CURIE, Marie.; CURIE, Pierre.; CURIE, Jacques.; LANGEVIN, Paul.

Recherches sur les substances radioactives. [With:] Pierre Curie, Propriétés magnétiques des corps à diverses températures. [And:] Paul Langevin, L’ionisation des gaz. [And:] Jacques Curie, Recherches sur le pouvoir inducteur spécifique et la conductibilité des corps cristallisés.

[Paris]: [Masson et Cie], 1889; 1895; 1903.

The doctoral theses of Marie, Pierre and Jacques Curie and of Langevin as the Annales de Chimie et de Physique printed them, on forty sheets that never went to the binder: each sheet still carries its sixteen pages in the order the pressman imposed them, half of them head-down, folded once and never again, its one bolt unslit, untrimmed at every edge and unsewn, exactly as it came off the machine at Gauthier-Villars. Marie Curie’s is the thesis of June 1903 that laid the discovery of polonium and radium before the examiners, in the form she revised for the Annales the same autumn and the first form in which anyone could buy it. The academic printing had run to some hundred copies for the jury and her circle. The three monthly parts of September, October and November 1903 carried the text, with a page of new matter, into every physics library in Europe while the Swedish Academy was deciding the prize she shared that winter. Around it stand three theses from the same school and the same press. Her husband’s of 1895 found the law of paramagnetism and the temperature at which iron ceases to be a magnet. Her brother-in-law’s of 1888 described the piezoelectric quartz with which she would measure radioactivity, and Langevin’s of 1902 is on the ions in a gas whose current her electrometer read. Gabriel Lippmann presided over Pierre Curie’s defence and over Marie’s, and the same journal took each thesis into its pages, as the custom was with a thesis of importance. No sheets of the Annales in this state, of these theses or of any other, have come to light in the dealer catalogues or at any major auction-house.

The sheets are the finding. A thesis in the Annales was set in octavo and printed sixteen pages to the sheet, eight on each side, and a bound volume hides how that was done. Here the sheet that opens the November part of Marie Curie’s thesis lies as the press left it: on its outer face pages 289 and 304 stand upright at the foot, pages 296 and 297 lie inverted above them, and the other four pages of the forme wait on the half folded beneath, so that the one fold has left pages 296 and 297 lying open side by side, the centre opening of the gathering, which a bound copy can show only across a spine; two more folds would have brought the whole into reading order. The foot of page 289 carries the printer’s own identification of the sheet, the journal, series, volume and month, and its number in the volume, 19; the corresponding lines on the other three theses read July 1895, March and April 1903, and August 1889. Every signature of the four is present, ten sheets for Marie Curie’s thesis, eight for Pierre Curie’s, thirteen for Langevin’s and nine for Jacques Curie’s, and because the Annales set four of these openings at the head of a gathering — Marie Curie’s November part, Pierre Curie’s thesis and Langevin’s March part all begin at page 289, the first page of signature 19, Langevin’s second part at 433 and Jacques Curie’s at 385 — it is at their ends that most of the outer sheets carry the first pages of the papers that followed, while the September part of Marie Curie’s thesis and Jacques Curie’s second memoir begin in mid-sheet under the close of the paper before. They bear no proof-reader’s marks, no compositor’s notes and no stamp, and are therefore not proofs in the printer’s sense of the word, which Littré defines as a sheet carrying the corrections the compositor is to make, but the ordinary printed sheets of the run, drawn off before folding, gathering and sewing. How they escaped is not known: printers kept overs, publishers kept remainders in sheets, and an author or a friend of the house could ask for a set before the bindery had it. What they show is the physical moment between the press and the book, for a thesis its examiners are reported to have called the greatest scientific contribution ever made in one.

The journal that printed them was the natural place for a Paris thesis in physics to appear. The Annales de chimie had been founded in 1789 by Guyton de Morveau, Lavoisier, Monge, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Dietrich, Hassenfratz and Adet, took physics into its title in 1816, and by the end of the century was the journal of record for French physics and chemistry, published by Masson in monthly numbers and printed, like the theses themselves, by Gauthier-Villars. Norman’s bibliography records the custom that governs this set: a thesis of importance was taken into the Annales after its defence, so that the academic printing, made in a small number for the examining commission and never sold, was followed within months by the journal’s printing, which was the one the world read. That is why the four theses of one family and one school came, over fourteen years, from one press in one format, and why the lines at the foot of their first pages read like a single series. The sheets of 1889, 1895 and 1903 are the same imposition on the same size of paper, and their first pages, laid side by side as they lie here, show the physics of the Curie school in the state in which its printer knew it.

Marie Curie’s thesis is the account of her work since 1897 on the rays Becquerel had found in uranium in 1896, and its own introduction dates it: the researches she had pursued for more than four years, and the moment when Pierre Curie abandoned his own work to join her. It sets out the method first. A radioactive powder spread on the lower plate of a condenser makes the air between the plates conduct; the current is measured by an electrometer whose deflection is held at zero by the charge released from a piezoelectric quartz under a known weight, so that the current is read as a weight and a time, an absolute measure and a fast one. That is the apparatus of her figure 1 on page 105, and it is the invention of the two Curie brothers. The method then runs through the pitchblende: the uranium and thorium compounds whose activity is an atomic property independent of their chemical state, the ores more active than uranium itself, the fractional crystallisations that concentrated a new substance with bismuth and another with barium, polonium and radium, and the spectrum lines of Demarçay that showed the second to be an element. The number that closed the chemical argument is here, an atomic weight of 225 for radium, determined from the chloride, and the three kinds of rays, the heavy positive particles, the electrons and the penetrating radiation, are sorted by their deflection in a magnetic field. The November part, which the sheet on top of the first stack opens, is the chapter on induced radioactivity: the activity that any substance acquires near a radium salt and loses by a law of its own, the emanation that carries it, the activity that lingers in solutions, and the contamination that had by then spread through the laboratory in the rue Lhomond until its own instruments had become active. Her conclusion is that radioactivity is a property of the atom; the energy the rays carry is either created in the atom or borrowed from outside; and she leaves the question open with a stated preference for a transformation of the atom itself, a reading she says had been put forward at the outset of the work on radioactivity and which Rutherford and Soddy had by then adopted outright.

The thesis was examined in June 1903 by a commission of Lippmann, Bouty and Moissan, the day of the defence having been left blank on the printed title-page and filled in by hand on some copies, and Rutherford, who was in Paris that month, dined that evening at the celebration Langevin had arranged, with Jean Perrin among the guests, and was shown in the garden afterwards a tube of radium glowing in fingers the radium had scarred. The Swedish Academy announced the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1903 on 12 November, to Becquerel and to the two Curies, between the October and the November parts of the thesis in the Annales; the Curies did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony in December, both of them unwell in ways later ascribed to the substance the thesis describes. The thesis itself went through four French forms in two years, and the Annales printing is the second and the public one. Gauthier-Villars printed the academic thesis in late May or early June 1903, the text approved for printing on 11 May, and its hundred or so copies went to the commission, and to the author’s friends, Rutherford among them. Klickstein, whose bio-bibliography of the thesis is the authority on its printings, established that the text the Annales set in the autumn was taken from the thesis but re-edited by Curie, with corrections, deletions, textual alterations and a full page of new material; the journal’s parts were the first form of the thesis on sale. A combined offprint of the three parts followed, and in 1904 Gauthier-Villars issued the revised text as a book; the English translation ran in the Chemical News from August 1903 and the German, by Walter Kaufmann, appeared at Braunschweig the next year. The thesis is Dibner’s, Horblit’s and Norman’s choice for the discovery of radium and has its place in Printing and the Mind of Man; the Annales parts, when they appear at all, appear bound into the volume, and these sheets are the earliest state of that edition that can exist.

Pierre Curie’s thesis of 1895 is the physics on which the rest stood, and the part of his own work that outlived radium. Defended on 6 March 1895 before Lippmann, Hautefeuille and Bouty, it divides bodies by their magnetism into three classes, the diamagnetic, the feebly magnetic and the ferromagnetic, and asks the question Faraday had left: whether the classes are one phenomenon or three, and whether a body passes from one to another. He answered with an instrument. A torsion balance carried the specimen between the poles of an electromagnet in a field made deliberately non-uniform, so that the force on the specimen measured its magnetisation, and an electric furnace of porcelain wound with platinum wire took some twenty substances from room temperature to 1,350 degrees, and iron to 1,370, the balance remaining sensitive at the top of the range to a hundredth of a milligram of force. Two results came out of it. For the feebly magnetic bodies, and for a gas, oxygen sealed under pressure in the thick-walled ampoule of his figure 6, the coefficient of magnetisation varies inversely with the absolute temperature, the relation every textbook since has called Curie’s law; and for iron, nickel and magnetite there is a temperature above which ferromagnetism disappears and the body becomes merely feebly magnetic, the Curie point. What he did not find was a bridge between diamagnetism and paramagnetism: his introduction says plainly that the experiments brought the two no closer and favour the theories that give them causes of different natures, so that it is the ferromagnetic and the feebly magnetic classes alone that the thesis makes continuous. The law waited ten years for its explanation, which came from the fourth author of this set: Langevin’s theory of 1905 derived it from the thermal agitation of atomic magnets, and Pierre Weiss’s molecular field of 1907 extended it to the ferromagnetic transition, so that Curie’s law and the Curie point are the two names by which this thesis is still cited. Curie took up the chair of physics at the École municipale de physique et de chimie industrielles the day after his defence, a post Mascart had had created for him; the Annales printed the thesis in July, and on 26 July he married Marie Skłodowska.

Langevin’s thesis is the theory of the currents that the Curies measured. He had spent 1897 and 1898 at the Cavendish under J. J. Thomson, beside Rutherford, Townsend and C. T. R. Wilson, at the moment when the conduction of electricity through gases became a science, and he brought back to Paris the problem the thesis settles: what happens to the ions that a radiation makes in a gas once they are made, how fast they move under a field, and how fast they find each other and recombine. Defended on 17 December 1902, and printed for the jury by Gauthier-Villars in an academic edition, it introduces the method for measuring the coefficient of recombination between the plates of a condenser and derives the mobilities of the positive and the negative ions from their diffusion and recombination, the quantities without which the current in Marie Curie’s condenser could not be turned into a statement about the rays. The Annales gave it two parts, the ionisation in March 1903 and the recombination and mobilities in April, the second continuing the paragraph numbers of the first, as the footnote on its first page explains. Langevin had been Pierre Curie’s pupil at the École de physique et de chimie, where in 1890 and 1891 Curie set him his first calculation, on damped motion; he was among the family’s closest colleagues through the radium years, succeeded Curie in his chair there in 1905, and twenty years later directed the thesis of their daughter. His recombination coefficient is still cited under his name in the physics of semiconductors.

Jacques Curie’s thesis is the oldest of the four and the source of the instrument. Presented to the Faculty in June 1888, as the footnote on its first page records, and printed by the Annales in two memoirs of 1889, it measures the dielectric constant and the conductivity of crystals, testing on solid bodies Maxwell’s relation between the dielectric constant and the square of the refractive index, which earlier experimenters had tried with charging times run down from one second to one twelve-hundredth of a second and found wanting, and it does so with an apparatus the author says at page 392 that he and his brother had built: the piezoelectric quartz, whose charge under a known weight is an absolute standard of electricity. The brothers had discovered piezoelectricity in 1880, working together in Friedel’s mineralogical laboratory at the Sorbonne, had found the converse effect on Lippmann’s prediction in 1881, and had the balance built by Bourbouze in 1885; the passage in this thesis describing it was reprinted in Pierre’s collected works in 1908, and Marie Curie wrote in her life of Pierre that when she began on uranium in 1897 she had at her disposal an excellent method studied and applied by Pierre and Jacques Curie. Jacques had taught mineralogy at Montpellier since 1883 and spent the years around his defence teaching in Algiers; he stayed at Montpellier until his death in 1941. The two Annales memoirs are the form in which the thesis reached the libraries; the academic printing of 1888, from the press of La Lumière électrique, is recorded at the Bibliothèque nationale, and no copy in either form has been traced at auction.

What the four theses share is more than a family. Two of them faced commissions with the same president and the same second examiner, Lippmann in the chair and Bouty beside him; all four came from the same press and the same journal; and the instrument runs through them in a single line. The quartz balance of Jacques’s thesis became the standard of charge in Pierre’s laboratory, the electrometer Pierre built around it became the apparatus of Marie’s figure 1, and the ionised air between her condenser plates, on which every number in her thesis depends, is what Langevin’s thesis is about. The theses are also the school’s dates: Jacques’s defence in the summer of 1888, when Pierre was still his brother’s junior; Pierre’s in the spring of 1895, four months before the marriage; Langevin’s in the last weeks of 1902, when the radium had been isolated and the prize not yet given; Marie’s in June 1903, with the Nobel announcement five months off. Read together they are the whole apparatus of the discovery of radioactivity, in the form in which French physics published a thesis, before a bindery made books of them.

The line did not stop with these four. Irène Curie defended her own thesis, on the alpha rays of polonium, in 1925 under Langevin, and the same journal’s successor printed it; she and Frédéric Joliot found artificial radioactivity nine years later. Dibner put Marie Curie’s thesis among his heralds; what has never been offered is that edition in sheets, the state that preceded every bound copy of it.

References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 164 — Horblit, One Hundred Books Famous in Science 19 — Norman 543 (M. Curie) and 544 (P. Curie) — Printing and the Mind of Man 394a — Waller 11319 and 11322a — En français dans le texte 333 — Herbert S. Klickstein, Marie Sklodowska Curie: Recherches sur les substances radioactives. A Bio-bibliographical Study (Philadelphia, 1966) — Marie Curie, Pierre Curie (Paris, 1924) — Pierre Curie, Œuvres (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1908), pp. 554–563 — Pierre Curie, ‘Sur la symétrie dans les phénomènes physiques’, Journal de Physique théorique et appliquée 3 (1894), pp. 393–415 — Paul Langevin, ‘Sur la théorie du magnétisme’, Journal de Physique théorique et appliquée 4 (1905), pp. 678–693 — Pierre Weiss, ‘L’hypothèse du champ moléculaire et la propriété ferromagnétique’, Journal de Physique théorique et appliquée 6 (1907), pp. 661–690 — Robert L. Wolke, ‘Marie Curie’s Doctoral Thesis: Prelude to a Nobel Prize’, Journal of Chemical Education 65 (1988), pp. 561–573 — Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York, 1995) — Anna Hurwic, Pierre Curie (Paris, 1995) — Loïc Barbo, Pierre Curie 1859–1906: le rêve scientifique (Paris, 1999) — Shaul Katzir, The Beginnings of Piezoelectricity (Dordrecht, 2006) — Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Langevin: science et vigilance (Paris, 1987) — Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement (New York: The Grolier Club, 2013), nos. 27–29.

Four theses on the printed sheets of the Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 40 sheets in all, each 450 × 560 mm, imposed in octavo with 16 pages to the sheet and folded once only, to 450 × 280 mm, never gathered, cut, opened or sewn; every sheet carrying at the foot of its first page the journal’s signature line and number. Marie Curie, Recherches sur les substances radioactives, 7th series, vol. XXX (September, October and November 1903), pp. 99–144, 145–203 and 289–326, signatures 7–13 and 19–21, 10 sheets, text-figures. Pierre Curie, Propriétés magnétiques des corps à diverses températures, 7th series, vol. V (July 1895), pp. 289–405, signatures 19–26, 8 sheets, text-figures. Paul Langevin, L’ionisation des gaz and Recombinaison et mobilités des ions dans les gaz, 7th series, vol. XXVIII (March and April 1903), pp. 289–384 and 433–530, signatures 19–24 and 28–34, 13 sheets, text-figures. Jacques Curie, Recherches sur le pouvoir inducteur spécifique et la conductibilité des corps cristallisés and Recherches sur la conductibilité des corps cristallisés, deuxième mémoire, 6th series, vols. XVII (August 1889) and XVIII (1889), pp. 385–434 and 203–269, signatures 25–28 and 13–17, 9 sheets, text-figures. Most of the outer sheets carry at their ends the first pages of the papers that followed, and two the last pages of the paper before; Langevin’s March run fills six sheets exactly. Light creasing at the folds and fore-edges, small marginal nicks and chips, the Jacques Curie sheets with the fore-edge margin cockled and split in places and the outer strip folded back, nowhere touching the text; the sheets otherwise clean and unmarked. Each thesis in a modern paper chemise with a manuscript title; the four in a modern flap case.

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Item #6717

Price: $15,000.00