Radio-Active Substances

The object of the present work is the publication of researches which I have been carrying on for more than four years on radio-active bodies. I began these researches by a study of the phosphorescence of uranium, discovered by M. Becquerel. The results to which I was led by this work promised to afford so interesting a field that M. Curie put aside the work on which he was engaged, and joined me, our object being the extraction of new radio-active substances and the further study of their properties.

Since the commencement of our research we thought it well to hand over specimens of the substances, discovered and prepared by ourselves, to certain physicists, in the first place to M. Becquerel, to whom is due the discovery of the uranium rays. In this way we ourselves facilitated the research by others besides ourselves on the new radio-active bodies. At the termination of our first publications, M. Giesel, in Germany, also began to prepare these substances, and passed on specimens of them to several German scientists. Finally, these substances were placed on sale in France and Germany, and the subject growing in importance gave rise to a scientific movement, such that numerous memoirs have appeared, and are constantly appearing on radio-active bodies, principally abroad. The results of the various French and foreign researches are necessarily confused, as is the case with all new subjects in course of investigation, the aspect of the question becoming modified from day to day.

From the chemical point of view, however, one point is definitely established:—_i.e._, the existence of a new element, strongly radio-active, viz., radium. The preparation of the pure chloride of radium and the determination of the atomic weight of radium form the chief part of my own work. Whilst this work adds to the elements actually known with certainty a new element with very curious properties, a new method of chemical research is at the same time established and justified. This method, based on the consideration of radio-activity as an atomic property of matter, is just that which enabled M. Curie and myself to discover the existence of radium.