CURIE · Eight Tonnes for One Gram — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-SCI-CN-CUR-02-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

CURIE · Eight Tonnes for One Gram Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Curie processed eight tonnes of pitchblende to isolate, in 1902, one gram of radium, whose half-life is a thousand six hundred years. Printed here is that proportion between what went in and what came out.

A Author

Marie Curie

B Subject

Radioactivity

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

Eight tonnes of pitchblende residue for one gram of radium chloride. The work was physical: dissolve, precipitate, crystallise and repeat the cycle for years in a shed with no floor.

What was isolated has a half-life of a thousand six hundred years, so that the gram of 1902 is still today practically a gram.

That permanence was sold as a virtue. There was radium water, radium cream and luminous paint for watch dials, and the women who applied it sharpened the brush with their lips.

The dial painters' lawsuits, in the twenties, established for the first time that a company answers for an illness contracted at the workplace.

Curie's notebooks are kept in lead-lined boxes and consulted by signing a waiver. They will stay that way for about another thousand five hundred years.

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