Marie Curie

181 Pages·1978·7.823 MB·English

by  Robert William Reid

MARIE
CURIE
By the same author
MARIE
Tongues of Conscience
CURIE
Robert Reid
New York
SATURDAY REVIEW PRESS/E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
For Nancy Reid
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are reproduced by kind permission of the
Laboratoire Curie. The photograph of the Solvay Conference appears by permission
of the Conseil de Physique at Solvay.
Copyright © 1974 by Robert Reid
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
First published in the U.S.A. 1974 by
Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief
passages in connecrion with a review written for inclusion in a
magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
ISBN: 0-8415-0317-6
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-3469
Contents
Acknowledgments 9
I Polish Childhood 13
2 Positivist Girlhood 22
3 Breaking the Bonds ^9
Paris 42
4
Pierre 56
5
6 A Sense of Values 64
7 Discovery 71
8 Fruitful Years 84
Competition
9 99
lO All the Rage 108
II The Prize 122
12 The Spirit of a Whipped Dog 136
Death in the Family 148
15
14 The Widow 157
15 Academic Miscalculation 171
i6 The Breath of Scandal 189
The Terrible Year 196
17
i8 Recovery 215
19 War 227
20 Missy 242
21 America 257
22 The Suspect 271
23 Dignifying Science 283
24
A New Generation 296
25 Left in Peace 312
Notes 323
Selected Bibliography
537
Index
339
Acknowledgments
In preparing this biography I have been helped in many ways
by relations, colleagues and co-workers of Marie Curie, as well
as by some who, in the early years of the century, worked in
the enthralling period of chemistry and physics following the
discovery of radioactivity. As I write, knowledge of radio­
activity is seventy-seven years old and the numbers who worked
on the subject in the fruitful ten or twenty years after its birth,
are dwindling. Sadly, three who made significant contributions
in the field, one a chemist, one a physicist, and one a medic,
and who gave me their time and help, died before the book was
complete. I gratefully acknowledge my debt to them all.
The opinions expressed in this book are of course my own;
I was freely allowed to form them because of the generous
access to documents given me, particularly by the Laboratoire
Curie. There I drew on the considerable skill and patience of
Mme M. Bordry, the archivist of the Laboratoire, who was
always ready with help and support. Members of many other
institutions willingly gave me assistance and I wish to thank,
among others, the staffs of the Academie des Sciences, the
American Institute of Physics, the Biblioth^que Nationale, the
Bodleian Library, the British Museum, Cambridge University
Library, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Columbia
University Library, the Fawcett Library, the Glowna Library
of the Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej, the Library of
Congress, the Muzeum Marii Sklodowskiej-Curie of Warsaw,
New York Public Library, the Royal Institution, the United
Nations Library of Geneva and Yale University Library.
For their constructive comments on the manuscript I am
grateful, as always, to my wife Penelope, to Diana Crawfurd and
to J. E. Stanfield. I have greatly valued the work of my skilful
Acknowledgments
and tactful editors, Philip Ziegler and John Knowler. For their
helpful comments on parts of the manuscript I am indebted to MARIE
Mrs Malcolm W. Davis, Jozef Garlinski, Dr G. E. Harrison,
Professor Francis Perrin and Dr J. Vennart.
CURIE
I wish to thank the following for allowing me to use manu­
script material in their possession or to which they hold copy­
right: Columbia University Library, Laboratoire Curie, M.
Maurice Curie, Mrs William Brown Meloney, Professor P. H.
Fowler, Yale University Library: and the following for per­
mission to make quotations from their publications: Librairie
F^lix Alcan, for extracts from Im Kadiologie et la Guerre by Marie
Curie; Cambridge University Press for extracts from Kutherford
by A. S. Eve; Editions Bernard Grasset for extracts from
Souvenirs et Kecontres by Camille Marbo; Doubleday & Company, Inc.
for letters from Madame Curie by Eve Curie, translated by Vincent
Sheehan, and Curtis Brown Ltd for extracts from Vierre Curie by
Marie Curie.
lO
Chapter i
Polish Childhood
Maria Sklodowska was born in a small apartment in one of the
cobbled streets leading from the red brick battlertients of the city
walls of Warsaw. On one side of the entrance to the house in Freta
Street is a plaque commemorating her birth - on November 7th,
1867. On the other side is another plaque with a short list of names
of the People’s Army Staff who fell there fighting in 1944 in the
Warsaw Rising. These memorials, side by side, illustrate well the
two national qualities the Poles keep very dear and which they
hold up to new generations who might otherwise forget too easily:
first, pride in the struggle for a national identity, and second, pride
in intellectual achievement.
No generation of Poles during the past few centuries has avoided
the struggle for the existence of the nation. Maria Sklodowska,
later to be known as Marie Curie, was one of a generation which
accepted it as a fact of everyday life. Just as today the old city has
memorials to those who died trying to preserve it for the Poles
themselves, so too the Warsaw of the 1860s kept its memories and
shrines. As children Maria’s brothers and sisters had to walk only
a few steps from their door to the site of the old Barbican in the
city walls and the spot where, in 1656, the citizens of Warsaw were
cut down defending their homeland from the invading Swedes.
The Swedes were one of many armies to have tramped back­
wards and forwards over Poland. Muscovites, Teutonic knights,
Austrian infantiers. Tsarist cavalry, Prussian lancers and Nazi
stormtroopers are only some of those who have seen this piece
of Central Europe as legitimate territorial pickings. Implicit in the
acts of plunder have been either the inferiority or the dispensability
of the people whose territory it was. Bismarck had a certain hypo­
critical compassion for them. He wrote to his sister in 1861, ‘Hit
13
l^olish Childhood
Marie Curie
But the generation that produced Maria Sklodowska’s genera­
the Poles till they despair of their very lives. I have every sym­
tion became cowed. The Russian boot had been heavy for too
pathy for their position, but if we are to survive, our only course
long. Only the stories of glory remained. Jozef Sklodowski’s
is to exterminate them.’^
eldest son, Wladislaw, was in any case a more conventional and
Hitler had a similar attitude, but with no pretence of compas­
submissive man than most of the others in his family. To him and
sion. In 1940 one of his Polish provincial Gauleiters, preparing
to many other Poles it was obvious that Russia was too powerful
the ground for the concentration camps, aped his attitude; ‘Not
and too rutliless a neighbour. Freedom for Poland would come
even an inch of the land we have conquered will ever belong to
only when Russia condescended to give it. Wladislaw elected to
a Pole again. Poles can work for us, but not as rulers, only as
compromise with the system. Like his father before him he set
serfs’.*
about getting himself a Russian scientific education in Russia, in
The first of these statements was written six years before the
Russian.
birth of Maria Sklodowska, and the second six years after her
He pushed himself slowly up the Russo-Polish academic ladder
death. During her years in Poland, masterful attitudes were no
and into a job teaching physics at a Warsaw school. During this
different; only the master differed. In 1867 Russia was the master.
steady progress in a conservative career he found himself a girl,
Poland had emerged from the eighteenth century as a nation
a teacher as might have been predicted, who had similar interests in
partitioned piecemeal among its neighbours, Austria, Prussia and
music, poetry and science, and who would clearly make a devoted
Russia. In what was left of central Poland, now named the Con­
wife within the constraints of the strictly limited combined income
gress Kingdom, the so-called King of Poland was in fact the
they could expect as teachers.
Emperor of Russia himself. Russia, like every other nation that
VClien Wladislaw met her. Mademoiselle Boguska was the
sat hard upon Poland, was a hated conqueror, no matter what its
principal of a small girls’ boarding school in Freta Street. She was
professed intentions for Polish self-determination. In 1830 Russia
dark, handsome and quite masculine in appearance; Wladislaw
had beaten down a Polish military revolt with unrestrained bru­
in his way was somewhat feminine with his light eyes and thin
tality. Again in 1864 an uprising had ended with the cropped heads
whiskers. But together they made an imposing pair, and posing
of five Poles dangling from a public scaffold on the hill outside the
for a photograph as they did, among the young ladies of the
Warsaw citadel.
The Sklodowski family fought as well as any patriots in defence school, with their straight backs, bobbed hair and corseted waists,
they looked every inch the typical Victorian parents radiating the
of the homeland. Maria’s grandfather, Jo2ef, had been 26 when
he took part in the 1830 fracas, and several of his seven healthy sternness, and conventions of that rank.
children saw both blood and suffering in their generation’s fight. They spent their early married years on the first floor of the
Jozef’s third son, Zdzislaw, had held in his arms the bleeding body Freta street house. As principal of the school Madame Sklodowska
of the revolutionary leader. Colonel Marcin Borelowski, and had been allotted rooms there. The whole establishment - school
watched him die. Jozef’s eldest daughter, Boleslawa, like so many and apartment - was tiny, so that what family life there was, was
young women in this coimtry where female inferiority was not much of it conducted in public, and much of it to the accompani­
so readily assumed as in other European countries was deeply ment of girlish screams or the patter overhead of feet on deal floor­
embroiled. Acting as an undercover agent for the insurgents, she boards. They had status, but few tangible rewards. The fruits of
helped organise the family home into a little hospital, to which she love, however, were plentiful.
guided wounded rebels and nursed them until they were fit enough During five of the eight years she taught, administered and lived
to be smuggled to the Austrian border.* in Freta Street the young wife was pregnant. A son Jozef, named
14 15
Marie Curie Polish Childhood
after his grandfather, had at last followed three girls: Sofia, made on a policy of replacement of Polish officials by Russian
Bronislawa and Helena. In the early spring of 1867 she found her­ immigrants.
self pregnant yet again. Maria was six years old when Sklodowski was forced out of his
llie few years that followed were the most stable, and the supplementary school post of under-inspector, and he was made
happiest they were all to have together. The parents were a self- to give up his school lodgings.
controlled (perhaps over self-controlled) pair who ran the family There were several moves about the city before Sklodowski
efficiently and with little demonstration of either anger or physical found a job - a position little more than a boarding house keeper.
affection. Sklodowski imposed his Victorian father’s sense of He took an apartmetit where he could lodge boys of school age
propriety. He admired intellectual achievement particularly of new and give them tuition.
scientific kind, and the strict observance of external morality. Again the family lived among the cries of strange voices, but
Sklodowska imposed her Victorian mother’s sense of uncom­ here the young owners of the voices had also to be accommodated.
plaining duty. She accepted the woman’s role in family affairs, Maria, as the youngest member of the family, had to sleep on a
and displayed an intense religious devotion. And they lived their couch in the dining-room and be clear of it by six every morning
lives in the subdued but effective atmosphere of a police State. so that the place could be got ready for the pupils’ meals.
When her time came early in the winter term of 1867, Madame She was a timid child, small and nervous, but old for her years,
Sklodowska as on the four earlier occasions, had to bear her they said. They probably meant that she had a logical turn of mind,
labour pains while the school carried on around the improvised that might have seemed a certain coldness to those who did not
delivery ward. Sheets, pillows, swabs and innumerable jugs of hot know her well. It was part of her inheritance; her father passed on
water which inevitably accompanied the event in those days, were to her not only his rational mind and his preciseness, but also an
carried in over the heads of small girls. Maria Salomee, as she was introspective nature and a ready acceptance of convention. From
to be christened, was born in the bedroom of the Freta Street her mother she derived her sense of duty and also, her total refusal
apartment on November 7th without any undue complications. to compromise. In her mother this immensely strong trait showed
Her arrival did however force Sklodowski to face the problem of itself most forcefully in her religious attitudes. The intensity with
his income. What had once supported a pair of schoolteachers which she took her daily doses of Catholicism deeply impressed the
with modest tastes, was no longer adequate for a family of seven. little girl. In the well-attended city churches Madame Sklodowska
Within a few weeks they had moved to a nearby Warsaw high publicly displayed uncompromising goodness and dutifulness.
school for boys, where an apartment was provided and Sklodowski Maria deeply admired her mother for these characteristics.
could combine his post of professor of mathematics and physics No child could possibly avoid religion in Warsaw in the 1870s.
with a job providing a second income: school under-inspector. ^ Its influence was everywhere apparent, and is still obvious to any­
These few years saw the slow but calculated effects of Russian body walking the streets of Poland today. Within a few yards of
pressure acting on the beaten-down nation. The most ruthless Maria’s birthplace, for example, was the Baroque Dominican
period of Russianisation of Poland had begun in 1867, the year of Church, white and noble, where she could peep in and watch
Maria Sklodowska’s birth. The planned programme affected white-robed friars pushing mops over the black and white tiles;
every aspect of Polish life. The Polish law courts were dis­ immediately opposite was the Church of the Holy Ghost: over­
established. The words ‘Vistula Land’ were substituted for decorated with carvings and guilded monuments; and down the
‘Poland’ on maps of the Congress Kingdom. Not only was streets sloping from Freta gently to the Vistula, she could pass the
Russian turned into the country’s official language, a start was Church of the Nuns of the Holy Sacrament, with the low and red-
16 17
Alarie Curie
Polish Childhood
roofed convent alongside, and in and out of which glided black
certain subject for psychologists and psychiatrists to debate. What
clothed figures of her own sex looking serene and good. But for
is certain is that the age which made a necessity, even a fetish, of
Maria the mystical experience was soon to come into conflict with
mourning, with black-curtained windows, black-veiled women
rationalism. Whether rationalism or mysticism would prevail was
and black-edged notepapcr, also unconscionably prolonged the
determined by a series of tragic events in the family’s life. Maria
agony. The new loss was catastrophic to Sklodowski himself.
was deeply impressed by the amount of time her mother spent on
Among the children, the youngest, Maria, now ten years old,
her knees in a church pew apparendy in intimate contact with her
was most deeply affected. The period of mourning was allowed
Maker. It was also clear to her that there was a barrier to intimacy
to drag on for several years and the effect clung to both father
between herself and her mother. Deference of children to their
and child for too long.
parents was the custom, and they addressed their elders in the
It was this unnecessarily drawn out event which caused the
third person. But in this family the distance and the problems ran
rationalism she had learnt from her father to conflict with the
deeper. Quite suddenly Maria noticed that her mother began to
mysticism to which her mother had introduced her. Maria was
avoid kissing or even embracing the children. Her mother sus­
unable to understand logically what it was that had so deeply
pected, rightly as it turned out, that she was suffering from the
touched and influenced her mother. The death, she now saw, was
first symptoms of tuberculosis. making her father a prematurely old man. The wasteful effects of
This coldness within the family might in the 1870s have seemed the tragedy finally tipped the scales. Religion lost. Three or four
cruel and unnecessary, whereas it was a wise practice in advance of years later she rejected it completely. Unusually at such an early
its time. But the effects of being kept at a distance by the mother age, she became what T. H. Huxley had just invented a word for:
she ‘passionately admired’ were deep; Maria was never afterwards agnostic. She had taken a step which led her more easily in the
able easily to accept physical closeness. direction of science.
A lesser but still important problem for Sklodowski was that All her life Maria suffered from agonies of shyness and timidity.
poverty was creeping up on him, and was now suddenly made When little more than a baby she was made to stand in front of her
acute by having to find money to send his wife to expensive sana­ class and recite her newly-acquired Russian for the benefit of a
toria in France. Worse was to come, however, when an outbreak stern-faced Russian-speaking inspector of schools; the trauma of
of typhus among the pupils spread to the Sklodowskis. Among its this mild experience stayed with her all her life. The timid manners
victims was the eldest child, Sofia, who died early in 1876. And and fragile reactions were in fact only outward symptoms of
very soon Mme Sklodowska’s tuberculosis began to show itself deeper nervous troubles. There were times when she broke under
in more distressing symptoms. Earlier lethargy gave way to the strain.
The first occasion, from which she had to be nursed carefully
fatigue, the muffled cough was more frequent and the blood on
back to health, was when she was 15 years old. She had had the
the handkerchief was frightening to the older children who under­
first steps of her education guided by the many teacher-members
stood what the stains meant. In an age familiar with the disease, the
of her own family, and had then passed through small private
prognosis was all too easy. She was dead within two years of her
educational establishments, and finally through the State system
eldest child. For the second time in her short life Maria sat with
in Warsaw. She emerged triumphant with a gold medal.
what remained of the family and watched a Catholic priest leave
But the effort to succeed took its toll. She was always peculiarly
a death-bed.
but typically reticent in describing the pressure which brought on
Whether the Victorian attitude to death was healthy is an un­
what doctors, lacking any better diagnosis, called her ‘nervous
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