hallliner.blogg.se

Logistically, Meloney modeled her campaign after fundraising efforts for the Statue of Liberty. “Life is passing,” she warned Delineator readers in April 1921, “and the great Curie getting older, and the world is losing, God alone knows, what great secret.” Meloney harnessed this energy by penning a plea in her magazine to support Curie, as a pioneering female scientist. She would make her fundraising more democratic and appeal directly to the women of the United States.Īmerican women had won the right to vote in 1920 and were feeling empowered. Undeterred, Meloney made a virtue of necessity and cast her net wider. First she asked the wives of 10 wealthy businessmen to donate $10,000 each. She began working her network of contacts. Meloney had always been politically active: her mother had founded a school for freed slaves, and Meloney had absorbed her mother’s activism. Meloney would just have to buy a gram of radium herself. If France wouldn’t support Marie Curie properly, then the United States of America would.

So with her typical moxie Meloney decided there was only one thing to do. Compared with the labs of other scientists Meloney had interviewed-Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell-Curie’s equipment looked like junkyard scraps. The high price of radium had shocked her-as had the dilapidated state of Curie’s lab. In it she called Marie “the greatest woman in the world,” praising her as both a brilliant scientist and a “woman of rare beauty.” On returning to New York, though, the editor couldn’t stop thinking about Curie’s difficulties. The very woman who’d discovered radium had seen her research grind to a halt for lack of it.Īfter this outpouring the interview proceeded, and Meloney’s story appeared in the Delineator a few months later. Given the cost, Curie couldn’t afford to purchase more. Worse, the French government had appropriated Curie’s original gram and redirected it to doctors for cancer treatment. She wanted to talk to Meloney about the eye-popping cost of radium-over $100,000 per gram ($1.3 million in today’s dollars). Later she personally escorted the gram to Bordeaux in western France for safekeeping.īut war heroics weren’t what interested Curie. When World War I erupted in August 1914, she stayed in Paris to protect the radium despite the threat of the invading German army. That gram won Curie the 1911 Nobel Prize, her second, and as the basis of much of her research, it was the most precious thing in the world to her. They’d toiled for years, refining and processing literal tons of mineral ore, all to extract a single gram of element 88. What, Curie asked the editor, do you know about radium?Ĭurie’s name had been inextricably linked to radium ever since she and her late husband, Pierre, had discovered it in 1898. Before she could ask her first question, Curie flipped the script and started interrogating her. So you can imagine Meloney’s surprise at what happened next. (That was just one of five duels the scandal inspired.) All in all it was an exhausting, humiliating ordeal.Įver since, Curie had loathed the press, and Meloney felt anxious the morning of her interview. Langevin’s wife threatened to kill Curie, and Langevin himself challenged the publisher to a duel. A few years earlier reporters in Paris had exposed the widowed Curie’s love affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin and published their private letters. Still, Meloney was nervous about her next encounter: Marie Curie. She was a seasoned reporter and knew her stuff. By May 1920 she was editing a popular magazine, the Delineator, and during a press tour of Europe that year, she had interviewed H. G. She’d started reporting for the Washington Post at age 17 and was the first woman to win a seat in the U.S.

Marie Meloney wasn’t used to feeling nervous.