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134 Radium
Pierre Curie, by Marie Curie. Including also Autobiographical
Notes. Translated by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, with an Introduction
by Mrs. William Brown Meloney. Illustrated. 242 pages. The
MacMillan Company, Xew York, 1923.
In her preface Mme. Curie says, "It is not without hesitation that
I have undertaken to write the biography of Pierre Curie. I should
have preferred confiding this task to some relative or some friend of his
infancy who had followed his whole life intimately and possessed as
full a knowledge of his earliest \ears as of those after his marriage.
Jacques Curie, Pierre's brother and companion of his youth, was bound
to him by the tenderest affection. But after his appointment to the University
of Montpelicr. he lived far from Pierre, and he therefore insisted
that I should write the biography, believing that no one else better
knew and understood the life of his brother. He communicated to me
all his personal memories and to this important contribution, which I
have utilized in full. I have added details related by my husband himself
and a few of his friends. Thus I have reconstituted as best I could
that part of his existence that I did not know directly. I have, in addiiton,
tried faithfully to express the profound impression his personality
made upon me during the years of our life together."
Mrs. William Brown Meloney, well known as the Editor of the
Delineator, in an introductory chapter tells of her visit to Mme. Curie
in Paris in 1920. As a result of this visit Mrs. Meloney was instrumental
in raising a fund contributed by the women of America to purchase
a gram of radium for Mme. Curie, the presentation of which was
made to Mme. Curie at the White House by President Harding on May
20, 1921. During the American travels. Mrs. Meloney repeatedly requested
Mme. Curie to write the story of her life and this little book
about her husband, and the notes about herself, is the result.
In the story of the life of her husband. Mme. Curie pays tribute
to the devotion to science that characterized Pierre Curie. She paints
his disdain for worldly honors that caused him to refuse the decoration
of the Palmes academiques and the I-egion d'Honncur. She tells of
spending money given her for her trousseau to buy two bicycles, upon
which the newly wedded couple made many happy trips in and around
Paris. She tells of her husband's successful researches and his gradual
advancement—with the continual struggle for something like adequate
research laboratory facilities. Then when she had begun that interesting
work on the measurement of the radioactivity of minerals, which
showed their abnormally high activity, she tells how her husband helped
in the tedious and yet fascinating work, which led to the discover)' of
polonium and radium in 1898. Their simple and happy family life, the
two daughters, Irene and Eve. are touched on.—the greater and greater
recognition accorded their work, including the joint award to Becquerel
and themselves of the Nobel Prize in 1903. and in 1905 membership for
Pierre Curie in the Academy of Sciences, the tenancy of a newly created
professorship in the Sorbonne. With all these honors went a continued
struggle for better experimental facilities, the need of which is vividly
shown in some of the illustrations which depict the crude means used
by the Curies in their firstlarge scale work of extracting radium from
the residues of pitchblends from St. Joachimsthal in Bohemia. Then
the tragedy of April 19. 1906, when the life of Pierre Curie was cut off
untimely as a result of being struck by a truck while crossing the street.