Got the right one today - Musee Curie 2-11-16

Well at least I got the right place today and we made it to the Musee Curie.  It's so easy if you're pointed in the right direction to begin with.
This was a pilgrimage visit for Deb.
As I've mentioned in a couple earlier posts Marie Curie lived out in our neighborhood for some years, and she did research at a  laboratory in nearby Aubervilliers.  But today we went to her primary laboratory immediately in the vicinity of the Sorbonne where she was finally allowed to become a professor (her husband refused to become a prof without her after their Nobel prizes - her appointment caused a furor).  The lab building, now a museum, is just a couple blocks from the
 Pantheon and Ecole Superior Normale for Physics. It is in a very old section of town, in the area that the Romans inhabited.   This building is where most of the research on Radium and the new radioactive elements took place.
The museum is very small, essentially 4 rooms.  In 2 rooms they have conserved both her office and chemical lab.  And the other rooms contain pieces of equipment that were used in their research.
It's quite interesting that Madame Curie came over to the U.S. in the late 1920's and toured the country giving lectures and demonstrations.  On this visit she was presented a gift from a women's group consisting of one gram of radium for her research,  It cost over 100,000 dollars all of which was raised by individual small donations.  Radium at that time cost more than 10 times the cost per weight of the highest priced diamonds. It was so precious that upon her death she willed the remaining radium to her daughter Irene (also a Nobel prize winner for the discovery of artificial radioactivity) so that the research could continue. Curie's laboratory continued to turn out remarkable work, continued by her daughter and son-in-law and her students, even after her death. For example, the element Francium was discovered there.  Due to the methods used during her life all of her papers are contaminated and radioactive.  They are kept under protective coverings and even today in order to review them researchers must wear protective lead.
After our visit we took a walk in the 5th arr. and down along the Seine, as we got there it started raining. As we hurried across the bridge we looked into the river and were quite surprised at how high the water was flowing, it was covering some of the lower steps along the quai.  It must have been at least 3 feet higher than normal, likely a testament to how much rain has been falling in the central part of the country.   As we walked along we went through two squalls of hail, not the heavy hail like Colorado but lighter, small, and not wind driven.  So that's the third time we've seen hail since we got here.  By the time we got back to the apartment it was sunny.