From which Bohemian town did Marie Curie obtain pitchblende?

Marie Curie obtained pitchblende from Jáchymov, a historic mining town in Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic.

At the time, Jáchymov was known by its German name, Joachimsthal, and was famous for uranium mining. The Curies needed pitchblende because Marie had discovered that this uranium-rich ore was more radioactive than uranium itself. That suggested it contained an unknown, intensely radioactive element.

The Austrian government sent about 100 kilograms of waste from a uranium-processing facility in the Jáchymov area to the Curies in Paris. By chemically separating the ore, Marie and Pierre Curie identified polonium in 1898 and announced radium later that year. The work was extraordinarily laborious: a tonne of pitchblende yielded only about one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

A common mix-up is confusing Jáchymov with Prague or Vienna. Prague is the Czech capital, while Vienna was the imperial capital; neither was the Bohemian mining town that supplied the crucial ore.