Marie Curie was shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with her husband Pierre Curie for their basic research in radioactivity. Radium is the heaviest of the alkaline-earth metals . Like the others in the group, radium is metallic and thus a good conductor of electricity. When freshly cut, it has a brilliant white color and, in time, a nitride coating develops. Virtually all radium is derived from the byproducts of uranium refining operations.
Radium is intensely radioactive.
It glows in the dark with an eerie bluish light. The handwritten laboratory notes of the discovers are still too radioactive today for safe handling. In the late 1950s, radium was mixed with a second phosphoresent material such as zinc sulfide to make luminous paint for wristwatches, clocks, and aircraft instrument dials. Shown above is the lumininous mixture of radium bromide and zinc sulfide lused in luminous watch dials. The radium gives off dangerous radiation which causes the zinc sulfide to glow.