Read Online Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull - Free Book Online Page B

with,” he managed to bring her around. Although still harboring a protective, almost motherly attitude toward radium, she worked to establish the standard, then in 1913 dutifully handed over the necessary amount of radium in person to the committee. Kept in a safe at the Office of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, the radium was to be made available to five continents. The committee agreed to call the standard unit of measurement a “curie”—the name by which it is known to this day.
    Paul Langevin quietly went back to his wife. Marie closed herself to the possibility of love and concentrated on getting the Radium Institute off the ground.
    She was having great difficulty regaining her full health, when a new crisis made all her previous troubles seem small.

CHAPTER NINE
    War Heroine
    I N JULY OF 1914, war broke out, first between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, then widening across Europe, eventually pulling in some twenty-five countries, including the United States. As the deadliest confrontation in history so far, the Great War interrupted Marie’s work. Science that wasn’t war-related was put on hold.
    “Senseless” was Marie’s word for war: “It is hard to think that after so many centuries of development, the human race still doesn’t know how to resolve difficulties in any way except by violence.” But while condemning the notion of war, she was determined to help France however she could, possibly also hoping to repair her tarnished reputation. First she offered to donate her prize medals when France asked citizens to donate their gold and silver (the offer was refused).
    Then she carried out a daring mission at great personal risk. In September of 1914, after Germany dropped three bombs on Paris, the French president moved the government headquarters outside of Paris to Bordeaux. He worried that if Paris was captured, the valuable radium would fall into German hands and be used somehow against France. He assigned Marie to transport all the radium in France to Bordeaux.
    With each tube encased in lead, it was such a heavy suitcase that people wonder to this day how she carried it. A young soldier on the train shared a sandwich with her and asked if she was Marie Curie. She gave her usual denial, in part from her abhorrence of publicity but also for fear that other passengers might think she was a coward fleeing Paris.
    From the start, the death tolls were staggering—obscenely so. By November 1914, there would be 310,000 dead, and 300,000 wounded soldiers in France. Scientific “progress” had created new weapons; the Germans were concocting deadly gases like mustard and chlorine, never used before in warfare. Marie’s friend and nurse Hertha Ayrton invented a fan to blow the gases out of trenches, and Marie, too, was galvanized to do something healing for French soldiers. “We must act, act ,” she said, putting her research aside—and inspiring her daughter Irène, now seventeen, to join forces with her.
    She learned that doctors on the battlefield had no X-ray equipment or technicians available to show where wounded soldiers had been hit by bullets and shrapnel. At the frontlines, wounded men were simply put in ambulances, “in a mixture of mud and blood,” as she described it, often dying on the way to a hospital. She knew X-rays could help save lives, so she invented a portable X-ray machine that could be transported to battlefields where it could immediately spot the location of a bullet, for example, inside a soldier’s body. Then she struggled for funding for an ambulance. Women drivers were still quite rare, but she got her license so she could drive to the front herself. But still she was not satisfied: she wanted to do more.
    So next she commandeered all unused X-ray and automotive equipment in Paris. She assembled a fleet of cars (even limousines), installing X-ray machines inside that could be hooked up to a car battery if electricity wasn’t available. Keeping careful notebooks