It was the 1890’s, and a young Polish-born scientist named Marie Sklodowska Curie hurried home through the streets of Paris. But her thoughts were back in the unheated, leaky shed where she worked. She was puzzling over an experiment she had done over and over. The result had been the same each time, but she could not explain why!
In this experiment, Marie used a rock called pitchblende that gave off mysterious rays of energy. These rays were like a signal, but the signals made no sense at all.
Marie believed that the signals from the rock might be coming from an element that no one knew about. So she began trying to find it. She boiled the pitchblende in huge pots. Next she added chemicals to it to break up the different compounds. Then she tested each part to see if it gave off rays. Her work took a long time and many of her experiments went wrong.
Finally, in 1898, Marie found the element that gave off the energy. She named it radium. The radium gave off so much energy that it glowed in the dark! It took Marie four years and several thousand kilograms of pitchblende to get just a tiny pinch of pure radium.
Marie’s work was hard, but it paid off. In 1903, she won a Nobel Prize, the most important award in science – and she gave the world a new element.
Picture Credit : Google
