All language subtitles for Unruly Elements_EN

One of the oldest tricks
in the chemist's tool box

is called the flame test.

More than a thousand years ago,
Arab alchemists discovered

that every substance gave off
a telltale color as it burned.

But as the number
of elements grew,

this test became less
and less useful,

because some elements
gave off such similar colors

it was hard to tell them apart.

One day in 1859,
a German chemist

named Robert Bunsen
described this problem

to his good friend
physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.

A few days later, Kirchhoff
came to Bunsen's laboratory

with an instrument made
from two telescopes,

a wooden box and a prism.

They used Bunsen's latest
invention-- the Bunsen burner--

to heat their samples.

Light from the burning
element passed down the barrel

of this telescope to the prism,
which split the light

into a spectrum of colors.

What they saw when they looked

into the eyepiece
was a revelation.

You see a whole collection
of sharp bright lines

at very particular wavelengths.

And that map of lines is
distinctive for every element.

It's almost like each
element has its own barcode.

It's a unique way of saying this
is that element, not some other.

Like Humphry Davy's battery,

the "spectroscope" kicked off
a whole new round

in the discovery of elements
starting with cesium

and rubidium, discovered by
Bunsen and Kirchhoff themselves,

quickly followed
by thallium and indium,

discovered by other chemists
who seized on their new tool.

Astronomers, too,
embraced the new technology,

turning the spectroscope
to the heavens.

In fact, there's one
element that we found

by first looking at the sun.

We didn't even know
it was here on earth.

It was helium.

By the middle
of the 19th century,

there had been an explosion
in the numbers of new elements

that had been found.

And this was exciting, but it
also led to a kind of muddle

that seemed to have no order,
no reason behind it.

Chemistry looked
like an unruly garden,

a jungle of bewildering details.

Human beings like
to make things simple.

And part of the whole,
scientific enterprise is

to bring order out of
what appears to be chaos,

to bring simplicity
out of complexity.

But the ever-rising number
of elements, now up to 63,

promised chemists just the
opposite of simplicity:

more and more variety,
with no end in sight.

How many elements were there?

Was this going
to continue forever?

The man who would finally
bring order to the elements

was a young Russian
chemistry professor

named Dmitri Mendeleev.

He didn't set out
to be a savior.

He was simply trying to organize
the textbook he was writing.

But as he grappled with this
challenge over one weekend

in 1869, Mendeleev would make
a discovery for the ages:

the periodic table
of the elements.

Today it hangs in every
chemistry classroom

in the world, one of
the most familiar images

in all of science.

But behind the table is a
fascinating untold story.

Who was this man
and how did he do it?

Mendeleev had recently
been named a professor

at the University
of St. Petersburg,

the leading institution
in Russia's capital.

But getting there had been
a long, improbable journey

from humble beginnings.

Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk,
Siberia,

which is basically smack
in the middle of Russia

if you look at it on a map.

It's very much the boonies
of imperial Russia.

His father, the headmaster
of the local high school,

went blind during the year
of Dmitri's birth,

leaving Mendeleev's mother
to support and raise

about a dozen children.

Maria Mendeleeva sensed
something special

in her youngest child.

So in 1849, she set out
with her 15-year-old son

on a 1,500-mile trip
by horse-drawn sleigh

in search of a school
that would accept him.

Like most students
from the provinces,

Dmitri was turned
away in Moscow.

But in St. Petersburg,
he landed a spot

in the teacher training school
his father had attended.

Exhausted by the journey,
Maria died a few months later.

She took me out of Siberia
and sacrificed what remained

of her money... her life...

so that I could get
an education.

From her I learned that
it is through work not words

that we must seek divine
and scientific truth.

Scientific truth was elusive
for any young chemistry student

in the mid-1800s.

There were deep divisions
in the field

over even the
most basic concepts,

particularly the atomic
weights of the elements.

Most chemists
believed each element

had its own unique kind of atom,

and ever since the early 1800s,
they'd been working

to determine how much an atom
of each element weighed.

That's how one distinguished
on element from another.

So it was crucial to understand

what were the
correct atomic weights

for each of the elements.

Everyone agreed that hydrogen,
the lightest element,

should be assigned a weight of
one, and that heavier elements

should have proportionally
higher weights.

But that's where
the agreement ended.

Did carbon weigh six
or did it weigh 12?

Did it weigh four?

That depended on who you talked
to and when you talked to them.

By the late 1850s people
were incredibly confused.

This was an
unsupportable situation.

Something had to be done.

Hoping to sort out the mess,
chemists organized

their first-ever
international meeting held

in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1860.

Mendeleev, being a young,
enterprising student,

goes to this meeting, and he
hears a very important speech

by an Italian chemist,
Stanislao Cannizzaro.

Cannizzaro laid
out a persuasive case

for a new, uniform system
of atomic weights.

I still remember the powerful
impression Cannizzaro made.

He seemed to advocate
truth itself.

After Karlsruhe, something
astonishing starts to happen.

Within a few years
of the congress,

you start seeing lots
of different attempts

to organize the elements
that are all based

on these new,
post-Karlsruhe weights.

A French geologist
arranged the known elements

in a spiral along
the outside of a cylinder--

like the stripes
on a barber pole--

and found that elements
with similar properties tended

to fall into columns.

An English chemist
arranged the elements

by atomic weight
in rows of seven

and found that their
properties repeated

like musical notes
one octave apart.

By the end of the 1860s, five
different European scientists

had detected glimmers of a
hidden order among the elements.

But no one could quite
put the puzzle together.

That's where things stood
when Mendeleev finally

landed a professorship at the
University of St. Petersburg.

One of the duties
of his new post was

to teach introductory chemistry.

He has to teach this class,
hundreds of students,

and he has to give
them a textbook.

There are no up-to-date
Russian language

college-level
textbooks available.

So Mendeleev set out
to write his own:

Principles of Chemistry,
in two volumes.

He completed
the first volume in 1868

and on Friday,
February 14, 1869,

he sent the first
two chapters of volume two

off to his publisher.

Marina.

He was in a hurry to finish it
because he was struggling

to make ends meet.

He hasn't yet
gotten any royalties

from the textbook, because it
hasn't been written yet.

He's got to keep his
family fed and clothed.

He has at this point
two children and a wife,

so he was always looking
for more funds.

To make a little extra money,
Mendeleev planned

to take a short break on Monday
to do some consulting

for a cheese-makers cooperative.

But he had
something on his mind.

His publisher was
expecting the next chapter

of his textbook in two weeks,
and he still hadn't settled

on a way to organize
the rest of his book.

Mendeleev had spent most
of the first volume

covering a few common
elements like hydrogen

and oxygen in great detail.

You learn a huge amount
of chemistry, but it's slow.

Volume one contains
just eight elements

out of the 63
that were then known.

When it came to writing
the second volume

of his textbook,
Mendeleev realized

that he had better find
an organizing principle

fairly quickly, because he had

to cover the
remaining 55 elements.

Since I'd set out
to write a book

called Principles of Chemistry,

I felt I had to
establish a system

for classifying the elements.

A system based not on chance,
or guesswork,

but on some sort of principle.

The problem gnawed
at him all weekend.

He's trying
to come up with a way

of packing more elements
in the same amount of space.

He couldn't ramble the way he
did in volume one,

however useful that was.

Mendeleev had already
hit on the idea

of focusing on whole
families of elements

rather than treating
one at a time.

Chemists had long known that
certain elements resemble

each other in much the way
family members do.

You can often tell
people are related

because they have
the same sort of face.

They have the same nose, they
have the same color eyes.

There's something in common, and
that's something very similar

in these chemical families.

They tend to react similarly to
the same kinds of substances.

Mendeleev had ended volume one
with two chapters

on a well-known
family, the halogens:

chlorine, fluorine,
bromine and iodine.

He began volume two
in the same way,

with chapters on sodium,
potassium and lithium,

a family called
the alkali metals.

He realized that a family
of elements is a good way

of organizing so you
can do more with less space.

The problem was, there was no
obvious family to turn to next.

For insight into
what other elements

might be grouped together,
Mendeleev looked more closely

at the two families
he already had.

And in that process,
he figures out

something rather extraordinary
about the elements.

He looks to the atomic weights
of sodium and lithium

and looks at the
difference between them.

And then he does the same thing
for fluorine to chlorine,

and notices that those
two differences

are very close to each other.

Was this just a coincidence...
or a clue?

Excited, Mendeleev wrote
down the lightest elements

and their atomic weights.

After seven elements, he broke
off and started a new row,

keeping elements with similar
chemical properties

in the same column.

The numerical
pattern continued to hold.

The eye is immediately
struck by a pattern,

a regular change in the atomic
weights of the elements

within the horizontal rows
and the vertical columns.

He notices that there's a
regularity in the differences.

That is, the changes
that happen within a family

happen regularly
across families.

And that's the
fundamental insight

that gets him thinking about

how to organize all
the other elements.

Mendeleev had begun the weekend
trying to solve the problem

of what to do next
in his textbook.

But having reached
this a-ha moment,

he dropped everything else
and he poured all his energy

into revealing an absolutely
fundamental principle of nature.

When he was taken by an idea,
he was really taken by it.

He starts putting
together this system.

And he's trying to figure
out the hard spots,

the things that don't
quite make sense.

Maybe I can scratch
out this element here

and put this element
in its place.

Should I change
the atomic weights?

Do I have to
rethink their properties?

And the problems of it, the
intellectual puzzle,

just grabs him.

The challenge
Mendeleev faced was similar

to one of his favorite
diversions,

the card game called Patience,
in which the object is

to arrange playing cards
by both suit and number.

That process of keeping several
different variables in mind

is kind of analogous
to how Mendeleev was thinking.

He started using both the
regular increasing order

of atomic weights
and the relationships

of chemical properties with each
other to build two dimensions.

Mendeleev didn't just lay out
the known elements

in order of rising
atomic weight.

When it looks like
the next element

doesn't have the properties
it is supposed to have,

he scooches it over
and leaves a blank spot.

And has the audacity,
has the daring to suggest

that there might one day
exist an element

that would fill that space.

The few scraps of paper left

from Mendeleev's struggle
that weekend reveal

that he sometimes arranged
the chemical families

in rows instead of columns.

Unhappy with this early
attempt at a table,

he moved the alkali metals
to a new position

in the next draft below,
but kept them together.

Mendeleev is not moving
elements individually.

But he is moving
them as a block.

It's as if it's a composite
piece of a jigsaw puzzle

that he's moving all together.

On Monday morning, a driver
arrived to take Mendeleev

to the train station for his
trip to the cheese cooperative.

He was well into his task
but still struggling

to make all the pieces fit.

We know this because one of the
surviving fragments is a letter,

delivered that morning,
concerning arrangements

for his trip to
the cheese cooperative.

And on the back of the letter,
which still bears the stain

of a cup, Mendeleev
has sketched a few symbols

and has carried out some
very simple calculations.

He's looking at differences
in atomic weights.

So he was still working
on the problem,

even after wrestling
with it all weekend.

The drafts of Mendeleev's
table show plainly

the struggle he went through.

The bottom of the page he lists
the elements to be classified.

As he fits them into
the table on that page,

he crosses out the elements.

It's just what you
and I would do.

We can see the effort
in that page.

He's making mistakes.

He's correcting them.

It's full of crossings out.

There are things
that don't quite fit.

This is a human being trying
to understand this world.

Hour after hour, Mendeleev
worked on the table,

missing one train after another.

Finally,
he dismissed the coachman.

The cheese makers
would have to wait.

That afternoon, a visitor
found him distraught,

unable to capture the order
he knew was there,

just out of reach.

Later that day,
Mendeleev came to a choice

that would crystallize
his thinking.

The elements involved were
iodine and tellurium.

Iodine's a little lighter
than tellurium

so it should come first.

But Mendeleev looks
at that and says,

"Well, if I put iodine first,
it's in the wrong family.

It is actually a halogen,
which is the next row down."

If he stuck to that weight rule,
it would put an element outside

of the family
it obviously belonged in.

So he decides tellurium,
the heavier element,

should go first.

It always bothered him
that iodine was lighter

than tellurium but came after.

That breaks the order
of atomic weights,

but it preserves the
family resemblances,

which are more important
than just the increase

of atomic weights.

With that principle established,

Mendeleev hurried
toward the end.

And the more he worked on it,
the better it looked.

Finally, that evening,
Mendeleev completed his table.

Before leaving the next day,
he ordered 200 copies printed

and sent to
leading European chemists.

By the time he left
for the cheese factory,

Mendeleev knew that he was onto
something extremely important.

I think he realized that day
that he had cracked it.

With a few modifications,
soon made by Mendeleev himself,

his 1869 draft
is easily recognized

as the periodic table
of the elements--

incomplete but unmistakable.

In his published table,
Mendeleev left blanks

for some of the elements
he thought were missing.

Not only did he
leave a blank space,

but he suggested
an approximate atomic weight

for that future element.

And the fact that Mendeleev
on that first weekend

is already thinking this way,
that's a sign

that he believed that there's
something deeper going on here.

Mendeleev believed his table was
more than a convenient way

to arrange the elements.

He was convinced he had
discovered a law of nature:

that the properties of
the elements are determined

by their atomic weights
and vary in a regular,

periodic way, across the table.

It's periodic
because the properties

of the elements repeat
in a regular fashion.

When you wrap around
from one row to the next

and come back to where you were,
the elements that are

in the same column
have similar properties.

He had an almost mystical
feeling

that this was there in nature

and not so much a human
invention as a discovery.

Given the remarkable
regularity of his table,

Mendeleev couldn't
believe nature

would have just left
some spaces empty.

Laws of nature
do not permit exceptions.

There must be an element which
we have not yet discovered.

Go look for that element.

And he was bold enough not only
to say an element is missing

but to predict.

The periodic law allows
us not only to predict

what new elements will be found,
but also to determine

in advance their chemical
and physical properties.

In 1871, Mendeleev published an
article making predictions

about three of
the missing elements

based on the properties of their
neighbors in the table.

Chemists really weren't used to
making predictions of any kind,

let alone ones to this
degree of specificity.

They are remarkably precise
and quite daring

for Mendeleev to print them.

Four years later,
a French chemist

found a new metal so soft
it melted in his hand.

He called it gallium.

It seemed to be a good fit for
the empty spot below aluminum,

but the density didn't match
Mendeleev's prediction.

He wrote the
Frenchman suggesting

that he check his data.

So you can just
imagine this Frenchman

who actually has the element
in his hands hearing

from this Siberian who has
never seen the element,

daring to say to him
that he's made a mistake.

But sure enough, when the
French scientist rechecked

his measurements,
Mendeleev was correct.

So not only had Mendeleev
predicted the element,

but he knew the properties
of the element better

than the discoverer
of the element knew them.

Within 15 years all three
of the detailed predictions

are discovered and that
catapults Mendeleev

to chemical superstardom.

I never thought I would live
to see my ideas verified.

I was wrong.

But in 1894, two British
scientists made a discovery

that threatened
to bring Mendeleev's

carefully crafted
edifice crashing down.

They found a new gas
they called argon

that didn't seem
to fit into the table.

When Lord Rayleigh and William
Ramsay discovered argon,

it looked like a problem,
a very serious challenge

to the periodic table itself.

Mendeleev's first reaction
to almost anything

that was contradictory
to the system was to be

hostile to it and suspicious.

And Mendeleev therefore
decides it's not an element.

There are lots of reasons
to think that.

First, it doesn't react
with anything.

Chemists couldn't get it
to do anything.

It was inert.

It behaved like no other gas

that anybody had
ever encountered.

And secondly, it has
no place on the table,

so how can it exist?

Matters got worse
when Ramsay announced

he'd also isolated
helium 30 years

after it was first
detected in the sun.

It was definitely an element,

and it too had no
place in the table.

And then just
three years after that,

William Ramsay's research group
discovered three new rare gases,

krypton, xenon and neon.

They display the same
kind of properties.

They are all inert gases.

And they display the same
increase of atomic weights

as the other
natural families do.

And that changed
the situation dramatically.

What began as a single
anomaly, a single puzzle,

now looked like
a group of elements.

Now we can see that helium,
neon, argon, krypton and xenon

are as closely united
as any other group.

And so Mendeleev makes
the single biggest revision

to the system he ever did.

He puts in a new column.

And that is the family
of noble gases.

My periodic system
is in no way injured

by these discoveries.

In fact, they
confirm and strengthen it.

It turned out
to be a vindication

of the periodic system.

And, if anything, made it even
more profound a discovery.

Mendeleev's table
had finally brought order

to chemistry's unruly garden.

After Mendeleev, one could see
that each element had a place.

It was a grand
design that worked.

Chemistry wasn't just
one thing after another,

random substances we've
dug up from the earth.

They are interlinked in a
complicated and rich way.

We are at the dawn of a new era
in chemical science,

approaching a new understanding
of the still-mysterious nature

of the elements.

As the 19th century
drew to a close,

the periodic table's ability to
corral the elements contributed

to a growing sense that the work

of science was
just about complete.

Most of nature's building
blocks had been found,

measured and cataloged.

Chemists agreed these
elements had been,

and always would be, the same--
forever fixed, unchanging.

All that remained was to fill
in the few remaining blanks.

Or so it seemed.

In fact, this smug sense
of satisfaction was about

to be shattered by something and
someone completely unexpected.

She was the unlikeliest
of revolutionaries,

a graduate student--
a woman-- from Poland

who had left her homeland
to pursue her passion

for science in Paris.

Yet in four short years,
her discoveries

would transform
our understanding

of matter and make her one
of the most famous women

in the world.

She worked on something
that was relatively obscure

and turned it into
a blockbuster.

New elements, new properties
and a whole new way

to look at the world.

The world would know
her as Marie Curie,

but she was
born Maria Sklodowska,

into a family
of Polish patriots,

at a time when Warsaw
was under Russian rule.

Poland had been literally
wiped off the map,

its residents forbidden
to speak their own language

or teach their own history.

But Maria's family
secretly defied the czar,

speaking Polish at home and
reciting patriotic poetry

to preserve
their Polish heritage.

She used to go by
an obelisk erected in honor

of the Russian people

and spit on the obelisk
on the way to school.

So you can see
Maria learned early

to be a fighter and resister.

The daughter of two teachers,
Maria excelled

in science and math.

But in Russian-ruled Poland,
women were not allowed

to attend university
let alone become scientists.

Very, very few places in Europe
or elsewhere had opportunities

for young women
to study science.

So one of the few places she
could was, in fact, in Paris.

But because her family
was too poor to send her,

Maria would first have
to work for six long years

as a governess to support
her older sister's studies.

Only at age 24 did
she finally get her chance.

She waited her turn
and she didn't give up.

And when the turn
came she took it.

I was lost in the great city.

But the feeling
of living there alone,

taking care of myself
without any help,

didn't depress me at all.

I had been waiting for this
opportunity for a long time.

Paris in the 1890s was like
no other place on earth--

a living showcase
for the wonders

of science and technology.

The city boasted
such modern marvels

as electric streetcars
and telephone exchanges.

At the laboratories
of Louis Pasteur,

scientists were
conquering diseases

that had plagued humanity
for centuries.

The Lumière brothers
were thrilling crowds

pictures that actually moved.

And rising above it all was the
brand new Eiffel Tower,

which would remain the
world's tallest structure

for nearly half a century.

Here was Paris, the kind
of intellectual, artistic,

technological capital
of the universe.

This was where
the modern age was born.

She felt this precious
sense of liberty.

She could say
whatever she wanted,

go wherever she wanted.

And she took it all
in and loved it.

Everything I saw and learned
was a new delight to me.

I had only one regret.

The days were too short
and went by too quickly.

Adopting the French form
of her name, Marie,

she enrolled at Paris'
pre-eminent university,

the Sorbonne,
where she could study

under the leading lights
of French science.

One of them was
Gabriel Lippmann,

a future Nobel Prize winner.

Another was Henri Poincare,

who was one of the leading
mathematicians

of the 19th century.

One of her math instructors
was a mountain climber.

Another was an aviator.

These were exciting people,

scientists who had
exciting lives.

It was like a new
world open to me,

the world of science which
I was at last permitted

to know in all liberty.

Marie graduated first in her
class in physics and,

with Professor Lippmann's help,
received a grant

to do research on magnetism.

A friend suggested she seek
out a French physicist

who had studied the subject

and might have some
lab space for her.

The meeting would
change her life.

Pierre Curie seemed
to me very young,

though he was 35 at the time.

I think it was pretty much
electric from the beginning.

With all my heart I thank you
for your photograph.

I showed it to my brother
Jacques-- was I wrong?

He finds you very fine
but he also said,

"She has a very decisive look,
maybe even stubborn."

Pierre Curie was
a first-rate researcher,

but he had never bothered
to complete his dissertation

and was content teaching
at an industrial college.

He was diffident,
modest, and shy.

He was very much an outsider.

He had been homeschooled by his
politically radical father

along with his brother Jacques.

In a family photograph you
see him with his brother.

His head is resting on his hand.

It's a pose of dreaming,
as if he is looking

at some inner vision.

Pierre was a man of ideas,
not action.

But he was galvanized
by this young woman

and pursued her as he had
nothing else in his life.

It would be a beautiful thing

if we could spend our lives
near each other,

true to our dreams, in science,
where every discovery,

no matter how small, lives on.

Pierre's proposal posed
a dilemma for Marie.

She had planned to get a
first-rate scientific education

in Paris and then return
to her beloved Poland

to teach and care
for her aging father.

Her mother had died
of TB early on

and he was counting
on Marie coming back.

Now this ardent young man was
offering her an exciting life

as a working scientist.

It was a decision that would
mean abandoning my family

and my country.

Marie had all those feelings of
responsibility for her father,

for her family, and then
for Poland on top of that.

In the end,
their mutual devotion

to each other and to science
overcame Marie's resistance.

"Fate has brought us together,

and we simply can't bear
to be apart."

The newlyweds left
on a cycling honeymoon

after a simple ceremony in 1895.

By 1897, even with
a toddler to care for,

Marie had set
her sights on getting

what no other woman had
ever received in France:

a doctorate in physics.

At the time, the world
was abuzz with excitement

over a new discovery:

mysterious rays
that had the power

to see through solid objects.

You could, by this
process, look at the bones

inside of your living hand.

It's as if you had a
magical set of glasses

that lets you see
inside of living creatures.

And that sparks
the public imagination.

Doctors instantly
recognized X-rays

as an invaluable
diagnostic tool.

There was a great
rush of excitement

from working scientists
as well.

In that first year,

there were about 1,000
scientific articles published,

at a time when the entire
physics community

in the world was only
about a thousand members.

But with so many others
doing research on X-rays,

Marie felt it would be hard to
make an original contribution.

And so she picked something that
she could work on

where there was
less competition.

In fact, no competition.

Just a year earlier, a French
physicist named Henri Becquerel

had discovered a different kind
of ray given off

by the element uranium.

These "uranic rays"
were powerful enough

to penetrate thick black paper
and create an image

on a photographic plate.

But the images were
not nearly as striking

as those created by X-rays,
and they seemed

to have no practical value.

So after writing a few papers
about this scientific curiosity,

Becquerel dropped the subject,

thinking it had
been squeezed dry.

Marie just thought that this was
a tremendous thing to work on,

particularly
as a graduate student.

The subject was attractive to me
because it was entirely new.

Little had been
written about it.

There was another reason
Becquerel's uranic rays appealed

to Marie.

She had spotted a clue that
might reveal more about them.

As you can see, air is normally
a poor conductor of electricity.

The current can't jump this gap,
so the bulb doesn't light.

But Becquerel had
noticed his uranic rays

had the mysterious power
to charge the air around them,

allowing electricity
to leak across.

The amount of electricity
was incredibly small,

about a trillionth
the amount needed

to light this little bulb.

No meter of the
day could measure it.

But Marie had a secret
weapon Becquerel didn't.

Right in Marie's own household
was perhaps the world expert

in how to measure tiny
little electrical effects.

The two of them,
Pierre and Marie Curie,

designed this really quite
ingenious instrument

to measure these very subtle
electrical effects

from her samples.

They placed a layer
of uranium on a metal plate,

then charged the plate
with a battery.

As expected, electricity
leaked across the gap

to the plate above.

To measure this tiny current,

the Curies would use
this second device

to create a matching amount
of electricity.

Inside was a special crystal

that could generate its
own tiny charge thanks

to a phenomenon called
piezoelectricity.

More than 20 years earlier,

Pierre and his brother
Jacques had discovered

that certain crystals
give out electricity

in response to pressure.

The amount of electricity
generated when you squeeze

or stretch that
crystal depends precisely

on how hard you press
on that crystal.

And that means you have a way

to make a very,
very sensitive measurement

of minute little
electrical currents.

By placing a weight
on the pan below,

Marie stretched the
piezoelectric crystal

inside the device.

Then, by slowly
relieving the tension--

unstretching the crystal--

she could generate a charge
exactly offsetting the one

coming from her uranium sample.

She could tell the
two charges were equal

when the spot of light
from this third instrument was

at zero on the scale.

Though it didn't
look very pretty,

this sort of pulled together
little contraption

was exquisitely accurate
and could allow them

to make measurements like
no one else in the world.

But using these instruments
required extraordinary

concentration and dexterity.

Ever so gradually,
Marie relieved the tension

on the crystal while carefully
watching the spot of light

to keep the two
charges in balance

and timing how long it
took to lift the weight

entirely off the pan.

The faster she had
to remove the weight,

the stronger the activity
of her test sample.

And that's why,
when you see pictures

of Marie Curie
in this experiment,

she's sitting there
with a stopwatch.

Termina.

Ma petite étudiante.

C'est très bien.

I never dreamt that I was
about to embark on a new science

that Pierre and I would follow
for the rest of our days.

Day after day, working in
a cramped, unheated storeroom,

Marie painstakingly carried
out her measurements.

She compiled data on uranium,

then went to test
the other known elements

to see if any of them
could also electrify the air.

She was not expecting
to make any sort

of earth-shattering discoveries.

She thought she would do

some sort of diligent work

on a whole lot of elements, and
she would measure their power.

It's exactly what you'd expect

for a perfectly legitimate
PhD dissertation.

And for a while, the results
were predictably dull.

No other elements showed
this strange property.

Things were going
along pretty routinely

until one day
in February of 1898.

And that was the day
that everything changed.

Pierre?

In the course of a single week,

Marie made two startling
discoveries.

She found that
the element thorium

could also make air
a better conductor.

That was the first
real solid indication

that this was
not unique to uranium.

This might be
a property of matter,

not a curiosity of one
particular element.

It was necessary
to find a new term

to define this new property
of matter.

I proposed the word
"radioactivity."

The next surprise came
when Marie tested pitchblende--

the raw ore from
which uranium is taken.

Something was very wrong.

Pitchblende seemed be four times

as radioactive
as uranium itself.

When I find a result like that,

as a scientist,
my first reaction is,

"I made a mistake" or
"The machine isn't working."

She did what every good
scientist should do,

which was doubt it,
be extremely skeptical,

and check every last
step of that chain.

So my mother made her
measurements over again.

Ten times, 20 times,
until she was forced

to accept the results.

In time, the Curies
realized this was no mistake.

The readings
from pitchblende were real.

A light bulb went
off and they said,

"Well, maybe there is
something else in there."

Very soon they began to suspect
that there was another element

in pitchblende
which was producing

this enormous radioactivity.

There must be some
new thing under the sun,

some new element that
had never been seen before.

And it must
be intensely radioactive,

since it was present
in amounts so small

that no one had
ever detected it.

Since neither Marie
nor Pierre was a member

of the Academy of Sciences,
they asked Marie's mentor,

Gabriel Lippmann, to deliver the
paper announcing this discovery.

This was one of
the most important papers

in the history of chemistry.

And yet it was almost
universally ignored.

Who was this Marie Curie?

She was a graduate student.

She spoke French
with a Polish accent.

She was married to a teacher
in an industrial school.

And she was a woman.

These are strikes that
are definitely against you.

And so her ideas
just weren't embraced

because she was so different.

But Marie knew she was
onto something important.

She had lit upon,
almost by accident,

an extremely exciting discovery.

And as soon
as he figured that out,

Pierre abandoned his work
on crystals and joined her.

To track down
their mystery element,

Marie and Pierre
subjected pitchblende

to a battery
of chemical procedures.

You break up your rock.

You try to dissolve it.

You treat it with all kinds
of other chemicals.

The goal is to separate
the ore into portions

with different
chemical properties

all the while tracking
the radioactive signal.

She then throws away everything
that isn't radioactive.

It's getting more
and more concentrated

as she goes through these steps.

The Curies soon discovered
that two distinct parts

of the pitchblende with
different chemical properties

were both radioactive.

That meant not one
but two new elements

might be hidden in the ore.

By July 1898, they were able
to announce the discovery

of one of those
substances with certainty.

Marie, you will have to name it.

The former Mademoiselle
Sklodowska thought

of her occupied native country

whose very name had been erased
from the map of the world.

Could we call it polonium?

Poland, remember,
was still not a country.

This was one way
of putting it on the map.

Et bien, voila.

Polonium it is.

Marie next turned her attention
to the second mystery element.

She finds the
activity is through the roof.

It's nearly a
thousand times more active

than even her uranium
sample had been.

Marie's polonium sample
had not been pure enough

to yield a unique spectral line.

Would this new, more powerful
element pass the test?

By 1900 spectroscopy was often
seen as the gold standard

for identifying the
materials you're working with.

And if Marie Curie wanted
to make some claim

that she found in
fact a whole new element,

she was going to have to meet
the chemists on their own terms.

She'd need
spectroscopic evidence.

Regarde ici.

Il ya une ligne...

Marie's sample
showed the presence

of the well-known
element barium.

But it also revealed a pattern

of spectral lines
never seen before,

strong evidence
that she and Pierre

had tracked down
their mystery element.

She could tell that
she had an element

that hadn't been seen before

because the spectral
lines she got were different.

And in the notebook
Pierre writes

in very bold ink
the name they decided

Radium.

But in the 19th century
there had been scores

of claims of elements
that later proved

not to be elements at all.

You needed to do more.

To satisfy
the chemical community,

a spectral line wasn't enough.

They had to see the real stuff
which could be weighed,

which could be measured.

It was important, as you would
with any other element,

to isolate this element,
to weigh it

and to place it
on the periodic table.

So in order
to be absolutely certain,

she had to have pure material

and that's what
she set out to do.

It was my mother who had no
fear of throwing herself

into that daunting task.

Without personnel, without
money, without supplies.

To isolate even
a speck of radium,

Marie would need to process
huge quantities of pitchblende,

a job too big
for her tiny laboratory.

The only space
available for this work

was a drafty old shed once
used as a dissecting room

for the school's
medical students.

As Greer Garson
and Walter Pidgeon showed

in the 1943 film Madame Curie,
the Curies worked tirelessly

to separate the radium from tons
of pitchblende residue

they had shipped
from a mine in Bohemia.

Sometimes I had to spend the
whole day mixing a boiling mass

with a heavy iron rod
nearly as big as I was.

I would be broken with
fatigue by the end of the day.

And yet we spent the
happiest days of our lives

in this miserable old shed.

An entirely new field
was opening before us.

Marie soon realized
that radium was a smaller part

of the pitchblende
than she ever imagined--

less than a millionth
of one percent.

Isolating it was going
to be an enormous job.

Marie's daughter said that,

had it been up to Pierre,

he might not have
taken the next step.

The world has done
without radium up to now.

What does it matter
if it isn't isolated

for another hundred years?

I can't give it up.

There is a special
passion which goes

with the discovery of elements,

and a line in the
spectrum is not enough.

She was after an
understanding of nature.

And there was very, very little
that would stand in her way.

In 1902, after four years
of arduous work,

Marie finally succeeded
in isolating one-tenth

of a gram of radium
chloride from ten tons

of pitchblende residue.

Four years to produce
the kind of evidence

that chemical science demands.

All of this effort so
that she could actually

convince the remaining chemists
that this was a real,

honest-to-goodness element.

She measured radium's
atomic weight at 225.9--

very close to the
current value of 226.

And she placed it correctly
in the periodic table.

Radium officially existed.

The incredulous chemists--
and there were still a few--

could now only bow
before the facts,

before the superhuman
obstinacy of a woman.

Here she was still
basically a graduate student

and the whole world was
beginning to talk

about her discoveries.

In just these four
years she's now discovered

two brand new elements.

Even more important, she's shown
that this strange emanation,

this radioactivity,
is a feature of matter,

not specific to one
quirky little substance.

And she's also developed
a quite impressive technique

for finding more.

This was the beginning
of identifying elements

by their radioactive power.

The same technique would soon be
used by others

to identify more
new radioactive elements.

In 1903, Marie Sklodowska Curie

became the
first female scientist

ever awarded
a doctorate in France.

By then it was clear
radioactivity

was a pivotal scientific
discovery,

deserving of recognition.

There's no doubt
that Marie Curie

had done the lion's
share of this work.

And yet, when the time came
to recognize this work,

it very nearly went
to other people.

A number of prominent
French scientists

nominated Pierre Curie
and Henri Becquerel

for the Nobel Prize in 1903.

And in this letter, they didn't
mention Marie Curie at all.

One of the nominators
was Gabriel Lippmann.

It's quite remarkable
since Gabriel Lippmann

was her teacher, her mentor.

He actually presented her very
first paper to the Academy.

So he knew about
her importance in this work

and how central she was
to these discoveries.

And yet his cabal of Frenchmen
just left her off the list.

And the idea that she could be
an important scientist

just didn't occur to them.

She was totally invisible.

Pierre-- and we have to give
him total credit for this--

turned around and said, "I did
not conceive of this idea.

"I helped with the work,
but it was someone else's idea

that made it possible,
and that's Marie Curie."

Pierre was adamant that Marie
needed to be included.

He immediately
wrote back and said,

"Wouldn't it be better, from
an artistic point of view,

to award the prize
to Marie Curie and to me?"

In the end,
Marie did share in the Nobel

with Pierre and Henri Becquerel.

She would go on
to win a second all her own.

But the real prize was
the magical substance

for which she would
always be known.

Some nights the Curies would
stop by the laboratory

to admire the element Marie
called "my child."

They arrived in the Rue Lhomond.

Pierre put the key in the lock.

The door squeaked and
admitted them to their world.

Eve Curie in her
biography of her mother...

Don't light the lamps.

...describes the wonder
of the Curies

as they went into their lab
and saw these glowing vials.

From all sides, we could see
gleamings suspended in darkness,

like faint fairy lights.

Do you remember the day
you said to me,

"I would like radium
to be a beautiful color"?

Radium had something better
than a beautiful color.

It was spontaneously luminous.

The fact that radium glowed
in the dark seemed magical.

But it was also troubling,
because it almost seemed

to violate some kind of
fundamental physical law.

Scientists had known for some
time that light is a form

of energy,
so if you distill something

and it suddenly glows
in the dark,

you have to ask the question:

Where does that
energy come from?

It's not changing shape,
it's not interacting

with the environment
to get this energy.

But it is just glowing,
infinitely,

and we had no idea
why it did that.

It was Marie who had
the flash of insight:

perhaps some types
of matter were changing

from one kind to another,
their atoms splitting apart

and releasing energy
in the process.

This theory of the source
of the energy is very seductive;

it explains
radioactivity very well.

But it was an idea many
chemists refused to accept.

Tell me, please,
how much radium salt is there

in the entire earth?

A few grams!

On this shaky
foundation they want

to overturn our understanding
of the nature of matter.

Even the Curies
were reluctant to accept it.

The Curies themselves,

they wanted to think of elements

as immutable,
unchangeable parts of nature.

The idea that one
could have transmutation

from one element to another
was very disturbing,

even to her, at first.

But the Curies' discoveries
inspired others

around the world to
pursue this daring theory.

The idea that finally
got pieced together was

that the energy was, in fact,
coming from the disintegration

of these atoms themselves.

Radioactivity was a sign that
the atom itself was unstable.

It could break apart.

This discovery implied
something even more profound.

Up to then,
most scientists had believed

atoms were the smallest
units of matter--

solid, unsplittable lumps.

But if radioactivity
was atoms falling apart,

there must be
even smaller pieces

inside still awaiting discovery.

Thanks to this
Polish expatriate,

this graduate student,
this young mother...

scientists hoping
to solve the mystery

of matter now had a pressing
new question to answer:

What's inside the atom?

Next time on
The Mystery of Matter...

There's a fundamental
quantity in the atom

which increases
by regular steps as we pass

from one element to the next.

I think he must
have been astonished.

Phil, the Germans have
split the uranium atom!

Seaborg figured
out how to turn it

into a new element, plutonium.

No matter what you do with
the rest of your life,

nothing will be as important as
your work on this project.

It will change the world.