October 9, 1898 – Birth of Éliane Montel, one of the brilliant scientists who did research at the Curie laboratory of the Institut du Radium

In 1919, she graduated from L'École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles de Sèvres and began teaching science to girls.

In 1926, she began to work as a volunteer assistant in the Curie laboratory at the Institut du Radium, under the recommendations of Paul Langevin (known for his theory of magnetism and for organizing the Solvay Congress) and, a year later, as a worker. During her stay, she published “Sur la pénétration du polonium dans le plomb” in the Journal de Physique. As a curious detail of her article, she only referred to works published by other women such as Ștefania Mărăcineanu, Elizabeth Rona, Irène Curie and Catherine Chamié. All of them worked at some point at the Institut du Radium in Paris.

While working in Frédéric Joliot-Curie's laboratory at the Collége de France, she acted as a political and scientific intermediary between Langevin and Joliot-Curie, who had been a former student of Langevin.

Between 1929 and 1930, in addition to her work in the laboratory, she worked as a Physics teacher at a school until she obtained a Rohtschild scholarship with the support of Marie Curie. However, she was forced to suspend her research to take care of her mother and she was unable to complete it within a year.

Between 1931 and 1932, she worked as a researcher in Paul Langevin's laboratory at the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris. Montel stayed with him until she died in 1946, visiting him while he was under house arrest in Troyes during World War II. As a result of her relationship with him, her son, Paul-Gilbert Langevin, was born in 1933.

After Langevin's death, Montel continued research on gaseous ion mobility measurements in the same laboratory, publishing the results and the last work Langevin did while under house arrest.

In the following years, he taught high school physics and chemistry in Fontainebleau (near Paris) until he retired in the 1960s.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Éliane Montel

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