Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science's First Family
Shelley Emling
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 1137278366
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Published to widespread acclaim, in Marie Curie and Her Daughters, science writer Shelley Emling shows that far from a shy introvert toiling away in her laboratory, the famed scientist and two-time Nobel prize winner was nothing short of an iconoclast. Emling draws on personal letters released by Curie's only granddaughter to show how Marie influenced her daughters yet let them blaze their own paths: Irene followed her mother's footsteps into science and was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission; Eve traveled the world as a foreign correspondent and then moved on to humanitarian missions. Emling also shows how Curie, following World War I, turned to America for help. Few people know about Curie's close friendship with American journalist Missy Meloney, who arranged speaking tours across the country for Marie, Eve, and Irene. Months on the road, charming audiences both large and small, endeared the Curies to American women and established a lifelong relationship with the United States that formed one of the strongest connections of Marie's life. Factually rich, personal, and original, this is an engrossing story about the most famous woman in science that rips the cover off the myth and reveals the real person, friend, and mother behind it.
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Marie Curie Radium Fund in a New York bank and its interest would eventually provide Marie with another source of personal income for the rest of her life. Always for Marie, though, it was that half teaspoon of material that would soon be locked away in the purser’s safe on the ship that was of paramount importance. In addition to getting back on track financially, Marie had also managed, on a separate level, to tunnel through her fears and come out on the other side. Langevin-Joliot said that
quiet and very studious and my father was very charming. . . . [B]oth were intelligent. . . . [T]heir collaboration was very successful because their personalities were so complementary,” she said. Frédéric wrote later of his early days with Irene that he hadn’t the slightest inkling that they might one day be a couple: “But I watched her . . . with her cold appearance, her forgetting sometimes to say hello, she didn’t always create sympathy around her at the laboratory. In observing her, I
a faster and easier fashion. No longer would doctors have to pay the high costs and endure the laborious work of separating naturally occurring radioactive elements from their ores, a process that had long been a drag on the development of nuclear physics. But for Irene, who admired her mother above all else, the greatest satisfaction came on January 15, 1934, when she and her husband briefed Marie on what they’d found. Indeed, the pair reproduced the entire experiment for both Marie and Paul
discoveries of you and your husband which . . . have crowned her great life work.” A more emotional Georges Fournier, one of Marie’s students who had worked with her at the institute, dramatically exclaimed that “we have lost everything.” At exactly noon on Friday, July 6, 1934, on a bright sunny day, the coffin of Marie was slowly lowered over Pierre Curie’s in the small cemetery in Sceaux, a site she had visited so faithfully over so many years. There were no official speeches or ceremonies,
newspaper, chatting at the wedding with Georges Cogniot, the director of a Communist paper. A wide range of personalities attended the wedding including Maurice Thorez, the longtime leader of the French Communist Party. In the spring of 1948, Irene left on a third and final trip to the United States at the request of the American Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. (In 1946, the House Un-American Activities Committee had branded this committee as subversive.) The fundraising tour on behalf of