Archives normally work the other way round, with gloves and climate control defending fragile paper from the people who come to read it. The Pierre and Marie Curie collection at France’s Bibliothèque Nationale inverts that. The reason is in what the Curies handled daily, and where they kept it.
Because the papers are still radioactive. More than a century on, her manuscripts, furniture and even her cookbooks remain so, and the lead-lined boxes holding the manuscripts can be opened only in protective clothing and after signing a . She carried bottles of and in her coat pocket and kept them in her desk drawer.
Many library collections use special gloves and climate-controlled rooms to protect archival materials from the visitor. For the Pierre and Marie Curie collection at France’s Bibliothèque Nationale it is the other way around.
After more than a hundred years, much of what Marie Curie owned remains radioactive: her papers, her furniture, even her cookbooks. Anyone wishing to open the lead-lined boxes containing her manuscripts must wear protective clothing and sign a waiver of liability first.
Her working habits explain it. She carried bottles of polonium and radium in her coat pocket and stored them in her desk drawer. Her autobiographical notes describe the pleasure of entering the workroom at night to see the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles.
The same glow produced the discovery. Pierre built a chamber with an electrometer to measure weak electrical currents, and bringing it near the tubes broke the air down into ions and created a current. The pair named that phenomenon , and it showed that atoms could emanate smaller particles still.
wat. Her notebooks will still be dangerous long after everyone who feared them is gone.
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The hazard outlasts everyone who misunderstood it, which is the plainest possible lesson about handling the unknown.
How do we know?
The Christian Science Monitor describes the collection’s handling rules, and quotes Curie’s own autobiographical notes on the glowing tubes in her workroom.
What is still unknown
A news account of archive practice rather than a published survey of contamination levels.
Learn something?
Where to next
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