Marie Curie was present in such minute quantities that they would eventually have to process tons of the ore. In July 1898, Curie and her husband published a joint paper announcing the existence of an element which they named "polonium", in honour of her native Poland, which would for another twenty years remain partitioned among three empires (Russian, Austrian, and Prussian). On 26 December 1898, the Curies announced the existence of a second element, which they named "radium", from the Latin word for "ray". In the course of their research, they also coined the word "radioactivity". To prove their discoveries beyond any
Chalcogen and Pierre Curie discovered that a sample of pitchblende was emitting four times as much radioactivity as could be explained by the presence of uranium alone. The Curies gathered several tons of pitchblende and refined it for several months until they had a pure sample of polonium. The discovery officially took place in 1898. Prior to the invention of particle accelerators, the only way to create polonium was to extract it over several months from uranium ore. The first attempt at creating livermorium was from 1976 to 1977 at the LBNL, who bombarded curium-248 with calcium-48, but were not successful.