The Radium Institute, Boltzmanngasse 3
Why is it significant?
Find the solid building at Boltzmanngasse 3, with its rows of tall windows and its institute sign by the door. It looks like any university building, but in 1910 it opened as the Institute for Radium Research, one of the very first places in the world built entirely to study radioactivity.
Key Facts
| Place | The Radium Institute, Boltzmanngasse 3 |
|---|---|
| Address | Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22130, 16.35640 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the solid building at Boltzmanngasse 3, with its rows of tall windows and its institute sign by the door. It looks like any university building, but in 1910 it opened as the Institute for Radium Research, one of the very first places in the world built entirely to study radioactivity.
Austria had a secret advantage. The mines of Saint Joachimsthal in Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg Empire, produced uranium ore, and it was from the waste of those mines that Marie and Pierre Curie had extracted their radium. Vienna had the raw material for the most exciting physics of the age. A lawyer and patron, Karl Kupelwieser, paid for this building, and the physicist Stefan Meyer led it.
Some of the most remarkable work here was done by women, at a time when that was rare. Marietta Blau developed a method of using photographic plates to record the tracks of particles, and in 1937, with Hertha Wambacher, she found star-shaped traces where cosmic rays had shattered atomic nuclei. Erwin Schrödinger later nominated her for the Nobel Prize.
But in 1938, Blau, who was Jewish, had to flee. Her colleague Wambacher had joined the Nazi party, and stayed. The annexation emptied Viennese science of many of its brightest minds, and the city never fully recovered them. After the war another physicist from this institute, Berta Karlik, became the first woman to hold a full professorship at the University of Vienna.
And the story continues. Today the building houses the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, founded by Anton Zeilinger, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 for experiments with entangled photons. From radium to quantum teleportation, all behind one ordinary facade. Now walk to the end of the Boltzmanngasse and turn left on the Währinger Straße. A yellow palace behind railings holds an army of wax bodies.