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TLS in French, signed “M. Curie,” one page, 8.25 x 10.5, Faculté des Sciences de Paris, Institut du Radium letterhead, February 27, 1923. Letter to fellow physicist Jean Perrin, in part (translated): "Thank you for sending me the notice on your scientific work. I had great pleasure in reviewing in detail the history of your beautiful activity." She disputes his claim that before his work “the chemical explanation for the fluorescence phenomenon was unknown, and that no explanation for the thermoluminescence phenomenon had been given…In this respect you are wrong." Curie goes on to affirm that in her 1910 Treatise on Radioactivity, "I had expounded upon the phenomenon of phosphorescence produced by radium rays as well as the phenomenon of thermoluminescence related to those same rays, and I pointed out those phenomena were probably the results of chemical transformations." Curie here references specific pages of her book in support of her claim.
Curie concludes in more fully developing her view of radiation and chemical action: "It is certain that, as regards radium rays, the chemical action is not always the result of electromagnetic radiation. I therefore think that a chemical reaction can be provoked either by an electromagnetic radiation or by a corpuscular radiation whose effect can be referred to as a shock. Depending on the nature of the reaction, one or the other of these two processes is more efficient, and it is probable that, in some cases, only one of them can take place. It seems to me that the reaction of ions in solution does not necessarily pertain to the first category." Perrin has penned an autograph note alongside this paragraph, stating that he himself has said as much since 1921. In very good to fine condition, with some light creasing, and a slight soiling along the intersecting folds.
Madame Curie was both the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice. She was awarded the 1903 prize in physics for her discovery of radioactivity, and was further awarded the 1911 prize in chemistry for her researches into radium and polonium—the publication of the very book referenced here, her 1910 Treatise on Radioactivity, being one of the direct causes for the award. The recipient, Jean Perrin, was a highly accomplished scientist who worked in many areas of physics—from thermodynamics and radiation to molecular chemistry and mass-energy equivalence—and he was himself awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics for empirically proving the existence of atoms.
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