Discovery of Polonium Radium and a New Word

Marie and Pierre decided to hunt for the new element they suspected might be present in pitchblende. By the end of 1898, after laboriously processing tons of pitchblende, they announced the discovery of two new chemical elements which would soon take their place in Dmitri Mendeleevs periodic table.The first element they discovered was polonium, named by Marie to honor her homeland. They found polonium was 300 times more radioactive that uranium.The second element the couple discovered was radium, which they named after the Latin word for ray. The Curies found radium was several million times more radioactive than uranium! They also found radiums compounds were luminous and that radium was a source of heat, which it produced continuously without any chemical reaction taking place. Radium is always hotter than its surroundings.