Exploration in Radiation Some of Curie’s most important discoveries happened because of her work in radiation. By expanding on the work of famous scientists such as Antoine Henri Becquerel and Wilhelm Röntgen, she made some discoveries of her own that proved to be quite important. Most notable of which were the two elements she discovered. Expanding on the work of others Much of Curie’s work was done based off of the findings of others, including Henri Becquerel and Wilhelm Röntgen. Röntgen produced and detected electromagnetic rays that could pass through solid objects, which he named x-rays, the x meaning the unknown. Not too long after, Becquerel discovered that uranium compounds emitted rays even in the dark. Curie took these discoveries and added to them greatly. Curie was fascinated by the unknown rays that Röntgen and Becquerel discovered and went to work to prove their findings. She used a device made by her future husband and his brother that could measure …show more content…
She first discovered that two ores, pitchblende and chalcolite, were much more radioactive than uranium itself. This showed that there were still new elements that were contributing to the radioactive nature of the ores other than just uranium. To find the new elements, Curie and her new partner Pierre Curie had to work strenuously to separate the pitchblende into the thirty elements contained within. They did this by employing several standard, but arduous, tasks to isolate the radioactive elements. Marie and Pierre discovered that there were two areas of high radioactivity, which were the bismuth and barium fractions of the pitchblende. They then concluded that there had to be two new elements inside these areas that caused the radiation, since the concept was new. They named the element in bismuth polonium, after Marie’s homeland of Poland, and the element in barium radium, after the Latin word meaning