19/07/2026
Le prime foto che mio padre mi mostro' "per studiare come esempio" da piccola (Circa 5 anni ) era questa foto dal Corriere che lui leggeva ogni giorno in barbieria.
On July 18, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced their discovery of polonium to the French Academy of Sciences. Marie had been digging into a strange puzzle: pitchblende, a dark uranium ore, was far more radioactive than the amount of uranium in it could explain. Something else had to be hiding inside, something no one had ever identified.
She was right. Through endless chemical separations, tracking the radioactivity like a trail of breadcrumbs, she isolated a substance roughly 400 times more radioactive than uranium.
She could have named it anything. She chose polonium, after Poland, her homeland. In 1898 Poland had been wiped off the map for over a century, carved up between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Naming an element after an occupied nation was a deliberate political statement, tucked into the language of chemistry.
Polonium was just the beginning. Five months later, the Curies announced a second element, radium. The paper announcing polonium was also the first time the word "radioactivity" ever appeared in print.
