Henri Becquerel Invention Of Radium

Radium is the 88th element on the periodic table, that gave off high levels of radioactivity, and for the first twenty years it was a magical healing substance that glowed in the dark. Introducing, this element to the human populace began both innovations to health science and tragic deaths of many who believed it was harmless.

Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie when Marie was looking for a subject to do her doctorate in physics. During that time, a scientist named, Henri Becquerel was testing uranium salts in sunlight to determine the aspects of its radiation and glow. Becquerel accidentally found a new type of substance while he was doing these tests that illuminated without needing the uranium salts. Marie Curie found

this to be an interesting subject to continue research on. (Fröman 1996) The Curie’s found radium in 1896 in a uranium mineral called pitchblende. This new substance they had found was three hundred times more radioactive than Uranium and would They coined the term radioactive and named radium after the rays. They did not know what radium would do to their bodies and would carry the element in their pockets and keep it by their bedside. Eventually they were consumed by radioactive related illnesses. They found that radium is similar to barium but extremely radioactive.
In the beginning of radium’s discovery, no one knew the effects of radioactivity to the body and thought it as a natural healing element, as it helped get rid of tumors, and soon it was used in products in the beginning of the 1900’s until around 1926. One job women could have during that time was painting watch dials with radium to make glow-in-the-dark watches for the American army,
hordes of working-class girls, some as young as 14, applied for jobs painting luminous numerals on watchfaces. The work was congenial. They sat in rows, dipping fine camelhair brushes into a radium solution, then ‘pointed’ them between moistened lips before painting the numbers on the dials. (Fergusson, 2016, para. 3.)
These women would ingest radium daily as they painted these watch dials and had no idea that their bodies would be poisoned by this element. Fergusson (2016) states in her article “The Radium Girls — still glowing in their coffins”, they found working with radium enjoyable and, “Some girls wore evening dresses to work so that they would glow on their dates. One painted her teeth to impress her man. There was no reason for them to think this was in any way sinister— rather the reverse: ‘Radium will put rosy cheeks on you’, they were told.” (para. 4). Consequently, these girls started to get sick and developed illnesses and diseases ranging from having stillborn children, rotted-out teeth, anemia, etc. (Fergusson, 2016). When radium is ingested the human body reacts to it as if it was calcium and travels throughout the body but especially the bones and
Marie Curie’s element, Radium, is an important sc