CHAPTER 14: The Discovery That Atoms “Fly to Bits”: Becquerel and the Curies (Paris and Warsaw)

Antoine Becquerel discovered his “rays” while searching for X-rays in fluorescent materials. His potassium uranyl sulfate emitted two types of rays, one being a small stream of particles identical to J. J. Thomson's electrons. We visit places near the Jardin des Plantes where Becquerel's work is celebrated. Next, we follow how the Warsaw-native Maria Salomea Sklodowska earned her way to the Sorbonne in Paris where she excelled, under extraordinarily impoverished conditions, in her study of physics and mathematics. After she married Pierre Curie, they worked together, again under bleak and dangerous conditions, to isolate two new elements, polonium and radium, and coin the term “radioactivity”. Soon afterwards, Pierre died in a tragic traffic accident, but Marie, now the mother of two young daughters, continued their work for twenty more years of both tragedy and triumph. She lived just long enough to see her daughter Iréne, with her husband Frédéric Joliot, discover artificial radioactivity. We visit myriad residences, workplaces, laboratories, hospitals, monuments, statues, museums, and graves all over Paris and Warsaw (and even Brittany) that honor and preserve the memory of the Curies. Three of these are four- or five-atom sites, among the best scientific-historic traveling sites in the world.