Marie Curie’s Papers in Order: What She Wrote and Where to Read It

Marie Curie is one of the most written about scientists in history and one of the least read. Almost everyone knows the story. Very few people have looked at the actual papers, partly because they are in French, partly because they are scattered across twenty years of Académie des Sciences proceedings, and partly because nobody ever sets them out in order.

Here they are in order, with what each one actually says and where you can read it now.

1897: The Paper Nobody Mentions

Recherches sur les propriétés magnétiques des aciers trempés

Her first publication is about the magnetic properties of tempered steel, done for the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry. It is industrial physics, careful and unglamorous, and it matters for two reasons. It establishes that she was already a working experimental physicist before she touched radioactivity, and it explains why she was good at it: the whole paper is about measuring small differences reliably.

1898: The Year Everything Happens

April 1898, Rayons émis par les composés de l’uranium et du thorium

A note to the Académie, presented on 12 April. This is the important one, and it is four pages long.

She had measured the emission from every element she could obtain, using the sensitive electrometer Pierre and his brother had built, and she found that thorium compounds emit too. Uranium was not unique. More decisively, the intensity depended only on how much uranium or thorium was present, and not at all on the chemical compound it sat in, or its physical state, or the temperature.

The conclusion is the foundation of the entire field: the emission is a property of the atom itself, not of any chemical arrangement. She also reports that pitchblende is far more active than its uranium content allows, which is the observation the rest of her life comes out of.

July 1898, Sur une substance nouvelle radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende

With Pierre. The announcement of polonium, named for Poland, which did not exist as a state at the time. This paper also introduces the word radioactif.

December 1898, Sur une nouvelle substance fortement radio-active contenue dans la pechblende

With Pierre and Gustave Bémont. Radium, identified spectroscopically at roughly a million times the activity of uranium, from a barium fraction they could not yet separate. They had about a tenth of a gram of the chloride and not a visible trace of the element itself.

1900 to 1902: The Grinding Years

The publications thin out here because the work was physical rather than intellectual. Several tonnes of pitchblende residue were processed by hand in an unheated shed to produce a decigram of radium chloride pure enough to weigh.

The 1900 report to the international physics congress in Paris is the best summary of what was known at the moment, written before anyone had a model of the atom to fit it into. In 1902 she published the atomic weight of radium, 225, which is what finally made it an element in the eyes of chemists rather than a suspicious activity in a barium salt.

1903: The Thesis

Recherches sur les substances radioactives, defended at the Sorbonne on 25 June 1903.

This is the central document of her career and the only one that reads as a complete account rather than a bulletin. It gathers five years of work into a single argument: the methods of measurement, the separation chemistry, the atomic weight determinations, the behaviour of the radiation in magnetic fields, the physiological effects, and the conclusion that radioactivity involves a transformation of matter, which was still a shocking thing to say.

The examiners told her it represented the greatest contribution ever made to science by a doctoral thesis. Five months later she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and with Henri Becquerel, whose accidental discovery in 1896 had started all of it.

An English translation appeared in Chemical News in 1904, and that translation is the reason the thesis is readable in English at all. Our edition of the 1903 thesis puts the original French and that 1904 English translation together in one volume, each language starting from its own cover and meeting in the middle. There is a fuller walkthrough of its contents in our guide to the thesis.

1910: The Treatise

Traité de radioactivité, two volumes, 971 pages.

The complete statement of the field by the person who created it, published four years after Pierre’s death and one year before her second Nobel Prize. It is a textbook in the old sense, meaning it assumes you intend to do the work yourself, and it contains the measurement techniques in enough detail to reproduce them.

In the same year she established the international radium standard, a sealed tube of 21.99 milligrams of radium chloride deposited at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. The unit of activity was named the curie. She had insisted on defining the standard by measurement rather than by reputation, which is characteristic.

1921 and 1923: The Two Books for General Readers

La Radiologie et la guerre (1921) is her account of the mobile radiography units she organised and drove during the First World War, including the training of 150 women to operate them. It is a practical, slightly impatient book about getting equipment to where it is needed.

Pierre Curie (1923) is the biography of her husband, with a short autobiographical section appended at her American publisher’s insistence. It is the closest thing to a memoir she ever wrote, and the reticence is total: the famous shed gets a paragraph.

Radioactivité was published posthumously in 1935, edited from her manuscript by her daughter Irène and her son in law Frédéric Joliot.

Where to Read Them

• The Académie notes of 1898 are in the Comptes rendus, digitised on Gallica at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The April, July and December notes are all short enough to read in a sitting
• The 1903 thesis is on Gallica in French and on the Internet Archive in the 1904 Chemical News English version
• The Traité of 1910 is on the Internet Archive, both volumes, scanned
• The laboratory notebooks are at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and are still radioactive enough to require a signed waiver and protective equipment. Consultation is possible and genuinely restricted

What the Sequence Shows

Read in order, the papers correct the popular story in one specific way.

The legend is about endurance: the shed, the tonnes of ore, the four years of stirring. That part is true, and it produced two new elements.

But the decisive contribution was made in April 1898, before any of the hard labour began, and it took four pages. It was a reasoning step: the activity tracks the quantity of the element and ignores everything else, therefore the source is the atom, therefore the atom is not immutable. Everything else, including the radium, is the consequence of taking that one inference seriously enough to spend four years confirming it.