The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPierre CurieThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Pierre CurieAuthor: Marie CurieAuthor of introduction, etc.: Marie Mattingly MeloneyTranslator: Charlotte KelloggVernon L. KelloggRelease date: December 23, 2022 [eBook #69617]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: The Macmillan Company, 1923Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIERRE CURIE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Pierre CurieAuthor: Marie CurieAuthor of introduction, etc.: Marie Mattingly MeloneyTranslator: Charlotte KelloggVernon L. KelloggRelease date: December 23, 2022 [eBook #69617]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: The Macmillan Company, 1923Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
Title: Pierre Curie
Author: Marie CurieAuthor of introduction, etc.: Marie Mattingly MeloneyTranslator: Charlotte KelloggVernon L. Kellogg
Author: Marie Curie
Author of introduction, etc.: Marie Mattingly Meloney
Translator: Charlotte Kellogg
Vernon L. Kellogg
Release date: December 23, 2022 [eBook #69617]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: The Macmillan Company, 1923
Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIERRE CURIE ***
400PIERRE CURIE IN 1906.Hellog Dujardin DujardinImp. Ch. Wütmann
PIERRE CURIE IN 1906.Hellog Dujardin DujardinImp. Ch. Wütmann
PIERRE CURIE IN 1906.
Hellog Dujardin DujardinImp. Ch. Wütmann
"It is possible to conceive that in criminal hands radium might prove very dangerous, and the question therefore arises whether it be to the advantage of humanity to know the secrets of nature, whether we he sufficiently mature to profit by them, or whether that knowledge may not prove harmful. Take, for instance, the discoveries of Nobel—powerful explosives have made it possible for men to achieve admirable things, but they are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of those great criminals who draw nations into war. I am among those who believe with Nobel that humanity will obtain more good than evil from future discoveries."
PIERRE CURIE,
Nobel Conference, 1903.
The translators wish to acknowledge their obligations to Dr. R. B. Moore, Chief Chemist, U. S. Bureau of Mines, and an American authority on radium, who kindly read the whole translation in manuscript in order to assure its accuracy as to the technical details referred to by Madame Curie in her account of the work of her husband and herself on radium.
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 years as of those after his marriage. Jacques Curie, Pierre's brother and the companion of his youth, was bound to him by the tenderest affection. But after his appointment to the University of Montpellier, 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 addition, tried faithfully to express the profound impression his personality made upon me during the years of our life together.
This narrative is, to be sure, neither complete nor perfect. I hope, nevertheless, that the picture it gives of Pierre Curie is not deformed, and that it will help to conserve his memory. I wish, too, that it might remind those who knew him of the reasons for which they loved him.
M. C.
Introduction
CHAPTERI.The Curie Family. Infancy and First Studies of Pierre CurieII.Dreams of Youth. First Scientific Work. Discovery of Piezo-ElectricityIII.Life as the Director of Laboratory Work in the School of Physics and Chemistry. Generalization of the Principle of Symmetry. Investigations of MagnetismIV.Marriage and Organization of Family Life. Personality and CharacterV.The Dream Become a Reality. The Discovery of RadiumVI.The Struggle for Means to Work. The Burden of Celebrity. The First Assistance from the State. It Comes Too LateVII.The Nation's Sorrow. The Laboratories: "Sacred Places"Autobiographical Notes—Marie Curie
Pierre Curie in 1906.Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory, where radium was discovered.A view of the extraction of radium in the old shed where the first radium was obtained.Pierre Curie with the quartz piezo-electroscope he invented, by which rays of radium are measured.A view of the extraction of radium in the old shed where the first radium was obtained.Mme. Curie instructing American soldiers in her Paris laboratory.Madame Curie in her laboratory at the Institut Curie, Paris.Mme. Curie and President Harding at the White House, May 20, 1921, when a gram of radium was presented to its discoverer by the women of America.
Every little while a man or a woman is born to serve in some big way. Such a one surely is Marie Curie. Her discovery of radium has advanced science, relieved human suffering and enriched the world. The spirit in which she has done her work has challenged the minds and souls of men.
One morning in the spring of 1898, when the United States was going to war with Spain, Madame Curie stepped forth from a crude shack on the outskirts of Paris, with the greatest secret of the century literally in the palm of her hand.
It was one of the silent, unheralded great moments in the world's history.
The discovery which had become a fact that morning was no accident. It was a triumph over hardship and doubting men. It represented years of patient labor. Madame Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, had wrested from Mother Earth one of her most priceless secrets.
I have been asked to tell why I undertook the Marie Curie Radium Campaign and how I persuaded Madame Curie to write this book.
It is with much hesitancy that I venture to write a preface to this book. She once chided me, in her gentle way, for an article in which I had stated facts with some feeling—although the facts praised her. "In science," she said, "we should be interested in things, not persons."
Madame Curie is the most modest of women. It is only after long persuasion that she has consented to record the autobiographical notes contained in this book. Still, so much has been left unsaid, uninterpreted, that I feel an obligation to say a word toward a fuller understanding of this great and noble character.
In 1915 I wrote in my editor's suggestion book: "Greatest woman's story in the world—Marie Curie, discoverer of radium."
For the next four years scarcely any writer of prominence went abroad without a commission from me to bring back the story of Madame Curie. Always they returned with the report: "She was not to be found," or "She was at the front somewhere," or "She won't see journalists." My own letters to Madame Curie brought no reply. I did not know then that great bags of mail from all parts of the world lay piled up in her laboratory where there was no secretary, while Madame Curie with her X-ray apparatus was at the front, relieving suffering and saving lives.
In May, 1919, another mission took me to Paris and I resolved to see Madame Curie myself. My friend, Stéphane Lauzanne, Editor-in-Chief ofLe Matin, said: "Give it up. Become interested in something else; she will see no one. She does nothing but work."
I began to ask questions.
"She is very simple and exceedingly retiring," said Lauzanne. "Few things in life are more distasteful to her than publicity. Her mind is as exact and logical as science itself. She cannot accept or understand exaggerations and inaccurate quotations. She cannot understand why scientists, rather than science, should be discussed in the press. There are but two things for her—her little family and her work.
"After the death of Pierre Curie, the faculty and officials of the University of Paris decided to depart from all precedent and appoint a woman to a full professorship at the Sorbonne. Madame Curie accepted the appointment and the date was set for her installation.
"It was the history-making afternoon of October 5th, 1906. The members of the class which had formerly been instructed by Professor Pierre Curie were seated in one group.
"There was present a large crowd—celebrities, statesmen, academicians, all the faculty. Suddenly through a small side door entered a woman all in black, with pale hands and high arched forehead. The magnificent forehead won notice first. It was not merely a woman who stood before us, but a brain—a living thought. Her appearance was enthusiastically applauded for five minutes. When the applause died down, Madame Curie bent forward with slightly trembling lips. We wondered what she was about to say. It was important. It was history, whatever she said.
"In the foreground sat a stenographer, ready to record her words. Would she speak of her husband? Would she thank the Minister and the public? No, she began quite simply as follows:
"'When we consider the progress made by the theories of radio-activity since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century—' The important thing to this great woman is work. Time should not be wasted in idle words. And so, dispensing with all superficial formality, with no betrayal of the tremendous emotion which all but overcame her—except by the extreme pallor of her face and the trembling of her lips—she continued her lecture in clear, well-modulated tones.
"It was typical of this great soul that she should carry on their work courageously and without faltering.
"You will see," concluded Lauzanne, "it is useless to try to interrupt her work for interviews."
Later I met one of Madame Curie's fellow scientists who sympathized with my desire, but who agreed with Lauzanne that an interview was impossible. Finally, however, he promised to carry a letter to Madame Curie.
I wrote ten letters and destroyed them. In one I said: "My father, who was a medical man, wrote: 'It is impossible to exaggerate the unimportance of people.' But you have been important to me for twenty years, and I want to see you a few minutes."
The answer came within an hour. I was to go to the laboratory the next morning.
I had been in Mr. Edison's laboratory a few weeks before sailing from home. Edison is rich in the material things—as he should be. Every kind of equipment is at his command. He is a power in the financial as well as the scientific world. In my childhood I had lived near Alexander Graham Bell; had admired his great house and his fine horses. A short time before, I had been in Pittsburgh, where the sky is plumed by the tall smoke stacks of the greatest radium reduction plants in the world.
I remembered that millions of dollars had been spent on radium watches and radium gun sights. Several millions of dollars' worth of radium was even then stored in various parts of the United States. I had been prepared to meet a woman of the world, enriched by her own efforts and established in one of the white palaces of the Champs d'Elysées or some other beautiful boulevard of Paris.
I found a simple woman, working in an inadequate laboratory and living in a simple apartment on the meager pay of a French professor.
As I entered the new building at Number One Rue Pierre Curie, which stands out conspicuously among the old walls of the University of Paris, I had already formed a picture of the laboratory of the discoverer of radium.
I waited a few minutes in the bare little office which might have been furnished from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Then the door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon.
Her well-formed hands were rough. I noticed a characteristic, nervous little habit of rubbing the tips of her fingers over the pad of her thumb in quick succession. I learned later that working with radium had made them numb. Her kind, patient, beautiful face had the detached expression of a scholar. Suddenly I felt like an intruder.
I was struck dumb. My timidity exceeded her own. I had been a trained interrogator for twenty years, but I could not ask a single question of this gentle woman in a black cotton dress. I tried to explain that American women were interested in her great work, and found myself apologizing for intruding upon her precious time. To put me at my ease, Madame Curie began to talk about America. She had for many years wanted to visit my country, but she could not be separated from her children.
"America," she said, "has about fifty grammes of radium. Four of these are in Baltimore, six in Denver, seven in New York." She went on naming the location of every grain.
"And in France?" I asked.
"My laboratory," she replied simply, "has hardly more than a gramme."
"Youhave only a gramme?" I exclaimed. That meant less than one-twenty-ninth of an ounce.
"I? Oh, I have none," she corrected. "It belongs to my laboratory."
I suggested royalties on her patents. Surely she had protected her right to the processes by which radium is produced. The revenue from such patents should have made her a very rich woman.
Quietly, and without any seeming consciousness of the tremendous renunciation, she said, "There were no patents. We were working in the interests of science. Radium was not to enrich any one. Radium is an element. It belongs to all people."
She had contributed to the progress of science and the relief of human suffering, and yet, in the prime of her life she was without the tools which would enable her to make further contribution of her genius.
"If you had the whole world to choose from," I asked impulsively, "what would you take?" It was a silly question, perhaps, but as it happened, a fateful one.
"You ought to have everything in the world you need to go on with your work," I said. "Some one must undertake this."
"Who will?" she asked rather hopelessly.
"The women of America," I promised—and then I rose to go.
That week I learned that the market price of a gramme of radium was one hundred thousand dollars. I also learned that Madame Curie's laboratory, although practically a new building, was without sufficient equipment; that the radium held there was used at that time only for extracting emanations for hospital use in cancer treatment.
I saw Madame Curie at the Institute again and then in her own home—a small apartment in the Ile St. Louis, where she lived with her two daughters. It was a happy, busy little family. They had no protest against life except to regret that lack of equipment interfered with the important research work Madame Curie and her daughter, Irene, should have been doing.
It was my hope when I arrived in New York, a few weeks afterwards, to find ten women to subscribe ten thousand dollars each for the purchase of a gramme of radium, and in this way to enable Madame Curie to go on with her work, without the publicity of a general campaign. That hope was soon dashed. I found one or two such women, but not ten.
There were not ten to buy that gramme of radium but there were a hundred thousand women and a group of men to help, who determined the money must be raised.
My first direct and substantial support came from Mrs. William Vaughn Moody, widow of the American poet and playwright.
When we found it would be necessary to launch a national campaign, Mrs. Robert G. Mead, a doctor's daughter, and one who had been a standby in cancer prevention work, became secretary, and Mrs. Nicholas F. Brady an executive member of the committee. Behind these women stood a group of scientific men, who knew what radium had meant to humanity, among them Dr. Robert Abbe, the first American surgeon to use radium, and Dr. Francis Carter Wood.
In less than a year the fund had been raised.
Stéphane Lauzanne describes a second impressive moment in the life of Madame Curie. It was nearly a year after my talk with her. It was fifteen years since that scene at the University of Paris. These years had been spent in her laboratory; she had made no public appearance. It was in March, 1921, that Monsieur Lauzanne heard her voice again.
"I lifted the telephone receiver," he relates, "and heard these words: 'Madame Curie wishes to speak to you.' What extraordinary event—what tragedy, perhaps, might this not mean? And suddenly, over the wire came the sound of the voice which I had heard only once before, but which had stayed in my memory—the same voice which had once pronounced the words, 'When we consider the progress made by the theories of radio-activity since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century——'
"'I wanted to tell you that I am going to America,' she said. 'It was very hard for me to decide to go, because America is so far and so big. If some one did not come for me, I should probably never have made the trip. I should have been too frightened. But to this fear is added a great joy. I have devoted my life to the science of radio-activity and I know all we owe to America in the field of science. I am told you are among those who strongly favor this distant trip, so I wanted to tell you I have decided to go, but please don't let any one know about it.'
"This great woman—the greatest woman in France—was speaking haltingly, tremblingly, almost like a little girl. She, who handles daily a particle of radium more dangerous than lightning, was afraid when confronted by the necessity of appearing before the public."
A little later, when Madame Curie and I had embarked for America, where she was to receive her radium and other experimental material, I asked her if, the day I had first given her the promise, she had believed that American women would rally to her aid.
"No," she confessed honestly, "but I knew you were sincere."
About the time of her marriage, one of her relatives gave Madame Curie a gift of money to be used for a trousseau. It was not a great sum, but important to the poor student in Paris. To understand the significance of the use to which she put this fund, it is necessary to remember that Marie Sklodowska was young, and possessed physical beauty and charm. She was not without appreciation of the beautiful, and she could not possibly have been utterly unconscious of her own appearance. She had a young girl's natural interest in pretty clothes. She considered the purchase of a wedding gown and other personal belongings, and then, with her characteristic exactness, measured her needs and the future.
She was married in a simple dress she had brought from Poland, and her trousseau fund was spent on two bicycles, so that she and Pierre Curie might enjoy the beautiful country of France. That was their honeymoon.
One dream that Madame Curie held, and still holds unrealized, is the hope of a quiet little home of her own with a garden and hedge, and flowers and birds. During her American travels, she would frequently glance through the window as the train passed through a small town, and, spying some modest little house with a garden, would say, "I have always wanted such a little home."
But owning a house was secondary in the life of both Pierre and Marie Curie. They simply made a home wherever they lived, for such money as might have gone for the purchase of her little dream house was always needed in the laboratory. She told me one day, with deep feeling, that one of the regrets of her life was that Pierre Curie had died without ever having had a permanent laboratory.
She had, as I have said, refused opportunities to come to the United States because she could not endure separation from her children. She was, I think, finally persuaded to face the long trip and the terrifying publicity attending it, partly because of her gratitude for the support given her scientific work, but principally because it offered a splendid opportunity for travel to her daughters.
There is in Madame Curie none of the legendary coldness and thoughtlessness attributed to the scientist. During the war, when she ran her own radiological truck and lived on the march from hospital to hospital in the zone of operations, she washed and dried and pressed her own clothes. Once during our American travels, we stayed in a home where there were several other house guests besides our party of five. I entered Madame Curie's room and found her washing her underclothes.
"It is nothing at all," she said, when I protested. "I know perfectly well how to do it, and with all of these extra guests in the house, the servants have enough to do."
On the night before the reception at the White House, at which President Harding was to present the gramme of radium to Madame Curie, the Deed was brought to Madame Curie. It was a beautifully engraved scroll, prepared in the office of Coudert Brothers, vesting all rights to a gramme of radium, the gift of American women, in Madame Curie.
She read the paper carefully, and then, after a few moments of thought, said: "It is very fine and generous, but it must not be left this way. This gramme of radium represents a great deal of money, but more than that, it represents the women of this country. It is not for me; it is for science. I am not well; I may die any day. My daughter Eve is not of legal age, and if I should die it would mean that this radium would go to my estate and would be divided between my daughters. It is not for that purpose. This radium must be consecrated for all time to the use of science. Will you have your lawyer draw a paper which will make this very clear?"
I said that it would be done in a few days.
"It must be done to-night," she said. "To-morrow I receive the radium, and I might die tomorrow. Too much is at stake."
And so, late as it was on that hot May evening, after some difficulty, we secured the services of a lawyer, who prepared the paper from a draft Madame Curie herself had written. She signed it before starting for Washington.
This document read:
"In the event of my death I give to the Institut du Radium, of Paris, for exclusive use in the Laboratoire Curie, the gramme of radium which was given to me by the Executive Committee of Women of the Marie Curie Radium Fund, pursuant to an agreement dated the 19th day of May, 1921."
This act was consistent with the whole life of the discoverer of radium; with the answer she had made to my question a year before:
"Radium is not to enrich any one. It is an element; it is for all people."
During her American travels, I repeatedly requested Madame Curie to write the story of her life. I urged its importance to history and its influence among students preparing to consecrate their lives to science.
Finally she consented. "But it will not be much of a book," she said. "It is such an uneventful, simple little story. I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France."
A simple statement, but fraught with what meaning! When most of us shall have been forgotten, when even the Great World War shall have dwindled to a few pages in the history books, when Governments shall have fallen and risen and fallen again, the work of Marie Curie will be remembered.
Of her work and her husband's, volumes—veritable libraries—have been written since that spring morning in 1898, when after an all night vigil in a shack on the outskirts of Paris, she came forth with the great gift of radium to mankind. Scientists will go on adding to the bibliography of the marvelous element. But of Marie Curie herself, the woman, it is unlikely that the world will ever read more than the brief notes which compose this small book.
It is her conviction, her philosophy, that "In science we should be interested in things, not persons."
Pierre Curie's parents, who were educated and intelligent, formed a part of thepetite bourgeoisieof small means. They did not frequent fashionable society, but confined themselves entirely to the companionship of their relatives and a few intimate friends.
Eugène Curie, Pierre's father, was a physician and the son of a physician. He knew very few kinsmen of his name, and very little about the Curie family, which was of Alsatian (Eugène Curie was born at Mulhouse in 1827) and Protestant origin. Even though his father was established in London, Eugène had been brought up in Paris, where he pursued his studies in the natural sciences and medicine, and worked as preparator under Gratiollet in the laboratories of the Museum.
Doctor Eugène Curie's remarkable personality impressed all who approached him. He was a tall man, who in youth must have been blonde, with beautiful blue eyes of a clearness and brilliancy that were striking even in an advanced old age. These eyes, which had retained a child-like expression, reflected goodness and intelligence. He had indeed unusual intellectual capacities, a very live aptitude for the natural sciences, and the temperament of a scholar.
Although he wished to consecrate his life to scientific work, family responsibilities following his marriage and the birth of two sons forced him to renounce this desire. The necessities of life obliged him to practice his medical profession. He continued, however, such experimental research as his means permitted, in particular undertaking an investigation upon inoculation for tuberculosis at a time when the bacterial nature of this malady was not yet established. His scientific avocations developed in him the habit of making excursions in search of the plants and animals necessary to his experiments, and this habit, as well as his love of Nature, gave him a marked preference for country life. Until the end of his life he conserved his love for science, and, without doubt, also, his regret at not having been able to devote himself exclusively to it.
His medical career remained always a modest one, but it revealed remarkable qualities of devotion and disinterestedness. At the time of the Revolution of 1848, when he was still a student, the Government of the Republic conferred on him a medal, "for his honorable and courageous conduct" in serving the wounded. He himself had been struck, on February 24th, by a ball which shattered a part of his jaw. A little later, during a cholera epidemic, he installed himself, in order that he might look after the sick, in a quarter of Paris deserted by physicians. During the Commune he established a hospital in his apartment (rue de la Visitation) near which there was a barricade, and there he cared for the wounded. Through this act of civism and because of his advanced convictions he lost a part of hisbourgeoispatronage. At this time he accepted the position of medical inspector of the organization for the protection of young children. The duties of this post permitted him to live in the suburbs of Paris where health conditions for himself and his family were much better than those of the city.
Doctor Curie had very pronounced political convictions. Temperamentally an idealist, he had embraced with ardor that republican doctrine which inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. He was united in friendship with Henri Brisson and the men of his group. Like them, a free thinker and an anticlerical, he did not have his sons baptized, nor did he have them practice any form of religion.
Pierre's mother, Claire Depouilly, was the daughter of a prominent manufacturer of Puteaux, near Paris. Her father and brothers distinguished themselves through their numerous inventions connected with the making of dyes and special tissues. The family, which was of Savoy, was caught in the business catastrophe caused by the Revolution of 1848, and ruined. And these reverses of fortune, added to those which Doctor Curie had experienced during his career, meant that he and his family lived always in comparatively straightened circumstances, with the difficulties of existence often renewed. Even though raised for a life of ease, Pierre's mother accepted with tranquil courage the precarious conditions which life brought her, and gave proof of an extreme devotion as she made life easier for her husband and children by her activity and her good will.
If the circumstances in which Jacques and Pierre grew up were modest and not free from cares, nevertheless there reigned in the family an atmosphere of gentleness and affection. In speaking to me for the first time of his parents, Pierre Curie said that they were "exquisite." They were, in truth, that. The father's spirit was a little authoritative—always awake and active. And he possessed a rare unselfishness. He neither wished nor knew how to profit by personal relations to ameliorate his condition. He loved his wife and sons tenderly, and was ever ready to aid all who needed him. The mother was slight, vivid in character, and, even though her health had suffered through the birth of her sons, was always gay and active in the simple home that she so well knew how to make attractive and hospitable.
When I first knew them they lived at Sceaux, rue des Sablons (to-day rue Pierre Curie) in a little house of ancient construction half concealed amidst the verdure of a pretty garden. Their life was peaceful. Doctor Curie went where his duties called him, either in Sceaux or in neighboring localities. Beyond this he occupied himself with his garden or his reading. Near relatives and neighbors came to visit on Sundays, when bowling and chess were the favorite amusements. From time to time Henri Brisson sought out his old companion in his tranquil retreat. Great calm and serenity enveloped the garden, the dwelling, and its inhabitants.
Pierre Curie was born the 15th of May, 1859, in a house facing the Jardin des Plantes, rue Cuvier, where his parents lived at the time when his father was working in the Museum laboratories. He was the second son of Doctor Curie and three and a half years younger than his brother Jacques. In after life he retained few particularly characteristic memories of his childhood in Paris; yet he did tell me how vividly present in his mind were the days of the Commune, the battle on the barricade so near the house where he then lived, the hospital established by his father, and the expeditions, on which his brother accompanied him, in search of the wounded.
It was in 1883 that Pierre moved with his parents from the capital to the suburbs of Paris, living first, from 1883 to 1892, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, then at Sceaux from 1892 to 1895, the year of our marriage.
Pierre passed his childhood entirely within the family circle; he never went to the elementary school nor to the lycée. His earliest instruction was given him first by his mother and was then continued by his father and his elder brother, who himself had never followed in any complete way the course of the lycée. Pierre's intellectual capacities were not those which would permit the rapid assimilation of a prescribed course of studies. His dreamer's spirit would not submit itself to the ordering of the intellectual effort imposed by the school. The difficulty he experienced in following such a program was usually attributed to a certain slowness of mind. He himself believed that he had this slow mind and often said so. I think, however, that this belief was not entirely justified. It seems to me, rather, that already from his early youth it was necessary for him to concentrate his thought with great intensity upon a certain definite object, in order to obtain a precise result, and that it was impossible for him to interrupt or to modify the course of his reflections to suit exterior circumstances. It is clear that a mind of this kind can hold within itself great future possibilities. But it is no less clear that no system of education has been especially provided by the public school for persons of this intellectual category, which nevertheless includes more representatives than one would believe at first sight.
Very fortunately for Pierre, who could not, as we can see, become a brilliant pupil in a lycée, his parents had a sufficiently keen intelligence to understand his difficulty, and they refrained from demanding of their son an effort which would have been prejudicial to his development. If, then, Pierre's earliest instruction was irregular and incomplete, it had the advantage of not so weighing on his intelligence as to deform it by dogmas, prejudices or preconceived ideas. And he was always grateful to his parents for this very liberal attitude. He grew up in all freedom, developing his taste for natural science through his excursions into the country, where he collected plants and animals for his father. These excursions, which he made either alone or with one of the family, helped to awake in him a great love of Nature, a passion which endured to the end of his life.
Intimate contact with Nature, which, because of the artificial conditions of city life and of traditional education, few children can know, had a decisive influence on Pierre's development. Guided by his father, he learned to observe facts and to interpret them correctly. He became familiar with the animals and plants of the environs of Paris. He knew which ones could be found at each season of the year in the forests and fields, the streams and ponds. The ponds in particular had for him an ever new attraction with their characteristic vegetation and their population of frogs, tritons, salamanders, dragonflies, and other denizens of air and water. No efforts to obtain the objects of his interests seemed too great for him. He never hesitated to take any animal in his hands in order to examine it more closely. Later, after our marriage, in our walks together, if I made some objection to letting him put a frog into my hands, he would exclaim: "But no, see how pretty it is!" He loved always, too, to bring back bouquets of wild flowers from his walks.
Thus his knowledge of natural history progressed rapidly. At the same time, also, he was mastering the elements of mathematics. His classical studies, on the contrary, had been much neglected, and it was principally through general reading that he acquired a knowledge of literature and history. His father, who was widely cultured, possessed a library containing many French and foreign works. Having himself a very pronounced taste for reading, he was able to communicate it to his son.
When he was about fourteen years old, a very happy event occurred in Pierre's education. He was put under an excellent professor, A. Bazille, who taught him elementary and advanced mathematics. This master was able to appreciate his young pupil, became much attached to him, and directed his work with the greatest solicitude. He even helped him to advance in his study of Latin, in which he was very much behind. At the same time Pierre and Albert Bazille, his professor's son, became friends.
This teaching had, I am sure, a great influence on the mind of Pierre, aiding him to develop and to sound the depth of his faculties and to realize his capacities for science. He had a remarkable aptitude for mathematics, which expressed itself chiefly by a characteristic geometric spirit and a great power of spatial vision. He, therefore, progressed rapidly and joyfully in his studies under M. Bazille, for whom he always felt an unalterable gratitude.
He once told me something which proved that even at this time he was not content solely to follow a fixed program of studies, but that he had already begun to launch out into personal investigation. Strongly attracted by the theory of determinants, which he had just mastered, he undertook to realize an analogous conception, but in three dimensions, and endeavored to discover the properties and uses of these "cubical determinants." Needless to say that at his age, and with the knowledge then at his disposal, such an enterprise was beyond his powers. The attempt, however, was none the less indicative of his awakening inventive spirit.
Several years later, when preoccupied with reflections upon symmetry, he asked himself the question: "Could not one find a general method for the solution of any equation whatever? Everything is a question of symmetry." He did not then know of Galois' theory of groups which had made it possible to attack this problem. But he was happy later to learn its results in the geometric applications to the case of equations of the 5th degree.
Thanks to his rapid progress in mathematics and physics, Pierre Curie was made a bachelor of science at the age of sixteen years. With this he passed his most difficult stage of formal education. The only thing with which he had to concern himself in the future was the acquisition of knowledge through his personal and independent effort in a field of science freely chosen.
Pierre Curie was still very young when he began his higher studies in preparation for the licentiate in physics. He followed the lectures and laboratory work at the Sorbonne and had, besides, access to the laboratory of Professor Leroux in the School of Pharmacy, where he assisted in the preparation of the physics courses. At the same time he became further acquainted with laboratory methods by working with his brother Jacques, who was then preparator of chemistry courses under Riche and Jungfleisch.
Pierre received his licentiate in physical sciences at the age of eighteen. During his studies he had attracted the attention of Desains, director of the University laboratory, and of Mouton, assistant director of the same laboratory. Thanks to their appreciation he was appointed, when only nineteen years old, preparator for Desains and placed in charge of the students' laboratory work in physics. He held this position five years, and it was during this time that he began his experimental research.
It is to be regretted that because of his financial situation Pierre was obliged, at this early age of nineteen, to accept the post of preparator instead of being able to give his whole time for two or three years longer to his University studies. With his time thus absorbed by his professional duties and his investigations he had to give up following the lectures in higher mathematics, and he therefore passed no further examinations. In compensation, however, he was released from military service in conformity with the privileges at that time accorded young men who undertook to serve as teachers in the public-school system.
He was by this time a tall and slender young man with chestnut-colored hair and a shy and reserved expression. At the same time his youthful face mirrored a profound inner life. One has such an impression of him as he appears in a good group photograph of Doctor Curie's family. His head is resting on his hand in a pose of abstraction and reverie, and one cannot but be struck by the expression of the large, limpid eyes that seem to be following some inner vision. Beside him the brown-haired brother offers a striking contrast, his vivacious eyes and whole appearance suggesting decision.
The two brothers loved each other tenderly and lived as good comrades, being accustomed to work together in the laboratory and walk together in their free hours. They also kept up affectionate relations with a few of their childhood friends: Louis Depouilly, their cousin, who became a physician; Louis Vauthier, also later a physician; and Albert Bazille, who became an engineer in the post and telegraph service.
Pierre used to tell me of the vivid memories he had of the vacations passed at Draveil on the Seine, where, with his brother Jacques, he took long walks beside the river, agreeably interrupted by swimming and diving in the stream. Both brothers were excellent swimmers. Sometimes they tramped for entire days. They had, at an early age, acquired the habit of visiting the suburbs of Paris on foot. At times also Pierre made solitary excursions which well suited his meditative spirit. On these occasions he lost all sense of time, and went to the extreme limit of his physical forces. Absorbed in delightful contemplation of the things about him, he was not conscious of material difficulties.
On the pages of a diary written in 1879,[1]he thus expressed the salutary influence of the country upon him:
"Oh, what a good time I have passed there in that gracious solitude, so far from the thousand little worrying things that torment me in Paris. No, I do not regret my nights passed in the woods, and my solitary days. If I had the time I would let myself recount all my musings. I would also describe my delicious valley, filled with the perfume of aromatic plants, the beautiful mass of foliage, so fresh and so humid, that hung over the Bièvre, the fairy palace with its colonnades of hops, the stony hills, red with heather, where it was so good to be. Oh, I shall remember always with gratitude the forest of the Minière; of all the woods I have seen, it is this one that I have loved most and where I have been happiest. Often in the evening I would start out and ascend again this valley, and I would return with twenty ideas in my head."
"Oh, what a good time I have passed there in that gracious solitude, so far from the thousand little worrying things that torment me in Paris. No, I do not regret my nights passed in the woods, and my solitary days. If I had the time I would let myself recount all my musings. I would also describe my delicious valley, filled with the perfume of aromatic plants, the beautiful mass of foliage, so fresh and so humid, that hung over the Bièvre, the fairy palace with its colonnades of hops, the stony hills, red with heather, where it was so good to be. Oh, I shall remember always with gratitude the forest of the Minière; of all the woods I have seen, it is this one that I have loved most and where I have been happiest. Often in the evening I would start out and ascend again this valley, and I would return with twenty ideas in my head."
Thus, for Pierre Curie, the sensation of well-being he experienced in the country was derived from the opportunity for tranquil reflection. Daily life in Paris with its numerous interruptions did not permit of undisturbed concentration, and this was to him a cause of inquietude and suffering. He felt himself destined for scientific research; for him the necessity was imperative of comprehending the phenomena of Nature in order to form a satisfactory theory to explain them. But when trying to fix his mind on some problem he had frequently to turn aside because of the multiplicity of futile things that disturbed his reflections and plunged him into discouragement.
Under the heading, "A day like too many others," he enumerated in his diary a list of the puerile happenings that had completely filled one of his days, leaving no time for useful work. He then concluded: "There is my day, and I have accomplished nothing. Why?" Further on he returns to the same theme under a title borrowed from Victor Hugo's "Le Roi S'Amuse,"
"To deafen with little bells the spirit that would think."
"In order that, weak one that I am, I shall not let my head turn with all the winds, yielding to the least breath that touches it, it is necessary that all should be immobile about me, or that, like a spinning top, movement alone should render me insensible to external objects."When, in the process of turning slowly upon myself, I try to gain momentum, a nothing, a word, a story, a paper, a visit stops me and is able to put off or retard forever the moment when, granted a sufficient swiftness I might have, in spite of my surroundings, concentrated on my own intention.... We must eat, drink, sleep, be idle, love, touch the sweetest things of life and yet not succumb to them. It is necessary that, in doing all this, the higher thoughts to which one is dedicated remain dominant and continue their unmoved course in our poor heads. It is necessary to make a dream of life, and to make of a dream a reality."
"In order that, weak one that I am, I shall not let my head turn with all the winds, yielding to the least breath that touches it, it is necessary that all should be immobile about me, or that, like a spinning top, movement alone should render me insensible to external objects.
"When, in the process of turning slowly upon myself, I try to gain momentum, a nothing, a word, a story, a paper, a visit stops me and is able to put off or retard forever the moment when, granted a sufficient swiftness I might have, in spite of my surroundings, concentrated on my own intention.... We must eat, drink, sleep, be idle, love, touch the sweetest things of life and yet not succumb to them. It is necessary that, in doing all this, the higher thoughts to which one is dedicated remain dominant and continue their unmoved course in our poor heads. It is necessary to make a dream of life, and to make of a dream a reality."
This acute analysis, sufficiently surprising in a young man of twenty years, suggests in an admirable manner the conditions necessary to the highest manifestations of the intellect. It carries a lesson which, if it were sufficiently understood, would facilitate the way of all contemplative spirits capable of opening new paths for humanity.
The unity of thought toward which Pierre Curie strove was troubled not only by professional and social obligations but also by his tastes, which urged him towards a broad literary and artistic culture. Like his father, he loved reading, and did not fear to undertake arduous literary tasks. To some criticism made in this connection, he responded readily: "I do not dislike tedious books." This meant that he was fascinated by the search after truth which is sometimes associated with writing devoid of charm. He also loved painting and music, and went gladly to look at pictures or to attend a concert. A few fragments of poetry in his handwriting were left among his papers.
But all these preoccupations were subordinated in his mind to what he considered his true task, and when his scientific imagination was not in full activity, he felt himself, in a sense, an incomplete being. He expressed this inquietude with an emotion born of his suffering during momentary periods of depression.
"What shall I become?" he wrote. "Very rarely have I command of all myself; ordinarily a part of me sleeps. My poor spirit, are you then so weak that you cannot control my body? Oh, my thoughts, you count indeed for very little! I should have the greatest confidence in the power of my imagination to pull me out of the rut, but I greatly fear that my imagination is dead."
"What shall I become?" he wrote. "Very rarely have I command of all myself; ordinarily a part of me sleeps. My poor spirit, are you then so weak that you cannot control my body? Oh, my thoughts, you count indeed for very little! I should have the greatest confidence in the power of my imagination to pull me out of the rut, but I greatly fear that my imagination is dead."
But despite hesitations, doubts, and lost moments, the young man was little by little striking out his path and strengthening his will. He was resolutely carrying on fruitful investigations at an age when many men who were to become savants were as yet only pupils.
His first work, done in collaboration with Desains, concerned the determination of the lengths of heat waves with the aid of a thermoelectric element and a metallic wire grating, a process, then entirely new, which has since often been employed in the study of this question.
Following this he undertook an investigation on crystals in collaboration with his brother, who had passed his licentiate and was preparator for Friedel in the laboratory of mineralogy at the Sorbonne. Their experiments led the two young physicists to a great success: the discovery of the hitherto unknown phenomena of piezo-electricity, which consists of an electric polarization produced by the compression or the expansion of crystals in the direction of the axis of symmetry. This was by no means a chance discovery. It was the result of much reflection on the symmetry of crystalline matter, which enabled the brothers to foresee the possibilities of such polarization. The first part of the investigation was made in Friedel's laboratory. With an experimental skill rare at their age, the young men succeeded in making a complete study of the new phenomenon, established the conditions of symmetry necessary to its production in crystals, and stated its remarkably simple quantitative laws, as well as its absolute magnitude for certain crystals. Several well-known scientists of other nations (Roentgen, Kundt, Voigt, Riecke) have made further investigations along this new road opened by Jacques and Pierre Curie.
The second part of the work, and much more difficult to realize experimentally, concerned the compression resulting in piezo-electric crystals when they are exposed to the action of an electric field. This phenomenon, foreseen by Lippmann, was demonstrated by the Curie brothers. The difficulty of the experiment lay in the minuteness of the deformations that had to be observed. Fortunately Desains and Mouton placed a small room adjoining the physics laboratory at the disposal of the brothers so that they might proceed successfully with their delicate operations.
From these researches, as much theoretical as experimental, they immediately deduced a practical application, in the form of a new apparatus, a piezo-electric quartz electrometer, which measures in absolute terms small quantities of electricity, as well as electric currents of low intensity. This apparatus has since then rendered great service in experiments in radioactivity.[2]
During the course of their experiments on piezo-electricity the Curies were obliged to employ electrometric apparatus, and, not being able to use the quadrant electrometer known at that time, they developed a new form of that instrument, better adapted to their necessities. This became known in France as the Curie electrometer. Thus these years of collaboration between the two brothers, always intimately united, proved both happy and fruitful. Their devotion and their common interest in science were to them both a stimulant and a support. During their work the vivacity and energy of Jacques were of precious aid to Pierre, always more easily absorbed by his thoughts.
However, this beautiful and close collaboration lasted only a few years. In 1883, Pierre and Jacques were obliged to separate; Jacques left for the University of Montpellier as Head Lecturer in Mineralogy (Maître de Conferences). Pierre was made Director of Laboratory Work in the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry founded by the city of Paris at the suggestion of Friedel and of Schützenberger, who became its first director. Their remarkable researches with crystals won for the brothers in 1895—very late, it is true—the Planté prize.