Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of radium
On this day · 26 December 1898
On December 26, 1898 the Curies told the French Academy of Sciences they had found a new element a million times more radioactive than uranium.
On December 26, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie, working with the chemist Gustave Bemont, announced to the French Academy of Sciences the discovery of a powerfully radioactive new element. They proposed calling it radium.
It was their second discovery that year. In July they had isolated polonium, named for Marie’s native Poland, but it could not account for all the radiation pouring out of pitchblende ore. Suspecting a further element, the Curies ground and dissolved tons of the mineral by hand in a leaky shed, chasing a substance whose glow Marie called “one of the joys of our life.”
Radium would reshape both science and medicine, opening the study of radioactivity and inspiring early cancer therapies. It also slowly poisoned its discoverer: decades of exposure left Marie’s notebooks dangerously radioactive to this day. The achievement helped earn the Curies a share of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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