About radium

The history of radium begins in a Bohemian valley, in Sankt-Joachimsthal in the Ore Mountains. A silver mine was discovered there in the early 16. century. The silver ore of Joachimsthal, now exhausted, contained inclusions of a brown mineral whose structure was not known, but which was used to tint the famous Bohemian crystal brown-yellow. It was in the pitchblende of Joachimsthal that the German chemist Martin Klaproth identified the metal that he named uranium in 1792. But the story of pitchblende does not end with uranium. In refining this mineral, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered, as early as 1898, the existence of two new elements with a more intense radiation than uranium: polonium and radium. The important effects of radioactivity on the organism were quickly recognized, since the director of the Pasteur Institute proposed the creation of the Radium Institute in 1909, for the study of radiotherapy. This institute became the Curie Institute, and other radioelements were eventually preferred to radium