Marie Curie (above) amassed a fleet of vehicles equipped with X-ray machines to bring the life-saving technology closer to the battlefield during World War I. By October 1914, the first of 20 vehicles, which French soldiers dubbed petites Curies (little Curies), were ready. She also asked local body shops to voluntarily outfit the vehicles with the equipment so it could be positioned in field hospitals close to the front. And she persuaded French manufacturers of X-ray equipment to donate it along with portable electric generators. Curie transported France’s only sample of radium in a safe-deposit box to the city, 600 kilometers southwest, but she quickly returned to Paris, determined to apply her scientific knowledge to aid the war effort.Ĭurie approached her wealthy friends and colleagues to donate automotive vehicles which when modified could be used as mobile X-ray units. Just before the German army’s invasion, the French government moved the country’s capital to Bordeaux. Construction was complete, but many of her researchers were off fighting the war. ![]() As founding director of France’s Red Cross Radiology Service, she was in the midst of setting up her laboratory at the Radium Institute, a new center in the city for the study of radioactivity. To move the technology closer to the soldiers, Curie and her daughter amassed a fleet of vehicles equipped with X-ray machines and set up 200 radiological units in more permanent posts during the first two years of the war.Ĭurie, who was born in Poland, was living in Paris in 1914 when the war began. Many hospitals in France already had X-ray equipment, but those machines were often far from the battlefield. She realized that the electromagnetic radiation of X-rays could help doctors see the bullets and shrapnel embedded in the soldiers’ bodies and remove them, as well as locate broken bones. When World War I broke out in Europe that year, Curie saw a way to apply her expertise to help save the lives of wounded soldiers. Evocation of the scientist in her personal chemistry lab, this garment allows us to catch a glimpse of Marie Curie’s intimacy.THE INSTITUTEBy 1914 Marie Skłodowska Curie had already made several pioneering contributions to the field of radioactivity, including discovering the radioactive elements radium and polonium. We find traces of all these orders from 1907 until her death, for a unit price oscillating between 30 and 35 old francs (about twenty euros), mainly for “ladies’ lab coat”. What we know for sure, however, is that all the lab coats came from the same supplier: Libert, 25 place Maubert in Paris. My father picked up one after her death, he did not want it to be thrown away, I think she is in the museum.” Nelly Boiteux, daughter of Georges Boiteux, driver of Marie Curie, quoted by Janine Dumont, in “Marie Curie under the gaze of Nelly”, Bulletin of the Association Curie et Joliot-Curie, n☁1, p. She already had her white hair, but she was beautiful, she dressed well, often with big black dresses, she wore hats, and when she worked, she wore black coats too. She was simple, she talked with us, she was not severe with children. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Marie Curie was cheerful, she liked my father because he always told jokes and they both laughed.
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