On the 20th of April, 1902, after years of hard work, Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated a brand new element: radium. It was thought, at the time, that this new material might have all kinds of beneficial properties, and so radium was swiftly incorporated into a huge range of products: everything from makeup to ceramics to health tonics and jewellery. What wasn’t understood at that time was that radium was in fact quite deadly.
