The first thing was that she had a sample of uranium ore, which they understood to be radioactive. But this specific sample was much much much more radioactive than they expected from the uranium alone. Prompting her and her husband to try and figure what was going on.
They were able to isolate radium-salts by dissolving a lot of a radioactive mineral called pitchblende in acid, and were slowly able to gather from hundreds of pounds of ore less than a gram of Radium Chloride. Proving the existence of this new element and later continued to work of making pure metallic radium.
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