The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  The other scientist investigating radium was a German organic chemist 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 purple and 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 magical to the human mind and, in their way, threatening. At that time, instead of being contrasted with science, spiritualism embraced it. The miracle of the telegraph bridged the divide of geography; séances bridged the divide of death. The Curies, along with Pierre’s brilliant student Paul Langevin, attended a number of séances with medium Eusapia Palladino, and during one evening, Pierre weighed her and discovered she’d gained six kilos (thirteen pounds). Other French spiritualists were communicating with the spirit world through planchettes, small tablets cut in the shape of a heart, with two legs and a pencil. Two men in Maryland combined the planchette with an alphabet board; another named the new contraption by merging the French and German words for “yes.” As the Great War unleashed a torrent of horror, grieving mothers and wives bought thousands of Ouija sets to communicate with their departed.

  Two years before Manya’s arrival in France, Paris celebrated an 1889 World’s Fair by erecting Eiffel’s tower, and now that tower was the centerpiece of 1900’s Universal Exposition, which inspired Henry Adams to believe the age of the Virgin had been eclipsed by the age of the Dynamo. Electricity had begun to replace gaslights in Paris in 1891, but at this fair, it powered the first metro line and the trottoir roulant, a moving sidewalk of two tracks and two speeds carrying visitors—the women in the enormous, billowing dresses of that era, and the men in towering silk top hats framing topiary-like facial hair—across 277 acres. In the evenings, electrically powered fountains were lit by electrically powered lights, and the wonders of the age were displayed in the Palaces of Electricity, Civil Engineering, Transportation, Machinery, Textiles, Mining, and Metallurgy. Max Nordau, the Hungarian cofounder of the World Zionist Organization, became so alarmed by the new powers invested in science and electricity that he warned of a horrifying future where everyone would “read a dozen square yards of newspaper daily . . . be constantly called to the telephone [his era’s version of e-mail] [and] think simultaneously of five continents of the earth.” If Nordau had included “stare constantly at a blinking screen instead of living in the material world,” he would have been a prophet with a Nostradamus-like following, yet he seems to have been nearly alone with these trepidations, for everyone else in his era believed that scientific progress would solve all problems, fix all economies, end all war, and create a civilized, Edenic planet. Louis Pasteur referred to laboratories as temples of humanity, and a sensation running for three decades in both France and Italy was Luigi Manzotti’s 1881 Excelsior ballet, which chronicled the triumph of the Enlightenment over Darkness, ending with love, brotherhood, progress, and science. This fantasy ended in 1914, and as historian Barbara Tuchman noted, “A phenomenon of such extended malignancy as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age.” The Universal Exposition’s two largest exhibits were, after all, Schneider-Creusot’s immense cannon, and Vickers-Maxim’s remarkable array of automatic machine guns.

  Pablo Picasso’s favorite exhibit at the fair was American dancer Loie Fuller, famed for her billowing phosphorescent veils, which she used as screens for projectors of color-shifting light. The effect was so dramatic it would appear in his revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Miss Fuller would ask the Curies for advice on creating “butterfly wings of radium.” After they helped her, she danced for them privately at their home and introduced them to sculptor Auguste Rodin; the four became regular friends and perhaps the only two people in the world the Curies saw regularly who weren’t scientists or blood relatives. Their closest friends remained the next-door neighbors at boulevard Kellermann, Jean and Henriette Perrin; he was a physics professor at the Sorbonne who verified Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion, correctly estimated the size of water molecules and atoms, and established cathode rays as negatively charged particles—electrons.

  Pierre presented his and Marie’s scientific findings to France’s Academy of Sciences on March 16, 1903, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences then awarded them and Becquerel the Nobel Prize. Behind the scenes, four members of the French Académie had recommended that Becquerel and Pierre alone share the Nobel, leaving out Marie’s work entirely. But one of her champions was a Danish mathematician who had great influence with the Swedish academy, and his strenuous efforts repelled that slight.

  The Nobel, which had only begun two years before, did not have the
global prestige then that it has now, but awarding it to an obscure husband-and-wife team in that tabloid and suffragette era would change that dramatically. The Nobel made the Curies famous, and the Curies, in turn, made the Nobel significant.

  In Pierre and Marie’s miracle year of 1903, few foretold what was to come. One who did was English chemist Frederick Soddy, announcing that matter must now be thought of “not only as mass, but also as a store of energy . . . [and] the planet on which we live rather as a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos.” In 1904, Soddy told Canada’s military leaders that whoever unlocked the power within the atom “would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose.”

  In the wake of the Nobel, the worldwide press created story after story about this unknown pair, their exciting discovery, their tremendous love for each other and for their work together, and whether Marie was equal, superior, or inferior to Pierre in scientific acumen and achievement. Only Röntgen could appreciate this kind of global attention, as the public enthusiasm for radium would now wholly eclipse that for X-rays. Cosmopolitan magazine called the metal “life, energy, immortal warmth . . . dust from the master’s workshop,” and the cover of the Chicago Daily Tribune of June 21, 1903, summed up the moment:

  Radium Greatest Find of History

  May Upset Vibratory Theory of Light and Questions Conservation of Energy.

  New York Engineer First to Make Photographs by Rays from New Substance.

  Discovery of Stupendous Import.

  Radium, $2,721,555 a Pound.

  Blessing, with menace. German chemist Friedrich Giesel, working with a dentist, first reported on radioactivity’s biological effects in 1900, and Pierre, following up, was thrilled to find radium could enflame his skin “with a lesion resembling a burn that developed progressively and required several months to heal,” as Marie reported. “Henri Becquerel had by accident a similar burn as a result of carrying in his vest pocket a glass tube containing radium salt. He came to tell us of this evil effect of radium, exclaiming in a manner at once delighted and annoyed: ‘I love it, but I owe it a grudge.’ ” Pierre: “The inflammation of the extremities of the fingers lasted about 15 days and finished when the skin dropped off, but the painful sensation did not disappear for two months.” An American journalist reported, “Pierre Curie pulled up his sleeve and showed me a forearm scarred and reddened from fresh healed sores.” Then it occurred to Pierre that radium’s emanations could kill malignant tumors, and a new medical specialty was born: curietherapy.

  Just as Röntgen rays had been used against diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other germs, as well as certain cancers, the Curies’ radium, when administered with care, could kill tumor cells without killing healthy tissue. When X-rays were used for treatment, radiologists adjusted the settings by putting their arm in the path of the rays; if they got a small sunburn, the machine was ready. This seat-of-the-pants method resulted in many of these technicians’ dying of leukemia. Curietherapy was immediately adopted as a replacement since it required no difficult equipment. In one famously successful technique, a bare sip of radium was stuck to the tip of a glass needle or goose quill, then injected into the center of a tumor. Its alpha rays were of such short range that they only damaged the high-turnover cells of malignancy nearby. This would be called brachytherapy and is still used today, primarily for cervical and uterine cancers. Other techniques used radium and mesothorium in sealed glass vials, resting on skin cancers or inserted into body cavities for mouth, throat, and digestive cancers.

  Some noticed that when animals were exposed to radium’s emanations, they were miraculously invigorated, and beyond its use in oncology, an entirely new industry arose in the 1910s and 1920s purveying radium-infused bath salts, bread, chocolates, Radithor bottled water, suppositories, and “liquid sunshine” tonics. Revigator tanks lined with a radium skin stored drinking water overnight to produce a homemade health infusion. Austria’s St. Joachimsthal, the source of the Curie’s ore, became a health spa featuring the Radium Palace Hotel (which served Radium Beer), attracting twenty-five hundred customers a year—one of them the young J. Robert Oppenheimer. The price of radium rose to three thousand times the price of gold, as now it cured “anemia, arteriosclerosis, arthritis, asthenia, diabetes, epilepsy, general debility, gastric neurosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, hyperthyroid, hysteria, infection, kidney troubles, muscular atrophy, neuralgia, neurasthenia, neuritis, obesity, prostatitis, rheumatism, senility, and sexual decline.” A 1929 pharmacy in Europe offered eighty radioactive products, including lotions, cigarettes, chocolates, bath salts, pillows, suppositories, condoms, and a face cream called Tho-Radia. Radium and X-rays were so magical and so admired they became brand names for many things that contained neither, including enamel, butter, cigars, playing cards, laundry starch, matches, hand cleanser, headache tablets, furniture polish, oil soap, liniment, and stain remover. A popular curio was the spinthariscope (after the Greek for “spark”), which held tiny bits of radium against a screen inside a brass viewer, like a kaleidoscope; the element’s emanations would strike the screen, creating a microscopic fireworks. The toy was based on the scintillation method used in physics, a zinc oxide plate under a microscope that flashed each time it was struck by an alpha particle, allowing the electrical shadows of atoms to be viewed with human eyes. Interned as an enemy alien at an abandoned Berlin racetrack during World War I, British chemist James Chadwick—discoverer of the neutron—was able to secretly continue his research using a thorium-infused German toothpaste.

  There was even a movement to replace electric lights (which had, after all, just replaced gas lamps) with radium’s glow. The first electrics were so harsh and glaring that Robert Louis Stevenson, for one, pled for a return to gas, complaining, “Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. [Electric illumination will] never allow us to dream the dreams that the light of the living or the lab conjured up.” The resonantly named Undark Paint combined radium with arsenic, manganese, thallium, uranium, copper, lead, and zinc sulfide to be used as a replacement, offering the “color and tone [of] soft moonlight.” The Curies never profited from the fad, for they had published their exact method for extracting radium without (in the name of free and open scientific inquiry) patenting any of the details. Anyone could produce their own radio-element without any royalties paid to its discoverers or their school, and without the Curies having any say in its use.

  As the Curies achieved greater and greater fame, with Marie becoming the most illustrious and renowned woman in the world, the couple seemed to turn more and more to each other. Neither’s personality changed a whit. At dinner with President Loubet at the Élysée Palace, a woman asked Marie if she would like to be presented to the king of Greece, and Marie said, “I don’t see the utility of it.” When the woman appeared shocked, Marie suddenly realized whom she was talking to: the first lady of France. “But—but—naturally, I shall do whatever you please. Just as you please,” she stammered. On January 22, 1904, Pierre described their novel situation to a colleague:

  I have wanted to write to you for a long time; excuse me if I have not done so. The cause is the stupid life which I lead at present. You have seen this sudden infatuation for radium, which has resulted for us in all the advantages of a moment of popularity.

  We have been pursued by journalists and photographers from all countries of the world; they have gone even so far as to report the conversation between my daughter and her nurse, and to describe the black-and-white cat that lives with us. . . . Further, we have had a great many appeals for money. . . . Finally, the collectors of autographs, snobs, society people, and even at times, scientists, have come to see us—in our magnificent and tranquil quarters in the laboratory—and every evening there has been a voluminous correspondence to
send off. With such a state of things I feel myself invaded by a kind of stupor. And yet all this turmoil will not perhaps have been in vain, if it results in my getting a chair and a laboratory.

  For reasons that remain unclear to this day, Pierre never trusted the Curies’ most important scientific colleague, Henri Becquerel, even after Becquerel helped them professionally and financially and never seemed to bear them ill will for eclipsing his professional stature with his own discovery. When in 1902, Pierre applied for membership in the Académie des Sciences and lost, he was certain Becquerel was responsible. The same year, he lost his second attempt at a Sorbonne chair and, when informed he was up for the Legion of Honor, refused it preemptively. Many in the local scientific community began thinking of the Curies not as unappreciated outsiders struggling to live a life of honor and science, as Marie and Pierre saw themselves, but as antisocial ingrates.

  In the middle of the Curies’ great triumph, Pierre sickened and never improved. He was wracked by pain so debilitating it made him weak, and Marie joined him in sleepless nights, watching in fear as her husband groaned in agony. The only diagnosis physicians could offer was “rheumatism,” which the Curies attempted to treat through a diet free of red meat and red wine. Pierre whispered to Marie, “It’s pretty hard, this life that we have chosen.”

  Blessing, with menace. The radium boom lasted for two decades, then collapsed. Like X-rays, radium’s emanations were discovered to be a miracle with two faces. Though exposure did indeed make people feel alive and energetic, it would be learned that the sensation came not from renewed health but from the body’s producing a torrent of red blood cells to defend itself. When Pennsylvania steel titan and international playboy Eben Byers died in 1932 after drinking Radithor every day for four years, the Wall Street Journal headlined, “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.” In the early 1920s, U.S. Radium in West Orange, New Jersey, hired eight hundred women to apply Undark Paint to watches and airplane instrument dials. Not knowing of any risk, the women used the radioactive ink as fingernail polish and moistened their work bristles with their lips for a sharper point. Nearly a decade later, they became horribly anemic, and their teeth and jaws fell out; a reporter noted, “One girl fainted at the sight of her own reflection; her body glowed as if lit from within.” In 1925, five of them sued U.S. Radium, and with the public support of New York World editor Walter Lippmann, they won their case in 1928. By then, twenty-four of the eight hundred were already dead.