Chemists -- France -- Biography; Curie, Pierre, 1859-1906; Physicists -- France -- Biography
Our investigations had started a general scientific movement, and
similar work was being undertaken in other countries. Toward these
efforts Pierre Curie maintained a most disinterested and liberal
attitude. With my agreement he refused to draw any material profit from
our discovery. We took no copyright, and published without reserve all
the results of our research, as well as the exact processes of the
preparation of radium. In addition, we gave to those interested whatever
information they asked of us. This was of great benefit to the radium
industry, which could thus develop in full freedom, first in France,
then in foreign countries, and furnish to scientists and to physicians
the products which they needed. This industry still employs to-day, with
scarcely any modifications, the processes indicated by us.[9]
Even though our industrial experiment yielded good results, again our
slender resources made it difficult to make further progress. Inspired
by our attempt, a French industrial, Armet de Lisle, had the idea, which
seemed daring at that epoch, of founding a veritable radium factory that
would furnish this product to physicians, whose interest in the
biological effects of radium and its possible therapeutic applications
had been aroused by the publication of various investigations. The
project proved a success because he could employ men already trained by
us in the delicate processes of this manufacture. Radium was then
regularly placed on sale, at a high price, it is true, because of the
special conditions under which it had to be made, and because, too, of
the immediate rise in the cost of the minerals necessary to its
production.[10]
I should like to express, here, our appreciation of the spirit in which
Armet de Lisle offered to cooperate with us. In an entirely
disinterested manner he placed at our disposition a little working place
in his factory and a part of the means necessary for us to use it. Other
funds were added either by ourselves, or came through subventions, of
which the most important, accorded in 1902 by the Academy of Sciences,
amounted to 20,000 francs.
It was in this way that we were able to utilize the ore we had acquired
little by little in the preparation of a certain quantity of radium,
which we used constantly in our research. The radium-bearing barium was
extracted in the factory, and I carried on its purification and
fractional crystallization in the laboratory. In 1902 I succeeded in
preparing a decigramme of chloride of pure radium which gave only the
spectrum of the new element, radium. I made a first determination of the
atomic weight of this new element, an atomic weight much higher than
that of barium. Thus the chemical individuality of radium was completely
established, and the reality of radioelements was a known fact about
which there could be no further controversy.
I based my doctor's thesis, presented in 1903, on these investigations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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