Sam Kean by The Disappearing Spoon;Other True Tales of Madness Love;the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements

Author:The Disappearing Spoon;Other True Tales of Madness, Love;the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Tables, Chemistry, SCI000000, Miscellanea, Periodic Law, Chemical Elements, Science, Inorganic, World, General, Physical & Theoretical, History
ISBN: 9780316051644
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-12T05:00:00+00:00

The trendy Revigator, a pottery crock lined with nuclear radium. Users filled the flask with water, which turned radioactive after a night’s soak. Instructions suggested drinking six or more refreshing glasses a day. (National Museum of Nuclear Science and History)

Historically, only a single case of acute polonium poisoning has approached the drama of Litvinenko’s—that of Irène Joliot-Curie, Marie’s slender, sad-eyed daughter. A brilliant scientist herself, Irène and her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, picked up on Marie’s work and soon one-upped her. Rather than just finding radioactive elements, Irène figured out a method for converting tame elements into artificially radioactive atoms by bombarding them with subatomic particles. This work led to her own Nobel Prize in 1935. Unfortunately, Joliot-Curie relied on polonium as her atomic bombardier. And one day in 1946, not long after Poland had been wrested from Nazi Germany, only to be taken over as a puppet of the Soviet Union, a capsule of polonium exploded in her laboratory, and she inhaled Marie’s beloved element. Though spared Litvinenko’s public humiliation, Joliot-Curie died of leukemia in 1956, just as her mother had twenty-two years before.

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