In this makeshift laboratory we worked practically unaided during two years, occupying ourselves as much with chemical research as with the study of the radiation of the increasingly active products we were obtaining. Then it became necessary for us to divide our work. Pierre Curie continued the investigations on the properties of radium, while I went ahead with the chemical experiments which had as their objective the preparation of pure radium salts. I had to work with as much as twenty kilogrammes of material at a time, so that the hangar was filled with great vessels full of precipitates and of liquids. It was exhausting work to move the containers about, to transfer the liquids, and to stir for hours at a time, with an iron bar, the boiling material in the cast-iron basin. I extracted from the mineral the radium-bearing barium and this, in the state of chloride, I submitted to a fractional crystallization. The radium accumulated in the least soluble parts, and I believed that this process must lead to the separation of the chloride of radium. The very delicate operations of the last crystallizations were exceedingly difficult to carry out in that laboratory, where it was impossible to find protection from the iron and coal dust. At the end of a year, results indicated clearly that it would be easier to separate radium than polonium; that is why we concentrated our efforts in this direction. We examined the radium salts we obtained with the aim of discovering their powers and we loaned samples of the salts to several scientists, in particular to Henri Becquerel.
During the years and , Pierre Curie published with me a memoir on the discovery of the induced radioactivity produced by radium. We published another paper on the effects of the rays: the luminous effects, the chemical effects, etc.; and still another on the electric charge carried by certain of the rays. And, finally, we made a general report on the new radioactive substances and their radiations.
Pierre Curie with the quartz piezo-electroscope he invented, by which rays of radium are measured for the Congress of Physics which met in Paris in . My husband published, besides, a study of the action of a magnetic field on radium rays.
The main result of our investigations and of those of other scientists during these years, was to make known the nature of the rays emitted by radium, and to prove that they belonged to three different categories. Radium emits a stream of active corpuscles moving with great speed. Certain of them carry a positive charge and form the Alpha rays; others, much smaller, carry a negative charge and form Beta rays. The movements of these two groups are influenced by a magnet. A third group is constituted by the rays that are insensible to the action of a magnet, and that, we know to-day, are a radiation similar to light and to X-rays.
We had an especial joy in observing that our products containing concentrated radium were all spontaneously luminous. My husband who had hoped to see them show beautiful colorations had to agree that this other unhoped-for characteristic gave him even a greater satisfaction than that he had aspired to.
