A. Edison X-ray Kit’.

The Fluoroscope joined the Cryptoscope (Italy), and Skiascope (Princeton) as easily accessible X-ray contraptions that were available both to researchers and the ordinary public, although a combination of Edison’s reputation and the user-friendliness of the design (the image was projected onto a screen instead of using photographic plates) led to ‘fluoroscope’ becoming the generic name for this style of gadget (and ‘fluoroscopy’ the practice of real-time X-ray imaging).14

To publicise his new device Edison held a public display of the Fluoroscope during the 1896 National Electrical Exhibition, which was held at the Grand Central Palace, a purpose-built exhibition hall, in New York City. This extravaganza actually allowed the viewer to get a three-second glimpse of their own bones while Edison explained the science behind the invisible rays (or at least what was understood at the time) in half-hourly lectures.15

Thousands of people queued up to put parts of their body into the direct path of the rays and observe the results live on a fluorescent screen. The interactive part of the display was run by Edison’s assistant, Clarence Madison Dally, who spent hours helping the eager public to see the mysteries of the X-rays in action, often using his own hand as part of the demonstration. Dally, observing that his skin became inflamed under the Fluoroscope periodically alternated the hand he used as part of the show.

Edison’s worldwide fame and his gift for promotion sparked a widespread public obsession with X-rays: there was even a word for it, ‘Roentgenmania’, a craze fuelled by sensational journalism that spread across the world with cartoons, poems and songs penned in tribute to the mysterious rays.i

Not everyone was enamoured of X-rays. According to Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton, a Scottish electrical engineer who is often cited as taking the first intentional X-ray photograph after Röntgen, showed Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, an X-ray photograph he had taken of his own hand. ‘How disgusting!’, was the response.16

X-rays became popular on a scale that had rarely been seen before when it came to scientific discoveries, even topping the enthusiastic public reaction to other sensationalised sciences like the wonders of harnessed electricity, the telegraph and incandescent lightbulbs. It would take something very special for that reaction to be seen again.

PARIS, FRANCE

Manya Skłodowska arrived in France in 1891 from her native Poland – then under the control of Tsarist Russia – to study at the University of Paris: the Sorbonne.j She graduated at the top of her class in physical sciences in 1893 and then second in her class in mathematical sciences a year later.

In 1895 Manya, now known by the rather more French-sounding ‘Marie’, married Pierre Curie, a physicist she had met through their mutual acquaintance, the exiled Polish physicist Józef Wierusz-Kowalski. From then on, she would frequently use both surnames. In common with Marie, Pierre’s specialism (and the subject of his doctoral thesis) was magnetism, but in addition he was well respected for his work with the scientific instruments that he developed and designed with his brother, Jacques. In 1897 Pierre and Marie Curie had their first child, Irène. Never one to neglect her studies, and searching for a subject for her doctoral dissertation, Marie now took up research that had been started and then discarded by Henri Becquerel, a French physicist and professor at the worldfamous École polytechnique in Paris who was also the director of the Museum of Natural History.

At the museum Becquerel looked after a vast collection of minerals with luminescent properties – that is, ones that glowed when they were exposed to light. Some of these were observed to fluoresce (when the light was turned off the glowing stopped) and others were known to phosphoresce (the glowing would continue for a short period of time after the external light had been removed). Becquerel was fascinated by both forms of luminescence and devoted much of his working life to understanding what caused this effect and why certain minerals had these properties and others didn’t.17

In 1895 Becquerel had begun to investigate the already-observed phosphorescent properties of uranium in the hope of determining whether this phenomenon might be related to the same invisible rays that Röntgen had recently discovered.k As an experiment, Becquerel placed uranium salts on a glass photographic plate which he covered with black paper (to keep out the sunlight while still potentially letting any X-rays through) and exposed the package to the sun for several hours. When the plate was developed, a silhouette of the uranium salts appeared in black on the negative: something that Becquerel had been expecting. A repeat of this experiment on another day was abruptly terminated when clouds obscured the sunlight that Becquerel thought he needed for the experiment to work. He bundled the plates and the uranium salts into a drawer while he waited for better weather. When, out of curiosity, he developed the plate, it was with the expectation that only a very faint impression of the uranium would be seen from its limited exposure to sunlight. Instead Becquerel found a very intense silhouette: much more than could be explained from the brief exposure time.

Becquerel, as further testing showed, had discovered that external light was not needed for the invisible rays to emerge: they came from the uranium itself. Becquerel made his observations public soon after, at the weekly meeting of the French Academy of Sciences. His paper: ‘On visible radiations emitted by phosphorescent bodies’, was published ten days later in their scientific journal Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences (Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences). What Becquerel had discovered was that some substances – naturally and of their own accord – produced invisible rays, a phenomenon that had previously been unknown to science.

And it was ‘Becquerel rays’ – as they were called at the time – that Skłodowska Curie now decided to make the focus of her doctoral research. Becquerel, after publishing seven papers on his discoveries in 1896 and two more in 1897, had returned to his previous research into magnetism.18 For Becquerel, like many of his colleagues, the discovery of new rays was interesting – but they were thought to behave so much like X-rays that he did not think they necessitated separate study. For Skłodowska Curie the lack of interest shown by other scientists meant that the rays were both an ideal subject for study and an opportunity to contribute original research, part of the requirements of any PhD thesis. Consequently, she gathered together samples of natural ores with the intent of studying all known elements, whether in a pure or compound state.

Like Röntgen, Becquerel was a keen photographer and had been investigating the properties of his rays using glass plates. While they produced striking images, photographic plates were not very useful when it came to quantifying the rays, so Marie decided to use an instrument known as an electroscope, which detected electrical effects in the air. The electroscope would allow Skłodowska Curie to trace the very small differences in the invisible rays that were emitted by different substances. The electroscope she used was one that had been developed by her husband and his brother, who some years earlier had discovered that quartz crystals gave off electrical signals when compressed. The Curie brothers had used this property (known as the ‘piezoelectric effect’) to devise a new type of electroscope, which the brothers named a ‘quartz piezoelectroscope’. This uniquely sensitive instrument would allow Marie to detect the very small electric currents that would later be understood to be a part of the radioactive decay process.

What Skłodowska Curie found was that these currents – this ‘radioactivity’ as she later named it – were particular to only two of the mineral substances she had tested: uranium and thorium.

Marie was especially intrigued by four minerals which were known to contain uranium: carnotite, autunite, chalcocite and pitchblende. She found that these emitted a much higher electrical energy than could be anticipated. In fact, one of the samples of pitchblende she measured had almost four times more radioactivity than would have been expected – which would only make sense if, apart from the uranium and thorium, it contained other, as yet unknown, radioactive elements.

To isolate these unknown elements the Curies adopted a method of analysis known as ‘fractional crystallisation’, employing various chemical procedures to separate the different substances into distinct parts (‘fractions’). As each element behaves differently, the pitchblende was ground, dissolved, boiled, stirred, filtered, poured and cooled (the natural endpoint of fractional crystallisation where the mixture would crystallise as the chloride salt of the element) until everything had been separated into solid forms of its different chemical compounds, which were now ready to be tested for radioactivity. Since pitchblende is a complex and often impure mineral, made of combinations of up to 30 different elements, this was a very complex task and lengthy indeed.

Using the instrument that Pierre designed to identify the most radioactive fractions, the Curies discovered that the final two of the resultant compounds – one containing mostly the element bismuth and the other containing mostly barium – were very strongly radioactive.

As neither chemically pure bismuth nor barium registered as radioactive, the Curies speculated that they must have found something extra hidden in the two types of residues and as chemical testing had failed to identify what this was, they suspected that this must be something previously unknown.l When they hypothesised the existence of this element in the bismuth fraction they gave it a name: ‘polonium’, after Marie’s birth country (following a longstanding naming convention).m A few months later, after a presumably much-needed holiday, they proposed another new element in the barium fraction – which they named ‘radium’ after radius, the Latin word for ray.

The Curies chose to announce their results to the wider scientific community at the regular Monday afternoon meetings of the Académie des Sciences, which were the most high-profile occasions available. However, as the Académie’s rules stipulated that only elected members were able to speak at the meetings, the Curies’ reports were read by proxies, as neither of them were members of this self-selecting club.n Skłodowska Curie’s first report ‘Radiations emitted by Compounds of Uranium and Thorium’ was read on 12 April 1898 by her former professor Gabriel Lippmann, and Henri Becquerel read out both the second report (jointly written with Pierre, who had abandoned his own studies to join his wife’s research) on 18 July and the third and final report on 26 December (written by both Curies and the chemist Gustav Bémont, who had now joined their research team). According to custom, non-member communications always appeared last on the meeting’s agenda. These findings were duly reported in the press but with little real significance attached to them.

But the discovery of a new element (let alone two within such a short space of time) was a fascinating find to the scientific world. Elements – thanks to the work of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who successfully brought together earlier attempts to arrange them – had since 1869 been ordered into a structure, the periodic table. Mendeleev had even left spaces where he made an educated guess (based on the relationship between elements with similar chemical properties) that there was a ‘missing’ element. Identifying these as yet undiscovered components would help to categorise and make sense of the world, and to do so was one of the pinnacles of a scientist’s career.

Not only did Skłodowska Curie have to prove that her initial discovery was legitimate, she needed to kill any speculation that it might be explained away by compromised samples (that the ‘radium’ was actually barium contaminated by uranium). There had been much jealous conjecture over the discovery having been made by such a young scientist (at the time she was merely a doctoral candidate), using equipment that was relatively unknown in chemistry, who also had the nerve to be a woman.

Following established scientific protocol, Marie needed next to determine the chemical processes that were required to isolate demonstrable amounts of radium and polonium from the bismuth and barium fractions, so that their atomic weights could be established. Once that was done, these hypothetical elements could be given official recognition by the chemical sciences community.

Given that their original sample had generated only faint traces of these new elements, the Curies realised that a massive amount of material would be required for their further studies, and they contacted the Austrian government, through Eduard Suess, who was at the time the president of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austrian Academy of Sciences) in Vienna, to request a quantity of residues from St Joachimsthal.

Considering the ‘bad luck mineral’ to be effectively worthless and presumably keen to save money on having it removed from the processing site after the uranium had been extracted for colouring agents, the Austrian government gave the Curies a much welcomed prize: one ton of pitchblende – theirs for only the cost of shipping to Paris.

It soon became apparent that polonium was difficult to separate, and since initial results indicated that radium was both more powerful and easier to isolate Skłodowska Curie now decided to focus on the second element that had been hypothesised.o

The process of producing samples of radium took rather more time than had been expected but the Curies took the decision to collaborate with the Société Centrale des Produits Chimiques (Central Chemical Products Company), a firm of scientific instrument makers headed by André Debierne, a former student of Pierre’s, who helped to experimentally identify the extraction procedures most likely to be successful.p The agreement was that the heavy, dirty, work of heating and boiling large vats of minerals would be done in their industrial factory and the more technical scientific analysis would be carried out at the Curies’ laboratory.q

It was in this laboratory that the Curies witnessed that while radium chloride looked like common salt in the daytime, it actually glowed in the dark. This effect was subsequently understood to be caused by its radiation agitating the nitrogen that is naturally present in the air. This vibration creates a buzz of energy, which is perceptible as a shimmer of light, just luminous enough to be visible in the dark. Referencing this, a now-famous image of the Curies was drawn by Julius Mendes Price (known as ‘Imp’) for the 22 December 1904 edition of Vanity Fair, which shows the couple in their laboratory holding aloft a vial of glowing radium. It was light, more than any other aspect, that would become associated with the Curies – and therefore with radium. ‘One of our joys, wrote Skłodowska Curie, ‘was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint fairy lights.’19

Not only did the salts give off a ghostly blue glow but Pierre discovered that radium was always at a slightly higher temperature than its surroundings. No one, at the time, could answer the question: where did this energy come from?

All in all, eight tons of pitchblende residues were treated over a period of four years before, on 21 July 1902, Skłodowska Curie announced in Comptes rendus that she had successfully isolated onetenth of a gram of the chemical compound radium chloride (RaCl2– a compound of radium and chlorine which takes the form of white crystals or powder). Radium was too volatile to isolate in its pure form, as it would immediately react with something else. The chloride sample Marie had obtained, however, was pure enough to enable their colleague Eugène Demarçay, an analytical specialist, to calculate its atomic weight to be 225.r

Now that radium’s atomic weight had been established it could be officially designated an element.s Marie’s father Władislaw Skłodowski, a teacher of maths and physics, lived just long enough to be told of her success. Writing to her from Poland, he said: ‘You are now in possession of pure radium salts. If we consider the amount of work done in obtaining this, it would certainly be the most expensive of chemical elements. What a pity it is that this work has only theoretical interest.’20 He died six days later without an inkling of the impact Marie’s discovery would have on the world. In fairness, at this point very few people did.

‘AN ABSOLUTE LACK OF STABILITY’

While Skłodowska Curie had been focused on establishing the chemical recipes required to isolate radium and its atomic weight, other researchers, including her husband (who was particularly excited by the light and continuous heat that seemed to emanate from radium), were searching for a scientific explanation of the phenomenon of radioactivity itself.

Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist, was determined to answer the question of what radioactivity really was. Beginning his research while at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge towards the end of 1897, Rutherford began to test the radioactive properties of uranium.

Using an electroscope, Rutherford and his team were able to show that the radioactive substances (in the case of this experiment, a uranium compound) were actually emitting not one but two distinct types of ray. The first ray Rutherford named alpha (α) after the first letter in the Greek alphabet. Alpha radiation was heavy and slow and could be stopped by a sheet of paper or just a few layers of cells in human tissue. The second type of radiation they detected, which came to be known as beta (β), has a hundred times more penetrating power than alpha particles. Beta particles can penetrate several layers of human skin but can be stopped by a sheet of aluminium.

In September 1898, Rutherford sent off the paper detailing his findings, ‘Uranium Radiation and the Electrical Conduction Produced by It’, to the Philosophy Magazine for publication. By the time the paper was published the following January, Rutherford had moved from Cambridge and had begun working in McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Soon after Rutherford’s paper had been published, Paul Villard, a physical chemist at the École Normale Supérieure, a graduate school in Paris, identified another emission from radioactive materials – which were given the name gamma (γ) rays.

Rutherford had been unable to detect this third form of radiation as the rays were so highly penetrating that they passed straight through all of the screening materials he had used in his experiments.21 They could penetrate air, paper or thin metal and were only stopped by many centimetres of lead or by very thick concrete. Travelling at the speed of light, gamma rays have since been confirmed as a high-frequency form of electromagnetic radiation (like X-rays, visible light, radio waves and ultraviolet light).

But there were even more mysteries to follow. Skłodowska Curie had, in 1899, observed that the radioactive minerals released a gas, and there was now a scrabble among scientists to investigate this further. Rutherford, discovering that thorium also released a similar substance, built a flask to collect and analyse this heavy gas, which he referred to as an ‘emanation’. The German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn repeated and extended Rutherford’s experiments and suggested that radium produced a similar emission. Harriet Brooks (the first woman in Canada to receive a master’s degree in physics) definitively confirmed Dorn’s experiments, publishing an article co-authored with Rutherford in Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada with the results of their experiments. This gas came to be known as ‘radium emanation’, then ‘niton’ (after nitens, the Latin word for ‘shining’), and finally ‘radon’.t

As scientists tested and measured this substance and tried to understand the mysterious process of emanation, they also realised that the gas seemed to spread around their laboratories and settled on equipment – when the air and the objects were subsequently tested it was noticed that they had become radioactive in a phenomenon that came to be called ‘induced’ or ‘excited’ radioactivity.

Later, Skłodowska Curie explained to a reporter from Century Magazine that ‘radium has the power of communicating its radioactivity to surrounding bodies. When a solution of radium salt is placed in a closed vessel, the radioactivity in part leaves the solution and distributes itself through the vessel, the walls of which become radioactive and luminous. We may assume … that radium emits a radioactive gas and that this spreads through the surrounding air and over the surface of neighbouring objects.’22

But no one really knew how this gas was formed or even what made certain elements radioactive. That radioactivity required energy was obvious. Unlike X-rays, which received their energy from the discharge tubes that were used to generate them, it wasn’t self-evident where the energy emitted by radium originally came from. Researchers were at first convinced that it had to be coming from an external source. It was suggested that this source could be background levels of radiation in the environment, from air molecules or even from the sun. These theories were pretty quickly ruled out by experiments that included placing the different radioactive elements at the bottom of mine shafts or in vacuums and even testing them at different times of the day and night (to check whether the sun was somehow transferring its energy). None of these experiments made the slightest bit of difference to the intensity of rays emanating from radium.

By showing all the ways that the power of radium could not