Biography | Marie Curie — The Shed Where They Extracted Radium

Between 1898 and 1902 Marie and Pierre Curie processed tonnes of pitchblende residue in a leaky wooden shed in the courtyard of the École Municipale de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, later ESPCI.

The shed stood behind the school buildings near what is now 10 rue Vauquelin.

They worked with worn pine tables, a cast-iron stove, and no proper ventilation, refining the ore through repeated chemical separations.

In July 1898 they announced polonium; in December of the same year they announced radium.

It took four more years of exhausting labour to isolate a pure sample of radium chloride large enough for spectroscopic confirmation.

Marie later wrote that the best and happiest years of their life were spent entirely consecrated to work in that miserable shed.

The shed itself is gone. A commemorative plaque marks the site of the discovery.

Photo: Monceau, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons