March 19, 1900: Frédéric Joliot-Curie is born
Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900-1958)
Scientific field: Physics
Known for: Artificially induced radioactivity
French nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Frédéric Joliot-Curie is widely credited with bringing his country into the atomic age, first with his research into and discovery of artificially induced radioactivity, and later with his appointment as director of France’s Atomic Energy Commission, modeled at his direction on that of the United States. Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his wife, French physicist Irène Joliot-Curie for their work on artificial radiation.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie was born Jean-Frédéric Joliot in Paris. In 1920 he was admitted to that city’s prestigious École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle, from which he graduated first in his class and went on to accept a research position at the Radium Institute at the University of Paris. There the scientist met Irène Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, the famous Nobel Prize winners who discovered radium; when Frédéric and Irène married in 1926, they both adopted the surname Joliot-Curie.
The work of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie led to the eventual developments of nuclear fission, nuclear energy, and the atomic bomb. While at the Radium Institute, Frédéric began studying radioactivity by working with the cloud chamber, a device that shows an atom’s charged particles in the form of a water-droplet trail. He completed his doctoral thesis, a study of the electrochemistry of radioactive elements, in 1930. Shortly thereafter, he and Irène began studying the work of German physicists Walther Bothe and Hans Becker. Bothe and Becker’s experiments centered around the radiation emitted when certain lighter elements are bombarded with alpha rays (energy particles that resemble the nucleus of a helium atom and contain two positive charges). The Joliot-Curies’ research eventually led to the discovery of the first artificial isotope, and then to artificial radioactivity.(1)
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