by P. D. Smith
On 16 March 1903, a few months before Rutherford’s visit to Paris, the true ‘mystery of radium’, as the London Times called it, suddenly dawned on the world. Pierre Curie informed the French Academy of Sciences that pure radium chloride was always 1.5°C warmer than its surroundings. This happened ‘without combustion, without chemical change of any kind, and without any change in its molecular structure’.47 Radium could melt more than its own weight of ice every hour. It was astounding news. According to Marie Curie, it ‘defied all contemporary scientific experience’.48 And, for the first time, atomic energy had been described in terms of heat to a non-scientific audience.
People had heard about radium’s extraordinary rays. Indeed three days later, Sir William Crookes gave what The Times said was a ‘beautiful demonstration’ of radium rays to the Royal Society. Using a screen of zinc sulphide, he revealed the brilliant phosphorescence that occurs when it is placed near radium: ‘Viewed through a magnifying glass, the sensitive 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.’49
But Pierre Curie’s announcement revealed ‘forces of a totally different order of magnitude’. The Times told its readers: ‘Apparently we have in radium a substance having the power to gather up and convert into heat some form of ambient energy with which we are not yet acquainted.’50 Although dreams of perpetual motion (like Tripler’s) were ruled out by the newspaper, the mysterious source of the energy seemed to be challenging the laws of thermodynamics, those fundamental principles of nineteenth-century physics that were carved in stone on the tablets of science. The world stood on the brink of a ‘new wonderland’ of science. As the respected Edinburgh Review put it:
A Crookes tube does not produce X-rays unless we pass a current through it; a lamp gives no light unless we keep it supplied with oil: but uranium and radium continue to give out Becquerel rays day after day and year after year, with no outside stimulus of any kind, and with an intensity that shows no measurable diminution… What is the source of the energy of their rays?51
A few weeks after Pierre Curie’s announcement, Soddy wrote an article summarizing recent advances in radioactivity. Significantly, he said that people now had to think of matter ‘not only as mass, but also as a store of energy’. Soddy was writing two years before Albert Einstein began to consider the equivalence of matter and energy. The amounts of energy in matter were ‘colossal’, said Soddy. Together with Rutherford, he had made a rough estimate: ‘The energy of radioactive change must therefore be at least twenty-thousand times, and may be a million times, as great as the energy of any molecular change.’52
The potential energy locked up within matter and slowly released in the radioactive glow of radium was indeed colossal. To illustrate this idea of matter as energy, Soddy then used an extraordinary image. From now on people should, he said, ‘regard 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’.53
In February that year, Sir William Crookes had vividly depicted the amount of potential energy in radium by saying just one gram could raise the entire fleet of the British Navy several thousand feet into the sky. Newspapers duly provided graphic illustrations showing the pride of the Admiralty hoisted unceremoniously into mid-air. Soddy was in Boston at the time this story broke in the American press. He mentioned it in a letter to Rutherford, saying that Sir William had been misunderstood as saying a gram of radium could ‘blow the British Navy sky high’.54 Sir William had been merely trying to depict the potential energy, not conjure up a superweapon. But as nuclear historian Spencer Weart has said, ‘scientist, press, and public had together crafted a new thought’.55 It wasn’t that far short of the truth.
In France, Gustave Le Bon, a science writer who knew the publicity value of dramatic predictions, told a newspaper that it would not be long before a scientist invented a radioactive device to ‘blow up the whole earth’.56 Even the innately cautious Rutherford echoed Soddy’s notion, ‘playfully’ suggesting to a friend that with the ‘proper detonator… an explosive wave of atomic disintegration might be started through all matter which would transmute the whole mass of the globe into helium or similar gases, and, in very truth, leave not one stone upon another’. It might have been a casual remark between friends, but it was too good not to print, and it duly appeared in January 1904.57
In the same month as this frightening prospect was reported, Frederick Soddy gave a lecture to a military audience on the latest advances in radioactivity. Unlike Rutherford, Soddy was not afraid of looking into the future and speculating publicly about the applications of pure science. Today he would tempt fate. Whoever cracked the secret of atomic energy, he said, ‘would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose’.58 The idea of the atomic chain reaction had been born and with it a scenario that would have quickened the heartbeat of Dr Strangelove himself: an atomic doomsday bomb.
At the end of 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie learned that they, together with Henri Becquerel, had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Pierre was a man who could not be flattered by honours. He did not visit Stockholm to collect the award for two years. Both Marie and Pierre were feeling the effects of radiation poisoning: his legs shook and he suffered unexplained pains. Both of them struggled against fatigue.
In his Nobel lecture, which he finally delivered in 1905, a year before his tragic death in a street accident, Pierre returned to the subject he had raised at the dinner party with Rutherford and his wife. He spoke of his fears ‘that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands’. Pierre implicitly compared himself to Alfred Nobel who, as well as establishing the Nobel awards just four years previously, had also invented dynamite and hoped thereby to end war. Powerful explosives may have ‘enabled man to do wonderful work’, said Pierre, but they are also ‘a terrible means of destruction in the hands of great criminals who are leading the peoples towards war’.
Pierre’s words were dignified and far from sensational, but his concerns were clear. He acknowledged that more good than harm came from scientific discovery. But he left his distinguished audience – gathered together to celebrate the achievements of science – with a distinct sense of unease about the future. As they set out on a journey of discovery that could yield unimaginable power, it was right, he said, that they should ask ‘whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature’.59 It was a question that would echo down through the twentieth century.
At the beginning of 1904, a reporter from the Strand Magazine arrived in Paris to interview the discoverers of radium. Cleveland Moffett, a writer of mystery stories including a minor classic, ‘The Mysterious Card’,60 met Pierre Curie in ‘one of the rambling sheds’ at the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles where he and Marie had isolated radium and polonium.61
When he first saw Pierre, the ‘tall, pale man, slightly bent’ was intently watching ‘a small porcelain dish, where a colourless liquid was simmering’. This was the painstaking chemistry of refining radium by crystallization. The pure metal had still not been isolated, Pierre Curie told the reporter. What they were now trying to obtain was radium chloride: ‘small white crystals, which may be crushed into a white powder, and which look like ordinary salt’.62
Pierre showed Moffett a sealed glass tube ‘not much larger than a thick match’ which was partly covered by lead and contained a white powder. He explained that the radium in the tube was very radioactive: ‘Lead stops the harmful rays, that would otherwise make trouble.’ He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a ‘forearm scarred and reddened from fresh-healed sores’, caused by the radioactive element. Pierre explained how Henri Becquerel had travelled to London carrying in his waistcoat pocket a small tube of radium for a lecture. A
bout a fortnight later ‘the professor observed that the skin under his pocket was beginning to redden and fall away, and finally a deep and painful sore formed there and remained for weeks before healing’.63
Would Monsieur Curie say therefore that radium was ‘an element of destruction’, asked the reporter.
‘Undoubtedly it has a power of destruction,’ replied Pierre, ‘but that power may be tempered or controlled.’64
Cleveland Moffett noted that the physicist’s hands ‘were much peeled, and very sore from too much contact with radium’. Pierre told him that for several days he had been unable to dress himself.65
‘Was it true,’ asked Moffett, adding with a dramatic emphasis, ‘could it be true, that this strange substance gives forth heat and light ceaselessly and is really an inexhaustible source of energy?’
Pierre repeated the extraordinary details of radium’s innate heat. He added: ‘a given quantity of radium will melt its own weight of ice every hour’.
‘For ever?’ asked the journalist.
The cautious scientist hesitated. ‘So far as we know – for ever.’66
Then the dignified physicist led Moffett into a darkened room where the reporter from the Strand saw with his own eyes – just as Rutherford had a few months before – the ‘clear glow’ of radium in the tube. The light it gave off was, noted the amazed writer, bright enough to read a page by.
‘Then radium may be the light of the future?’ he asked.67
Pierre shook his head. Patiently he explained, as he had done many times before to journalists, that ‘we should pay rather dearly for such a light’. People exposed to large quantities of radium would suffer paralysis, blindness and various nervous disorders. And then there was the cost. ‘Radium is worth about three thousand times its weight in pure gold,’ said Pierre. In 1904 a kilogram cost £400,000. There were perhaps just four grams in the whole world: ‘you could heap it all in a tablespoon’, he said.68
Cleveland Moffett listened as Pierre told him about his recent journey to London, where he had delivered a lecture on radium. There he had met Crookes, who had shown him a ‘curious little instrument’ he had just invented. The English chemist called it a spinthariscope, from the Greek word for scintillation, or bright spark.69 Sir William explained that he had taken the word from Homer’s Hymn to Apollo. There it describes the radiance of the ancient god Apollo, often associated with the sun:
Here from the ship leaped the far-darting Apollo,
Like a star at midday, while from him flitted scintillations of fire,
And the brilliancy reached to heaven.70
In this way a 2,500-year-old description of a Greek god became the name of a device that revealed the wonders of radium to thousands of ordinary people in the twentieth century.
The spinthariscope consisted of a fluorescent screen, a shiny brass magnifying eyepiece and a minute fragment of radium – too small to be seen with the naked eye, but enough to last for 30,000 years according to some estimates.71 Looking through the lens in a darkened room revealed a sparkling display, ‘scintillations of fire’ as the classically trained Sir William would have said. Soon advertisements for these simple devices appeared in all the newspapers.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings, recalls that the spinthariscope was a fashionable scientific toy in the Edwardian period, selling for a few shillings. When he was a boy, his Uncle Abe showed him one. Sacks ‘found the spectacle enchanting, magical, like looking at an endless display of meteors or shooting stars’.72 For Pierre Curie, the ‘vision’ he saw through the spinthariscope was ‘one of the most beautiful and impressive he had ever witnessed; it was as if he had been allowed to assist at the birth of a universe – or at the death of a molecule’.73
While in Paris, Moffett also met Dr Jean Danysz, a biologist from the Institut Pasteur who had been doing tests with radium on animals. ‘I have no doubt that a kilogramme of radium would be sufficient to destroy the population of Paris,’ Danysz said coolly:
Men and women would be killed just as easily as mice. They would feel nothing during their exposure to the radium, nor realize that they were in any danger. And weeks would pass after their exposure before anything would happen. Then gradually the skin would begin to peel off and their bodies would become one great sore. Then they would become blind. Then they would die from paralysis and congestion of the spinal cord.74
Danysz was speaking forty years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Combine this view of the lethal radioactivity of radium with the explosive tube of Bulwer-Lytton’s fictional vril, which can be fired at cities hundreds of miles away, and you have a nuclear missile.
Dr Danysz added that, paradoxically, animals ‘thrive’ after a short exposure to radium. This real but temporary effect led to radium soon being marketed as a health tonic – ‘liquid sunshine’ as the labels claimed. But such radium tonics had lethal consequences for anyone who drank them regularly. The apparently beneficial effects are caused by the body over-producing red blood cells, a natural defence mechanism which makes the person feel briefly invigorated. One Pittsburgh industrialist drank a brand of radium water called ‘Radithor’ every day. He liked it so much he even sent crates of the tonic to his friends. But it slowly poisoned him, and he died painfully: the bones in his jaws were decaying and he was suffering from anaemia and a brain abscess.75
Danysz and his colleagues at the Institut Pasteur had also found that radium slowed the development of moth larvae by a factor of three. ‘It was very much as if a young man of twenty-one should keep the appearance of twenty-one for 250 years!’ Danysz boasted to the journalist, with rather unscientific exaggeration.76 Not only was radium a potential energy source, but it might also be the elixir of eternal youth. There were precedents here too in alchemy. The mythical philosopher’s stone was not just about making gold, it was also capable of curing all human ailments. The quest to discover the secret of this miraculous power – the source of both wealth and health – has enthralled people ever since.
The fantastic claims being made for radium echoed another of the alchemists’ dreams. For radium promised humankind the ultimate power, the power of the gods: the Parisian biologists claimed to have used the ‘strange stimulation’ of radium ‘to create life where there would have been no life’.77 One of the most famous alchemists was Paracelsus (1494–1541), who left a remarkable body of texts and teachings. A true Renaissance man, he rejected book-learning as the route to knowledge and instead taught his students to trust the evidence of their own senses: ‘He who wishes to explore Nature must tread her books with his feet.’78 A firm believer in using chemistry to both diagnose and treat disease, Paracelsus has even been praised by the Prince of Wales in 1982 as an early practitioner of holistic medicine.79 But among his more outlandish boasts was that with alchemy he could create life itself.
The writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe satirized the hubris of scientists in his version of the Faust story by alluding to the recipes of Paracelsus. Mephistopheles has to lend a hand to breathe life into a homunculus, or ‘little man’, which Faust’s overly ambitious assistant, Wagner, is seeking to create by alchemical means. A century later, in 1908, Somerset Maugham’s novel The Magician described how a modern-day alchemist (based on the real occultist Aleister Crowley) attempts to create a living being, also by Paracelsian techniques. But in the age of radium it seemed that science might finally realize this ancient dream.
The Parisian scientists told Moffett how unfertilized sea-urchin eggs had been miraculously stimulated into growth. He informed his readers that ‘we may in the future be able to produce new species of insects, moths, butterflies, perhaps birds and fishes, by simply treating the eggs with radium rays’. He suggested that, given greater quantities of radium, even mammals might be changed in this way, ‘to produce new species among larger creatures, mice, rabbits, guinea-pigs, etc’. Moffett also told how French scientists were using radium to create ‘monsters’. They had found that tadpoles exposed
to radium developed differently, their tails began to disappear and they grew ‘a new breathing apparatus’.80 In the 1950s, fears about radioactivity and genetic mutation would spawn now classic monster movies, such as Godzilla and Them! The stirrings of Frankenstein’s monster can be heard in these words of Moffett’s, and perhaps for that reason he chose not to dwell on this frightening subject.
Cleveland Moffett ends his article on radium’s miraculous potential with the triumphant claim that ‘we are entering upon a domain of new, strange knowledge and drawing near to some of Nature’s most hallowed secrets’.81 It was a message of hope. But now, in an age that has become deeply ambivalent about science and scientists, it sounds more like a warning.
Following the discoveries made by the Curies, matter soon came to be seen as a ‘reservoir of atomic energy’.82 Sir William Crookes had suggested in a speech to physicists in Berlin in 1903 that if natural radioactivity was caused by the disintegration of atoms, then all matter was in a state of inevitable decay: ‘This fatal quality of atomic dissociation appears to be universal and operates whenever we brush a piece of glass with silk; it works in the sunshine and raindrops, and in the lightnings and flame; it prevails in the waterfall and the stormy sea.’83 As someone commented, matter – the basic substance of the universe – was ‘doomed to destruction’.84
