Biography | Marie Curie — The Shed Behind 42 Rue Lhomond

People point at the marble of the Institut Curie and call it the room where radium was found.

The first isolation happened in a courtyard shed that is no longer there.

Pierre Curie held a post at the École municipale de physique et de chimie industrielles, then entered from 42 rue Lhomond. After Henri Becquerel's 1896 observation of uranium rays, Marie took the problem as a doctoral subject.

In July 1898 the Curies announced a new radioactive element in a bismuth fraction of pitchblende. They named it polonium, after the partitioned country of her birth.

In December 1898 they announced a second element, radium, in a barium fraction.

Announcement was not isolation. From 1899, sacks of Bohemian pitchblende residues arrived at this yard. Marie treated tonnes of ore in a glassed-in shed used as a store and workshop: worn pine tables, a cast-iron stove, no hoods for the gases.

By 1902 they had extracted a decigram of radium chloride. That was enough to measure an atomic weight and to prove the element was real.

The shed was demolished. The school still occupies the block. The modern door is 10 rue Vauquelin. A plaque on the school records the 1898 discovery, with Gustave Bémont named as assistant.

Stand in the courtyard, not in the later museum laboratory on rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. That later lab is a different chapter. This pin is the vanished shed.

Photo: Henri Manuel portrait of Marie Curie, c. 1920, public domain. ESPCI courtyard and plaque photographs are later visitor records.