MADAME CURIE.

Shannon News, 12 January 1926, Page 4

MADAME CURIE.

DISCOVERER OF RADIUM. A LIFE OF HARD WORK. Twenty-seven years ago in a small laboratory in'France radium was discovered by Monsieur and Madame Curie. . To-day Madame Curie • is working without her husband's aid, but her eldest daughter, Mile. Irene Curie, is there to replace him. A woman of singularly noble character and of extraordinary scientific attainments, Mme. Curie, when interviewed by M. Raymond de Nys for 'Le Petit Parisien,' said: "December 26, 15.98, was the date of the final experiment, which isolated radium. It was not very 'warm that day in the shed in Rue Lhomond, where we carried on our reseaches." "Mme. Curie's look is strangely faraway and dreamy," he writes. "Her eyes are the color of steel and of periwinkle. The pupils are large and extraordinarily dilated, seen behind her convex binocular glasses. " 'Tel! me, will you, madame, of that poor shed which you have now replaced with your well-equipp*a laboratory.' "A furtive softness came into Mme. Curie's grave face. " 'lt was a* wooden shack, with a pitch floor, and a glass roof. The rain came in., The wind entered as if 4 were at home.? The furniture and materials were scanty. We had some old pine tables; a cast-iron stove which was much too small, and no place to keep fuel. Then there was the blackboard, oh which Pierre Curie wrote his figures and equations and did his calculations over and over again. "

"Long after we left it I used to go back to the shed occasionally. On my last visit, after my husband's death and some weeks before it was torn down, the blackboard was still covered with his figures. It was a poverty stricken workshop for the precious products which we handled. We were there from early in the morning and often spent the entire day there, eatingUuncheon on the corner of the table and returning after dinner. At night the shed was beautiful, with the radiating preparations standing, on stools or on the tables. In the darkness they emitted a feeble bluish light which penetrated into the shadows and filled us with ecstasy. We were very peaceful there until the day when came, and with i» those who "make" it, the autograph hunters and the

" 'Have I been indiscreet, madame?" •■••" 'No. But t Pierre Curie, when we won the Nobel Prize together in 1903 often had the feeling that your confreres were. He wrote to a friend: "They even reproduced my daughter's conversation with her nurse, and told about th black-and-white cat which we have at home." ' " 'I shall not do that' . "No. But I shall note, while Mme. Curie silently " reviews her memories, her dress, as simple as a black smock, and the nudity of the room in which she received me. You might call it a nun's cell. The table is not wormeaten, like those in the old shed. But the chairs are all of wood ,of hard, very hard, wood. "Mme. Curie prefers—at her laboratory as well as at home —whatever will Wear well. In the vestibule of the Radium Institute a notice which she has signed in her own slow,' careful hand, without any flourishes, abjures the pupils and assistants to be saving of materials. Now rich, shei went for a long time to the school of, poverty. If she had been willing to go to the expense of a motto, she would have chosen this: 'Work; Economise.'

■" 'As a student,' she said, 'I had to content myself, with a tiny room, niggardly furnished, and like so many other women have known what solitude is behind four hostile walls. I had my books and my work. Then, after my marriage, we had for four yeart the little lodging in the Rue de la Glaciere, where you have a view over the big gardens. Our furniture was given to us by relatives. I have tt still. I kept house and did the cooking."

" 'Did you wash the dishes, carry the coal, and do the marketing?'* " 'I did everything. But housekeeping 'was not any harder than the work at the laboratory, where, with the aid of an iron rod, I had to stir in earthen or metal pots the products which we were analysing. As to doing the marketing, there was nothing humiliating that, even when I had to say to the butcher: "You know, J don't care for the best cuts. A good stew wll suit my purse better." Mme. Curie was born in Warsaw November 7, 1867, the daughter of an impecunious college professor. She came to Paris when a young woman and took her first degree from th« University of Paris in 1893. She became associated with Professor Pierre Curie in scientific research, and married the professor shortly afterward. Their discovery of radium was given to the world in 1898. Seven years later the woHd waa shocked to learn one morning that M. Curie had been run over by a Paris dray and killed. Mme. Curie succeeded to his professorsihp of general physics in the University of Paris. Mme. (Jure is now fifty-eight years of age, and has given more than thirty years of her life to the pursuit and study of radium. She lives at the Institut Curie in Paris on the salary of a teacher at the Sorbonne. She has made fifteen millionaires in America alone, and it is estimated that her discoveres and work saved the Ives of 50,000 wounded men during the war.