MADAME CURIE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 250, 13 April 1910, Page 5

MADAME CURIE.

Madame Curie, who is one of the great scientists of the world, has succeeded in isolating a small quantity of polonium, a metal 5000 times more rare than radium. She and her late husband discovered radium, and since his death a few years ago, she has continued her researches. She has a passion for science that is very seidom found in a woman, and she ia gifted in addition with wonderful powers of mind and imagination. Her nursery was a laboratory. Forty years ago, when she was a small child, she gave up her dolls in order to play with retorts, crucibles and test tubes in the scientific workshop of h?r father, who was professor of physics at a college in Varsova, in Austria. When she was a little older she became his "washer," cleaning the instruments and apparatus after his experiments. She grew up with more than elementary knowledge of science, and as a young girl went to Paris in order to study. She was so poor that she had to attend a municipal working-class technical school, and it was in the laboratory of this institution that her wonderful capabilities attracted the attention of Profesior Curie, whom she subsequently married. She shares with most savants that faculty of abstraction that is so valuable to those engaged in scientific work. When she is employed upon a difficult piece of research she heara nothing, sees nothing, and is unmoved by anything that is not directly concerned with her investigations. It is said that once, when in the middle of an absorbing experiment, a servant ran into the laboratory screaming loudly, "Madame, madame, I have swallowed a pin!" "There, there, don't cry," said Mdme. Curie soothingly, "here is another chat you may have." She has a little daughter, and she believes that the child shows promise of scientific powers even more brilliant than her own. She is modest in the extreme regarding her own achievements, but it has been'said that she vvae veally the originator of the radium discovery. Professov Cin-ie was once offered the Cross of the Legion of Honour, but he refused it because the same decoration wai not offered to his wife.