Welcome to the Curie Institute Lab
At that time, no one else in the world of physics had noticed what Curie recorded in a sentence of her paper, describing how much greater were the activities of pitchblende and chalcolite than uranium itself: “The fact is very remarkable, and leads to the belief that these minerals may contain an element which is much more active than uranium.”
She later would recall how she felt “a passionate desire to verify this hypothesis as rapidly as possible.”
On 14 April 1898, the Curies optimistically weighed out a 100-gram sample of pitchblende and ground it with a pestle and mortar. They did not realize at the time that what they were searching for was present in such minute quantities that they would eventually have to process tonnes of the ore.
