History of chemistry element among the fractions that resulted. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Marie's native country of Poland. On December 21, 1898, the Curies detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende. They presented this finding to the French Academy of Sciences on December 26, proposing that the new element be called radium. The Curies then went to work isolating polonium and radium from naturally occurring compounds to prove that they were new elements. In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram
Polonium In the United States, polonium was produced as part of the Manhattan Project's Dayton Project during World War II. It was a critical part of the implosion-type nuclear weapon design used in the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki in 1945. Polonium and beryllium were the key ingredients of the 'urchin' detonator at the center of the bomb's spherical plutonium pit. The urchin ignited the nuclear chain reaction at the moment of prompt-criticality to ensure the bomb did not fizzle. Much of the basic physics of polonium was classified until after the war. The fact that it was used as an