Pitchblende was an expensive mineral, and we could not afford to buy a sufficient quantity. At that time the principal source of this mineral was at St. Joachimsthal (Bohemia) where there was a mine which the Austrian government worked for the extraction of uranium. We believed that we would find all the radium and a part of the polonium in the residues of this mine, residues which had so far not been used at all. Thanks to the influence of the Academy of Sciences of Vienna, we secured several tons of these residues at an advantageous price, and we used it as our primary material. In the beginning we had to draw on our private resources to pay the costs of our experiment; later we were given a few subventions and some help from outside sources. The question of quarters was particularly serious; we did not know where we could conduct our chemical treatments. We had been obliged to start them in an abandoned storeroom across a court from the workroom where we had our electrometric installation. This was a wooden shed with a bituminous floor and a glass roof which did not keep the rain out, and without any interior arrangements. The only objects it contained were some worn pine tables, a cast-iron stove, which worked badly, and the blackboard which Pierre Curie loved to use. There were no hoods to carry away the poisonous gases thrown off in our chemical treatments, so that it was necessary to carry them on outside in the court, but when the weather was unfavorable we went on with them inside, leaving the windows open. [Illustration: A view of the extraction of radium in the old shed where the first radium was obtained.]