Jean Frédéric Joliot, 1900-1958

Abstract Jean Frédéric Joliot was born in Paris on 19 March 1900. He was the youngest of six children. His father, who was 57 when Frédéric was born, had fought in the 1870 war and afterwards in the Commune, as a result of which he had to flee to Belgium. When he returned after the amnesty, he became a business man and devoted himself to the education of his family. Frédéric spent 7 years at the Lycée Lakanal and then two at the Ecole Lavoisier, after which in 1919 he became a pupil at the Ecole de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris, where Paul Langevin was his teacher and was the first to recognize Joliot’s abilities. From 1922 to 1924 Joliot worked in the steel industry in Luxembourg. Then after a year’s military service he was appointed, on Langevin’s recommendation, to the post of assistant to Marie Curie at l’lnstitut du Radium de Paris. Joliot’s scientific career had begun in one of the greatest schools of experimental physics of the first half of the twentieth century. A year later he married Madame Curie’s eldest daughter, Irène, who was born in 1897 and who was then engaged in research in her mother’s laboratory. Thus started a scientific collaboration which ended only with Irène Joliot-Curie’s death in 1956, two years before her husband’s. During the first ten years of their married life, most of their scientific work was carried out together—26 joint papers were published during this period. Joliot’s first research concerned a new method of studying the electrolytic deposition of radio-elements (1).* The bottom of the vessel containing the electrolyte consisted of a very thin sheet of mica made conducting by a sputtered gold film. Polonium was electrolyzed out of solution on to this surface and the alpha rays emitted passed through the mica sheet into an ionization chamber below. Thus the rate of deposition of polonium could be followed quantitatively and continuously as a function of the electrode potential and the time.