Radiochemistry · 1909–1975
Marguerite Perey
Perey joined the Curie laboratory as a technician preparing actinium samples and became, through the exacting purification work that job required, the person who knew that material best. Her identification of a new activity depended on recognizing that a carefully purified actinium preparation was producing something that should not have been there. She later took a chair at Strasbourg and became the first woman elected to the French Académie des Sciences as a corresponding member.
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Contribution & context
In 1939 she identified element 87 as a minor alpha-decay branch of actinium-227, naming it francium. It was the last element to be first identified in a natural source rather than by synthesis, and it remains among the rarest, with no stable enough to accumulate.
pnnl.gov — ActiniumarXiv preprint — ActiniumRSC Periodic Table — ActiniumRSC Periodic Table — Radiumphy.anl.gov — Radium
Discoveries in context
Elements that arrive by decay ↗
Several elements were first found as short-lived members of radioactive series, and explaining them forced chemists to accept that one place in the table can hold atoms of different mass.
Sources & further reading
- pnnl.gov — Actinium ↗pnnl.govReference explanation · Source checked
- arXiv preprint — Actinium ↗arXivReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Actinium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Radium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- phy.anl.gov — Radium ↗phy.anl.govReference explanation · Source checked
Sources and further reading. What the review labels mean