Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes

Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean

Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)

***

In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.

Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900)
"Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of
the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as
the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army."
Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother
and one of her sisters died, early in her life.
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.

Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.

But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'

It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.

Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.

When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.

"Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913"
The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood.
From the Bibliothèque nationale de France
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.
Pierre Curie was an expert on piezoelectric crystals, and with the help of these crystals he helped her measure the electrical current that could pass through air from uranium. She began examining other rock samples and tried to figure out if they had the same property as uranium.

She struck gold (metaphorically speaking) when she experimented with pitchblende that contained uranium: Its radioactivity was so much stronger than uranium itself that she suspected that there must be another, unknown element in the pitchblende.

Now her task was to determine the element's atomic weight, order it into the Table of the Elements, and see what it looked like in its pure form. Pierre Curie broke off the research that he was doing to join his wife in the laboratory on the Rue Lhomond, because her research was so promising. But Marie did the hard physical labour of heating pitchblende waste (which had been shipped to the laboratory from an Austrian mining company that couldn't use it), stirring it in cauldrons with huge iron rods, and trying to isolate the radium. (They also identified polonium, but it was far weaker and therefore less interesting than radium.) Radium is rare and there was so little radium in the waste that the isolating took forever.

The laboratory was cold and leaky as well as dusty. The exposure to radium made the Curies sickly, as well as their propensity not to eat enough. Fortunately, Irène, their eldest child and the future physicist, was healthy, but sadly Marie had a miscarriage with the child afterward.

When the method for isolating radium was finally achieved, a gram of radium cost (I think) about a hundred thousand francs. And the Curies were still tremendously poor. But Marie earned her doctorate at the Sorbonne in June 1903, and both of the Curies harvested international fame as the results of their research were bruited abroad.

After that, at least in Ève Curie's telling, Marie's and Pierre's happiness in life never returned. Winning the Nobel Prize — which happened very shortly after Marie's doctorate, in the winter of 1903 — brought them a public and media attention that disrupted their home and their work lives, and demolished the quiet life that they wanted, forever.

It also whitewashed the fact that the two laureates' laboratory equipment was still not what they wanted, despite the Nobel Prize funds. It required an intervention from an American journalist who was a fervent adorer of Marie Curie to buy her more radium many years later. Before that, it took endless haggling before the Curies received a new laboratory partly financed by the Sorbonne, although at least the Nobel Prize helped them pay for a laboratory assistant. Also, it annoyed Ève and likely her parents as well that Swedish and other institutions were far happier to recognize the French couple than French institutions.

Then Pierre Curie died from being run over in the street, unexpectedly, in 1906.
It seems as if Marie merely endured her life after that. She never spoke with her children about their father.

"The Iron bridge, Warsaw, Poland" (ca. 1890-1900)
From the Library of Congress
Marie Curie was tremendously fond of the Vistula River,
which flows through her native Warsaw.
via Wikimedia Commons

They'd had two small children for whom she was now responsible alone: Irène and Ève. (Although she did have nannies to help her even before Pierre's death, and Pierre's father lived with them and was an excellent grandfather.)

Less importantly, Pierre's students were without a professor. Friends applied on her behalf for her husband's professorship at the university, when she was in shock from her husband's death and did not offer much initiative on her side. The Sorbonne agreed to employ her, as their first female professor.

She led the laboratory. Besides her authoritative knowledge of radium and other aspects of physics and chemistry that led laboratory workers to look up to her, she generously offered help to those who worked for her.

But aside from her bereavement, the prying interest in her personal life became particularly painful when she was accused of having an affair with a married man, four or five years after Pierre's death.

The public as well as her colleagues largely admired her nevertheless. The Academy of Medicine elected her as a member, as medical applications of her work became widespread. (Radium was used to eat away at tumours in cancer patients, in a technique that was called Curietherapy.) Also, she won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for herself, to add to the earlier Nobel Prize for Physics that she had shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel.

The First World War broke out. She organized trucks with mobile radiology equipment that could help surgeons detect fragments of shells, bullets, etc. and help in their work. She also patriotically bought war bonds despite predicting, accurately, that they were worthless from a financial standpoint and would decimate her money. Also, of course, a new era of social responsibility eventually drew scientists like Albert Einstein into public discourse and public foundations like the League of Nations. This politically conscientious scientific community might have helped her feel better about her own public role.

Marie Curie in a "Mobile Military Hospital X-Ray-Unit" (ca. 1915)
During World War I
From Madame Curie by Ève Curie
via Wikimedia Commons

As for the phantoms that she herself had unleashed: It became clear that radium was dangerous — she had already known that because it burned her hands, for instance, so that her laboratory introduced a protocol for handling it that she did not always follow, and she carried her gram of radium around in a lead-lined casket.

But because she and her husband had agreed not to patent their methods for extracting radium, she was not able to stop absurd companies that extracted radium and then marketed it for use in cosmetics, for example.

As Marie Curie became elderly, eye cataracts temporarily blinded her, which horrified her not just because it made life difficult in general but also because it threatened her scientific work — she had to add bright colors to her laboratory equipment in order to see it. She also developed an aplastic anaemia that eventually killed her. Both of these ailments seem to be the result of her radioactive work environment.

But before her death she still travelled with her daughters on speaking tours, holidayed in Brittany and later at Hyères, swam and cycled, skied and sailed, corresponded with strangers and with her own elderly siblings, talked with Irène about physics and heard Ève play the piano, and seems to have found things to appreciate in life.

*

Madame Curie is fervidly written, at least in the English translation by Vincent Sheean, to the point of gushing. But it also has a million lively details, thanks to Ève's free access to her parents' letters and photographs. It also helps that her interests are so diverse: from the landscapes her parents loved, through the delights of having banquet menu cards to write mathematical equations on, to political dissident life in Poland during the 1870s and 1880s. Due to her role representing and shepherding her mother for public appearances, Ève was also familiar with the kinds of things that the general public wanted to know.

I think this biography is also a towering achievement insofar as most newer biographical works on Marie, from documentary films to Wikipedia articles, seem to derive from Ève Curie's book. So, as she wished, she was able to mould her mother's reputation posthumously.

Marie Curie [Wikipedia]
Marie Curie Documentary [YouTube]

***

Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a more recent book, written in a formal prose that more or less is meant (I think) to appeal also to high school students or younger teenagers, about groups of young American women who worked in radium factories during the 1920s and 30s. For example, the girls painted needles on wristwatches with radium paint so that they would glow in the dark. Later on, in World War II, the paint would also be used for military equipment, for parts that needed to be visible by glowing with a dim light that the enemy could not see.

(Copper-doped zinc sulfide was used to make surfaces glow in the dark. For example, in German underground air raid shelters it allowed people to see doorways and stairs in the darkness, so that they would not panic or make a misstep and injure themselves. But it was used without the additives like radium and mesothorium that American radium companies preferred for the watch dials. Likely the Americans' reasoning behind adding radioactive elements was that copper-doped zinc sulfide glows bright green but only for about fifteen minutes, for example, and that glow requires previous exposure to light because it is only phosphorescence and not a self-produced light.)

The girls in the radium factories usually kept their paintbrushes fine-tipped by licking them, a technique that led them to 'eat' radium, and they were not warned adequately about radium's risks. The radium began replacing the calcium in their bones. It led to damage in their jaws, tumours and strange sicknesses.

Because the company that employed the girls paid off doctors, buried evidence and accused a few of the girls of having syphilis, and refused to accept responsibility, multiple lawsuits were filed before some of the women were compensated and able to pay for their medical treatments.

The radium killed some girls, ruined the health of others, led to an immense personal financial cost, and had less measurable but devastating effects on the personal lives of many workers as well as those of their families.

The tale of the Radium Girls is a cautionary tale that reminds us that materials in our environment that we think are safe are not always safe, that companies can shield their financial wellbeing at the expense of human lives, that cheerful lives can be degraded into lasting misery by one thing — like the omnibus that accidentally killed Pierre Curie, in Ève's book —, that advertising can make a product seem brilliant and hopeful when it is the opposite, and that we are terribly vulnerable if we contract illnesses.

But, of course, there were also brave lawyers and journalists and girls who were plaintiffs in lawsuits, loyal family members and friends, and other people, who lend the story hope. The book was written and researched with great, empathetic dedication; the author also spoke in person with many relatives of the women who were affected by the poisoning. It is very emotionally affecting to read.

Radium Girls, by Kate Moore
First published 2016 by Simon + Schuster UK

*

In 1978, the same year Luminous Processes closed in Ottawa, Peg Looney's body was exhumed. Earlier, when the Cold War threatened nuclear attacks, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission began to study radiation's effects on humans. [... ] Looney's family gave permission for her body to be exhumed and researched by Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont for the study. "The family was told that they brought her body back encased in lead because she was still so radioactive," Halm says. — Tara McClellan McAndrew, National Public Radio Illinois

The bewildering real-life postscript to the story of Radium Girls, which concentrates on the 1910s through the 1940s, is that briefly after the Radium Dial Company collapsed because of these lawsuits for radium poisoning, the owner founded a new radium-based company in one of the affected towns: Ottawa, Illinois. Into the 1970s, the company (Luminous Processes) was still using radium, arguing that as long as the workers didn't lick it, they were fine. In fact they were, mostly, not.

Then "the state forced the factory to close in 1978 after repeated health and environmental violations," as a National Public Radio Illinois article from February 2018 notes. Another article explains, citing a book by Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, that "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined it that year for having radiation levels '1,666 times' the allowable amount. After failing to make the necessary improvements, Luminous [Processes] closed."

A New York Times article from 1988 even mentions high levels of gamma ray radiation at the Manhattan offices of the company run by the son of the founder of Luminous Processes, so clearly the entire family of the owner had learned nothing.

In Ottawa, Illinois, a public health assessment for the federal government stated as recently as 2006:

Based on current site conditions, IDPH concludes that exposure to radium-226 in soil at NPL-11 and NPL-8 poses a public health hazard. Residents, workers, and trespassers have a low increased risk of cancer from exposure to contaminated soil.

(IDPH is the Illinois Department of Public Health.)

Lastly, the National Public Radio article also notes — with alarming implications for the present and future — that President Donald Trump has suggested reducing money for the Superfund programme that decontaminates such sites.

It is problematic if federal funding is not there for decontamination projects especially as in some cases like Ottawa's, the companies that have caused the problem no longer exist, and will never pay in any concrete material sense for their own ecological abuses.

"High Radiation Found in Plant On East 44th St.", by David E. Pitt (May 5, 1988) [New York Times]
"Public Health Assessment for Ottawa Radiation Areas" p. 1 [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry]
"The Radium Girls: Cleaning Up Contamination" by Mary Hansen (February 1, 2018) [National Public Radio Illinois]
"The Radium Girls: An Illinois Tragedy" by Tara McClellan McAndrew (January 25, 2018) [National Public Radio Illinois]
Radium Girls [Wikipedia]
[Articles retrieved March 24, 2019]