Eliane Montel

Eliane Montel (1898–1992) was a French physicist and chemist.

Family

Montel was born on 18 October 1898, in Marseille. Her parents were Jakob Nerval Montel, merchant, and Eva Esther Fitt. They were from a family belonging to the Jews of the Pope, who lived for several centuries in the south of France. She spent her childhood between Marseille and Montpellier.

From the 1920s, she was having a love affair with French physicist Paul Langevin. Their son, Paul-Gilbert Langevin, was born on 5 July 1933 in Boulogne-Billancourt.

Early years

Student in sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de jeunes filles de Sèvres, she graduated in 1919, so she was able to teach sciences to young girls, and then graduated at the agrégation competition in 1923.

Professional career

In 1926, she began to work as a voluntary help in the Curie laboratory at the Institut du radium, under Langevin's recommendations, then as a free worker the next year. She then published then her work Sur la pénétration du polonium dans le plomb in the Journal de physique.

Following her work in the laboratory, she was also a physics teacher in highschool in 1929–30. In 1930, Montel asked Marie Curie to get her a Rothschild scholarship for the year 1930–31. She obtained it, but had to stop her researching work to help her mother and did not manage to finish the year.

In 1931–32, she works as a researcher at the ESPCI, in Paul Langevin's laboratory. Montel stayed with him until he died, in 1946, visiting him when he is in house arrest in Troyes during World War II.

Working then in Frédéric Joliot-Curie's laboratory at the Collège de France, she was a political and scientific intermediate between Paul Langevin and his former student Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

After Langevin's death, in 1946, she continued the research work in the same laboratory under René Lucas's direction and works on gaseous ions mobility measures. She has to stop and publish Paul Langevin's last work which was realised during World War II when he was in house arrest. "The device could manage to study the nature of ions and follow its formation and evolution, giving the mobility spectrum".

For the following years, she taught physics and chemistry in highschool in Fontainebleau, near Paris, until her retirement in the 1960s.

In 1967, Montel attended the Curie laboratory former researchers dinner, for Marie Curie's 100th birthday.

In 1972, she worked on Langevin's 100th birthday commemoration, publishing texts in his memory in some periodicals and writing a personal text, Langevin et le rationalisme, le savant hors de la tour d'ivoire to be published in Scientia. She added some material to a former text written in La technique moderne, in the 1930s.

In the 1970s and '80s, she became a close friend of history of religions specialist Jean-Paul Roux and followed his teaching at the Ecole du Louvre. She then became interested in several areas as history of religions, history of art, archeology, Far East, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Islam and Judaism. As she is soon ninety years old, she visited Eastern countries with him and went to Syria.

She died in Paris in 1992.

Works

• On penetration of polonium in lead, Review of physics and radium, 1929.
• Paul Langevin, the great masters of Science, Modern Technics, 1935.
• On mobility and diffusion of ions, in Reports of the sessions from the French Academy of Sciences, 1939.
• On a new method to measure gaseous ions mobility, in Reports of the sessions from the French Academy of Sciences.
• Action of 204Tl and 90Sr β-rays on ordinary photographic records, with Ouang Te Tchao, in Reports of the sessions from the French Academy of Sciences, 1946.
• On the Paul Langevin analyzer for the research on gaseous ions mobility, with Ouang Te Tchao, Review of physics and radium, 1949.
• On a high sensibility monofilar electrometer, Review of physics and radium, 1954.
• A Tribute to Paul Langevin, with René Lucas, 1972.
• Langevin and rationalism, the scientist outside the ivory tower, Scientia, 1973.

See also

• Paul Langevin
• Marie Curie
• Frédéric Joliot-Curie
• Paul-Gilbert Langevin