On April 19, 1906, the forty-seven-year-old Nobel laureate Pierre Curie was run over by an oversize, horse-drawn wagon filled with bales of army uniforms. He was negotiating that tricky Parisian intersection where traffic from the rue Dauphine, the quai Conti, the quai des Grands Augustins, and the pont Neuf have created Gallic havoc for over a century. Curie had just quit a meeting of reform-minded University professors where he argued for legislation to improve the lot of junior faculty and to prevent laboratory accidents. He had planned to stop at his publisher’s office on the quai, but because of a strike—by equally reform-minded trade unionists—the office was shut. Absent-minded and somewhat radium-sick, he turned away in the spring rain, and was on his way to the library of the Institut when that six-ton wagon rumbled down the bridge from the Ile de la Cité to crush his skull.

His death brought to an end two...

 

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