Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Marguerite Perey

Marguerite Perey

Marguerite Perey discovered the chemical element francium in 1939. Francium was the last element ever discovered in a natural source. All elements discovered after Perey’s discovery have been produced by artificial methods in the laboratory.

Education and Marie Curie

Marguerite Catherine Perey was born in Paris, France on October 19, 1909.

In 1929 she qualified with a chemistry diploma from Paris’s Technical School of Women’s Education. This qualification enabled her to apply for chemistry technician positions. She hoped to get a good job, because her family was badly off financially.

She applied for work in Marie Curie’s laboratory in Paris – The Radium Institute – and was amazed to be interviewed by the great Marie Curie herself. Marie Curie was one of the most famous people in the world at that time. In terms of scientists, only Albert Einstein was better known to the world’s public, and in France itself Marie Curie, with two Nobel Prizes, was the greatest of all scientists.

This could have been an intimidating experience for the 19 year-old girl, and indeed the interview seemed to go badly. However, Perey was surprised to learn she had been hired. She was going to work alongside Marie Curie.

Advertisements

Becoming a Radiochemist

After starting work at the Radium Institute, Perey was trained in the isolation and purification of radioactive elements. In time, she became responsible for preparing and purifying samples of the chemical element actinium.

Actinium is radioactive. It was discovered in Curie’s laboratory in 1899 by the chemist André-Louis Debierne. 30 years later, Marie Curie was still studying the element, cataloging its radioactive properties in exacting detail.

Five years after Perey started work, Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia; she was 66 years old. The disease was probably caused by the radiation she exposed herself to during her scientific career.

Nevertheless, the show must go on, and André-Louis Debierne pushed on with actinium related work. Marguerite Perey continued preparing the samples.

She had good ideas, and her work was high quality; this was recognized with a promotion to radiochemist. Her work was dangerous. Marie Curie was not the first person at the Radium Institute whose death was probably caused by radiation and, tragically, would not be the last.

The Discovery of Francium

Surely the Americans are wrong

In 1935, age 26, Perey read a research paper from the USA. The American researchers had found beta particles being emitted by actinium.

Perey knew as much about actinium as anyone else in the world – she had been working with it for seven years. She decided the American researchers were probably wrong about actinium being the source of beta particles. While actinium did emit beta particles, Perey thought the energy of the beta particles seen in America was wrong for actinium.

She suspected actinium was decaying into a different atom – this is called a daughter atom or daughter product – and the daughter atom was emitting the beta particles reported in America.

Seeking the Daughter Atom

Perey decided to produce an ultra-pure sample of actinium and study its radiation before it had the chance to form daughter products. This was exceptionally difficult: the ultra-pure actinium sample would have to be prepared and its radiation studied in a very short time-frame.

alpha-decay

The nucleus of a radioactive atom emits an alpha particle. As a result, it loses two protons and two neutrons. The loss of protons means it becomes a different chemical element.

Perey prepared her ultra-pure sample and made her crucial discovery: a tiny fraction – about 1% – of actinium’s total radioactivity came from the emission of alpha particles, not beta particles. Nobody had suspected this to be the case.

An alpha particle consists of 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Actinium is element 89 in the periodic table, meaning it has 89 protons. If it emits an alpha particle it loses 2 protons and becomes an atom with 87 protons: so the daughter atom was element 87.

The Daughter Atom – A New Element

In 1939 there was no element 87 in the periodic table. Although people had suspected it existed, nobody had been able to find it. Perey had discovered a new element! The new element was made when actinium emitted alpha particles.

And she had been right about the American research work. The beta particles with unexpected energy were not from actinium, but from the new element.

With 87 protons the new element belonged in Group 1 of the periodic table, joining the other alkali metals: lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium.

Actinium Produces Francium and an Alpha Particle

Actinium to Francium Decay

Perey discovered that actinium could decay by emitting a helium nucleus from its own nucleus. Such a helium nucleus is called an alpha particle. The daughter nucleus formed was a previously undiscovered element which she chose to call francium.

Marie Curie had named the first element she discovered polonium in honor of her home country – Poland.

After some discussion, Perey decided to name the new element to honor her home country – France. And so a new element was added to the periodic table – francium.

Less than 30 grams of natural francium is present on Earth at any time, because although it is constantly made by the radioactive decay of actinium, it is constantly undergoing radioactive decay into its own daughter products. Its half-life is only about 22 minutes, so it doesn’t hang around for long.

Perey hoped the new element would be of use in cancer treatments, but this did not prove to be the case.

Recognition, Future Career and Awards

After joining the elite group of scientists who have discovered a chemical element, Marguerite Perey was given leave to study for a Ph.D. at Paris’s prestigious Sorbonne. The award of a Ph.D. was not in doubt, because her thesis would describe her discovery of a new element.

The trouble was she didn’t have good enough high school qualifications to be admitted to the Sorbonne, and she did not have a bachelor’s degree. The Sorbonne refused to award Ph.D. degrees to people who had not achieved their entry requirements – even if they had discovered a new element!

So, during the years of World War 2, Perey spent time taking courses at the Sorbonne to eventually get the equivalent of a B.S. degree. After she had done this, she was awarded her Ph.D. degree in 1946. She became Doctor Marguerite Perey.

(Maybe it’s just me, but the Sorbonne comes over as a pretty stuffy sort of place!)

With her Ph.D. Perey immediately became a senior scientist at the Radium Institute. She continued working there until, in 1949, at age 40, she took the Chair of Nuclear Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg.

Perey also served as a member of the Atomic Weights Commission between 1950 and 1963.

In 1962 she became the first woman to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences. In addition to this, she was awarded:

1950: The French Academy of Science Wilde Prize
1960: The French Academy of Science Le Conte Prize
1960: The City of Paris Science Grand Prize
1960: Officer of the Legion of Honor
1964: Lavoisier Prize of the French Chemical Society
1964: Silver Medal of the City of Paris
1973: Commander of the National Order of Merit

The End

Marguerite Perey died at age 65 on May 13, 1975. Like Marie Curie and a number of other scientists who had worked at the Radium Institute, she died of a radiation-linked illness. In fact, her body was found to be unusually radioactive. She had been instrumental in the introduction of better safety measures in the laboratories under her control. Sadly, this was too late to save her own life, but it was a lifesaver for future generations of nuclear scientists.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
© All rights reserved.

Image of Marguerite Perey provided by ivanbotero95 under GFDL, then colored and modified by this website.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Marguerite Perey." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 7 Dec. 2014. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/marguerite-perey/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • marie curie
    Marie Curie
  • irene-joliot-curie
    Irene Joliot-Curie
  • lise meitner
    Lise Meitner
  • fred-hoyle
    Fred Hoyle
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Jan Ingenhousz: Discovered photosynthesis
  • Barry Marshall: Overturned the Medical Establishment
  • Linus Pauling: Maverick Giant of Chemistry
  • William Röntgen: The Discovery of X-rays
  • Howard Florey: Brought penicillin to the world
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Archimedes: A mind beyond his time
  • Stanley Milgram: The infamous Obedience Experiments
  • C. V. Raman: Color change allows harm-free health check of living cells
  • Rosalind Franklin: Shape-shifting DNA
  • Robert Boyle: A new science is born: chemistry
  • Carl Woese: Rewrote Earth’s history of life
  • Alfred Wegener: Shunned after he discovered that continents move
  • Henri Poincaré: Is the solar system stable?
  • Polly Matzinger: The dog whisperer who rewrote our immune system’s rules
  • Otto Guericke: In the 1600s found that space is a vacuum
  • Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water
  • Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world’s most famous codebreaker
  • Evangelista Torricelli: We live at the bottom of a tremendously heavy sea of air
  • Eudoxus: The first mathematical model of the universe
  • James Black: Revolutionized drug design with the Beta-blocker
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Chen-Ning Yang: Shattered a fundamental belief of physicists
  • Robert Hooke: Unveiled the spectacular microscopic world
  • Barbara McClintock: A Nobel Prize after years of rejection
  • Pythagoras: The cult of numbers and the need for proof
  • J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
  • Johannes Kepler: Solved the mystery of the planets
  • Dmitri Mendeleev: Discovered 8 new chemical elements by thinking
  • Maurice Hilleman: Record breaking inventor of over 40 vaccines
  • Marie Curie: Won – uniquely – both the chemistry & physics Nobel Prizes
  • Jacques Cousteau: Marine pioneer, inventor, Oscar winner
  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Perfect Numbers and our Tiny Universe
  • What Happens when the Universe chooses its own Units?
  • Hipparchus and the 2000 Year-Old Clue
  • Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species
  • You Will Die For Showing I’m Wrong!
  • Getting Through Hard Times – The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy
  • Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System
  • Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | James Black | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Eudoxus | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud | Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould | Otto von Guericke

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Alister Hardy | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Jan Ingenhousz | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Barry Marshall | Polly Matzinger | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Henri Poincaré | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2025