The Discovery of Radium by Marie Curie | Hacker News Reader

The Discovery of Radium by Marie Curie

gutenberg.org

62 pointssohkamyung20 comments

The time this was discovered was an incredible time of discovery, largely due to the new availability of high vacuum pumps and high voltage in glass. People were messing with these cathode ray tubes all over, and they led to so much.

Roentgen found x-rays in 1895 in a high vacuum, high voltage glass tube. This led to the discovery of the electron and quantum physics at the time (and later, the double helical nature of DNA was found from xray diffraction). Following that work, Becquerel discovered natural radiation. Curie and Rutherford followed that up with nuclear physics, which eventually led to atomic warfare, radiation therapy, mars rover power supplies, and nuclear power stations.

Meanwhile, CRTs also gave way to vacuum tube electronics like radios, amplified music, and large-scale telephone networks.

And of course the TV.

Man I love cathode ray tubes. Wrote a thing about them once:

https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed-th...

Sidenote: first person to win the Nobel twice; only person to win in two different scientific fields.

Extraordinary achievement - especially considering how difficult things must have been for female scientists back then.

*Maria Skłodowska-Curie.

Also the link is inaccessible in Germany.

Apparently blocked due to a German court case in 2018 [1]. Did a notice like the one in the article appear when you accessed the website?

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/04/project-gutenberg-blocks-a...

> Then I thought that there should be in the minerals some unknown element having a much greater radioactivity than uranium or thorium. And I wanted to find and to separate that element, and I settled to that work with Professor Curie. We thought it would be done in several weeks or months, but it was not so. It took many years of hard work to finish that task.

Sounds like every software project I've worked on!

Edit: I love also the .txt formatting, wish more books had this option https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61622/61622-0.txt

...just about a century ago, and only about 25 years later, the atomic bomb was realized. It makes you wonder what 2045 will bring as you look around at quantum computing and biotechnology.

Not too long ago, I read that one can see her notebooks yourself! You can sign up and be on a list to do so! If you visit Paris... And sign a waiver... And wear some protective clothing...

Because her notebooks are still radioactive and will be for quite some time to come.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/27/marie-curie/

(I still chuckle - nervously - whenever I am reminded about this fact!)

Here is the link to the Nobel prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/summary/

The distribution of the prize is interesting: - 1/2 went to Becquerel (who's that?) - 1/4 went to Pierre Curie - 1/4 went to Marie Curie

He was actually the person that discovered radioactivity. He did so when studying phosphorescence, and discovered that uranium salts (that are phosphorescent too), also exposed a photographic plate even when they not had been exposed to light, and even through black paper. You can clearly argue about the share of the price, and he was also clearly doing the discovery by luck.

The Curies, and especially Marie Curie was the ones that sorted out the nature of radioactivity and discovered two new elements in the process, but the discovery of radioactivity itself was quite important, so that he received the Nobel prize was not really undeserved.

He worked with the Curies on their research into radioactivity and is the namesake for the becquerel, a unit of radioactivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Becquerel. (Other units happen to be “rutherfords” and “curies”.)

Right there in the text: Author: Marie Sklodowska Curie

So why the are you people still changing her name to just Curie?

That's not in the text of the book, only in the metadata added by Project Gutenberg. You can clearly see her signing her name as M. Curie in the image on that website, and (with a brief Google search) I can't find an example of Curie going by her maiden name after getting married, while there are plenty of examples of the opposite: cf. this letter to Alexander Graham Bell: https://www.loc.gov/resource/magbell.12200101/?sp=1

Completely tangential but it's a common thing for a married woman to take the surname of her spouse's family and suppress the maiden name...

Possibily because the most obvious place her name is written is on the image of the front cover, where it's written as "Madame M. Curie". I'd not heard heard her referred to as Marie Sklodowska Curie before - TIL.

Us people are doing that to her name because us people generally use first and last name when referring to individuals and ignore the middle name.

For example:

Melanie Trump

Elizabeth Warren

Steve Jobs

Bill Gates

...

That’s not her middle name. It’s her maiden name.

Because people find it inconvenient to use middle names everywhere, particularly if they’re long?

Skłodowska is her maiden name, not her middle name (which was Salomea).

In American English, when people retain their birth surnames in the middle of their name after marriage, they become "middle names" just like a second given name. Often USAns don't know that this custom is not universal, leading to dreadful faux pas when they assume things like that Hugo Chávez Frías's surname was "Frías".

Didn’t she replace her middle name with her maiden name?

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