Who presented Marie Curie's April 1898 paper on uranium rays to the Académie des Sciences?

Marie Curie’s April 1898 paper on uranium rays was presented to the Académie des Sciences by Gabriel Lippmann.

Curie was not a member of the Académie, so she could not personally present the paper at its meeting. Lippmann, her former professor and mentor, read or submitted it on her behalf on 12 April 1898. The paper reported her measurements of radiation from uranium and its compounds.

This early work helped Curie establish radioactivity as a serious research subject. Using an electrometer developed by Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques, she found that uranium compounds ionized the air around them. She also reported that thorium emitted similar radiation, though Gerhard Carl Schmidt had independently published that observation shortly beforehand.

A common mix-up is to associate Lippmann with Curie’s later discoveries of polonium and radium. Those findings were announced in subsequent papers, with other scientists sometimes presenting the Curies’ results because Marie was still outside the Academy. Lippmann himself later won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for color photography.