Radium Revolution How Marie Curie's Discovery Changed the World

By Davis Truman

Step into the captivating world of scientific discovery and groundbreaking innovation with "Radium Revolution."

This extraordinary book unveils the remarkable story of one of history's most iconic scientists, Marie Curie, and her groundbreaking discovery of radium. This revelation forever altered the course of human knowledge and progress.

As you turn the pages, you'll witness the enchanting glow of radium, a mysterious substance that both fascinated and terrified the world. Through the lens of Marie Curie's pioneering work, you'll understand the profound implications of her discovery, from revolutionizing medicine to sparking the nuclear age.

The book also explores the broader impact of Curie's work, delving into the societal and cultural shifts triggered by her discoveries.

From the emergence of new medical treatments to the moral dilemmas of the atomic era, "Radium Revolution" offers profound insights into how science shapes our world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223134220

Book preview

Chapter One

Radium meets the American Imagination

LIKE THOUSANDS OF OTHERS, Henry Adams first confronted radium face-to-face at the Paris Exposition of 1900. As Adams haunted the Expo, he marveled at the new application[s] of force he encountered everywhere he looked. The dynamo, as Adams understood it, was a symbol of infinity that evoked feelings akin to what the first Christians must have felt in the presence of the Cross. It was less a piece of machinery than an occult, otherworldly object. Radium, however, represented something even more disorienting to Adams: it was wholly new.  Though it looked like little more than innocuous powder, radium heralded a profound rupture in human history for Adams. Nothing in Adams's famed Education prepared him for the metaphysical reorientation that radium would force on him. Only a few years earlier, x-rays and atoms had no place in his consciousness, but by 1898, his world was turned on its head when Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb called radium. The discoveries on display at the Expo brought him into a supersensual world in which nothing could be measured according to old notions of scale. The dislocation represented by the dynamo and radium left his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. Adams, always the historian, thought of comparable fractures in history, of shifts in worldview brought about by the lives of Copernicus, Galileo, and Columbus. But even those events failed to evoke the powers Adams sensed. Only Constantine setting up the Cross in 310 could match the sense of mysterious energy and divine substance of the things he saw in Paris in 1900. That year marked for Adams the moment when the continuity of history snapped. He quoted his acquaintance, the English philosopher Arthur Balfour, who announced that until the turn of the century, the human race had lived and died in a world of illusion. Children of the new century would be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. For Adams, the cohesion of the very universe had unraveled, leaving a multiverse" in its place.

Yet for all the profundity Adams attached to radium’s power, even he could not grasp the totality of radium’s importance. Adams, like many others, was primarily impressed by its great energy. The element wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible. But the story of radium was not one of abstract forces. It was one interaction between the external physical reality of the universe and the bodies and imaginations of those who encountered it, whether physically or in the media. While some fantasized about radium’s potential to power ships and move mountains, radium’s complex relationship with the body was perhaps the most enthralling aspect. Radium had the power both to cure and to kill. Its mysterious power could nurture hope and cause fear. Radium may have been, as Adams believed, wholly new, but it also evoked ancient mysteries about health, sickness, and the unseen forces that could bring both. During the first half of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands turned to radium as a cure for countless illnesses. Some received radium treatment in hospitals, while others sought the unorthodox channels of dangerous patent medicines and purportedly radioactive contraptions. Though the motivations for pursuing radium cures were as numerous as the patients themselves, the fact that so many people in the United States and abroad took radium medicines cannot be understood without looking at the complex history of Americans’ confrontation with the unprecedented new substance.

Although radioactivity was unlike anything humans had encountered, it had a handful of predecessors that helped lay critical groundwork for the response to radium. Humans had long struggled to understand their universe and frequently appealed to the influence of unseen energies to do so. American reactions to radium were conditioned by previous rays and forces that seemed to multiply in the century leading up to the element’s discovery. One could look to any number of starting points for the prehistory of radium. Still, it was during the late 18th century, in the Curies’ own Paris, that one man's ideas helped establish several patterns that radium would follow more than one hundred years later. At that time, Paris was already experiencing a vogue for mysterious forces, including gravity and electricity. Franz Anton Mesmer’s timing could not have been better. He arrived in Paris to find people ready to be convinced that their bodies were intimately linked with unseen forces and that those forces held the secret of life. Mesmer was an Austrian native, but he made his name in the salons of Paris. At the time of his arrival, Parisians were already obsessed with science. They struggled to understand the world around them and eagerly latched onto new theories that seemed promising. Often, these ideas blended science with spiritualism since the separation between the real and the fantastic was not always finely drawn. Mesmer offered a worldview that combined scientific explanations with more occult notions. He claimed that forces hitherto undetected by scientists permeated all things and needed only to be adequately harnessed to achieve perfectly balanced health. Animal magnetism was Mesmer’s term for the medium through which forces passed from one object to another, including light, heat, magnetism, and electricity. Mesmeric séances attempted to coral and control animal magnetism to cure many physical, mental, and emotional ills. Participants were often whipped into frenzies, reaching states akin to what would later be called hypnotism. Mesmerism appealed to