9781422285640

14 Uranium

Marie Curie In 1903, Marie Curie

became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics. She, alongside her husband and Henri Becquerel, was awarded for accomplishments in the study of radioactivity. She won a second Nobel in 1911 in chemistry. Curie died in 1934 after years of working with radioactive elements. She died of aplastic anemia, a blood disease in which the body stops making new blood cells. The malady is often caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.

Marie Curie.

At the time, the younger Becquerel wanted to known whether there was any connection between newly discovered X-rays and phosphorescence. A year before, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen accidently discovered X-rays, which he then used to photograph the bones in his wife’s hand. Fascinated with the discovery, Becquerel placed uranium salts near a photographic plate covered with dark paper. After a while, a “fogged” image appeared on the plate. Henri Becquerel understood immediately that uranium was giving off some unseen force. His discovery caught the interests of Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre. While working in their Paris laboratory, the Curies worked hard to find out which elements in pitchblende gave off the extraordinary rays. While studying the rays, the Curies made a number of important discoveries. They learned that some elements in pitchblende emitted invisible rays that they called radiation. Radiation is the natural process by which atoms spontaneously disintegrate into energy.