When war broke out in August 1914, Marie Curie had just established the Radium Institute in Paris and was the most celebrated scientist in Europe.
Within weeks she had concluded that her laboratory was the wrong place to be.
The battlefields of northern France were filling with wounded men, surgeons were operating blind on injuries riddled with bullets and shrapnel they could not locate, and the X-ray machines that could have shown them everything sat in city hospitals nowhere near the front.
Curie had never worked with X-rays and had never driven a car. She taught herself both.
She designed a vehicle that combined an X-ray machine, a photographic darkroom, and a dynamo generator powered by the car’s engine, making it electrically self-sufficient and deployable anywhere a vehicle could reach.
She then approached wealthy friends, manufacturers, and French industrialists for donations of vehicles and equipment, and persuaded body shops to fit them at no charge.
By October 1914 the first 20 of these rolling field laboratories were ready. French soldiers called them petites Curies, little Curies.
Curie drove one herself to the battlefield with her 17-year-old daughter Irène operating the equipment beside her.
Military bureaucrats initially refused to allow women at the front.
Curie ignored them and went anyway, dressed in an alpaca coat with a Red Cross armband on her sleeve.
She also established 200 permanent radiological stations at military posts across France and trained 150 women as X-ray technicians in an intensive program at the Radium Institute.
By the war’s end, over one million soldiers had been examined using the infrastructure she had built.
#ww1 #redcross #curie
