Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and chemist Gustave Bémont presented findings to the French Academy of Sciences describing a new, intensely radioactive element extracted from pitchblende ore, which they named radium. The discovery followed grueling months processing tons of ore in a converted shed at the School of Physics in Paris. Radium's extraordinary radioactivity, far greater than uranium's, opened new frontiers in physics and medicine, though its dangers remained unknown for decades.
Marie Curie had already coined the term 'radioactivity' while studying uranium compounds, noticing that pitchblende ore was more radioactive than its uranium content alone could explain. She and Pierre suspected an undiscovered element was responsible and began the punishing work of isolating it, processing tons of ore by hand in a leaky, unheated shed that Pierre's colleague later called 'a cross between a stable and a potato cellar.'
Working with chemist Gustave Bémont, the Curies isolated barium chloride fractions increasingly rich in an unknown radioactive substance. On December 26, 1898, they announced the element to the French Academy of Sciences, naming it radium for its intense radioactivity, a term Marie herself had introduced to science. It would take Marie four more years of labor to isolate a decigram of pure radium salt from tons of ore.
The discovery made the Curies scientific celebrities and would earn Marie a second Nobel Prize in 1911 (having shared the 1903 Physics Prize with Pierre and Henri Becquerel). Radium's glowing vials fascinated the public and found use in cancer treatment, but decades passed before scientists understood the element's lethal dangers, ones that likely contributed to Marie Curie's own death from radiation-related illness in 1934.