20
20
0
On December 31, 1911, Marie Curie received her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her work with radioactivity. From the article:
"Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in Physics, and with her later win, in Chemistry, she became the first person to claim Nobel honors twice. Her efforts with her husband Pierre led to the discovery of polonium and radium, and she championed the development of X-rays.
Who Was Marie Curie?
Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person — man or woman — to win the award twice. With her husband Pierre Curie, Marie's efforts led to the discovery of polonium and radium and, after Pierre's death, the further development of X-rays. The famed scientist died in 1934 of aplastic anemia likely caused by exposure to radiation.
Childhood and Education
Maria Sklodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw (modern-day Poland). Curie was the youngest of five children, following siblings Zosia, Józef, Bronya and Hela.
Both of Curie’s parents were teachers. Her father, Wladyslaw, was a math and physics instructor. When she was only 10, Curie lost her mother, Bronislawa, to tuberculosis.
As a child, Curie took after her father. She had a bright and curious mind and excelled at school. But despite being a top student in her secondary school, Curie could not attend the male-only University of Warsaw. She instead continued her education in Warsaw's "floating university," a set of underground, informal classes held in secret.
Both Curie and her sister Bronya dreamed of going abroad to earn an official degree, but they lacked the financial resources to pay for more schooling. Undeterred, Curie worked out a deal with her sister: She would work to support Bronya while she was in school, and Bronya would return the favor after she completed her studies.
For roughly five years, Curie worked as a tutor and a governess. She used her spare time to study, reading about physics, chemistry and math.
In 1891, Curie finally made her way to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She threw herself into her studies, but this dedication had a personal cost: with little money, Curie survived on buttered bread and tea, and her health sometimes suffered because of her poor diet.
Curie completed her master's degree in physics in 1893 and earned another degree in mathematics the following year.
Marriage to Pierre Curie
Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on July 26, 1895. They were introduced by a colleague of Marie’s after she graduated from Sorbonne University; Marie had received a commission to perform a study on different types of steel and their magnetic properties and needed a lab for her work.
A romance developed between the brilliant pair, and they became a scientific dynamic duo who were completely devoted to one another. At first, Marie and Pierre worked on separate projects. But after Marie discovered radioactivity, Pierre put aside his own work to help her with her research.
Marie suffered a tremendous loss in 1906 when Pierre was killed in Paris after accidentally stepping in front of a horse-drawn wagon. Despite her tremendous grief, she took over his teaching post at the Sorbonne, becoming the institution's first female professor.
In 1911, Curie’s relationship with her husband's former student, Paul Langevin, became public. Curie was derided in the press for breaking up Langevin's marriage, the negativity in part stemming from rising xenophobia in France.
Children
In 1897, Marie and Pierre welcomed a daughter, Irène. The couple had a second daughter, Ève, in 1904.
Irène Joliot-Curie followed in her mother's footsteps, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. Joliot-Curie shared the honor with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, for their work on the synthesis of new radioactive elements.
In 1937, Ève Curie wrote the first of many biographies devoted to her famous mother, Madame Curie, which became a feature film a few years later.
What Did Marie Curie Discover?
Curie discovered radioactivity, and, together with her husband Pierre, the radioactive elements polonium and radium while working with the mineral pitchblende. She also championed the development of X-rays after Pierre's death.
Radioactivity, Polonium and Radium
Fascinated with the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered that uranium casts off rays weaker than the X-rays found by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Curie took his work a few steps further.
Curie conducted her own experiments on uranium rays and discovered that they remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium. The rays, she theorized, came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics. Curie herself coined the word "radioactivity" to describe the phenomena.
Following Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, she continued her research with her husband Pierre. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Curie's native country of Poland.
They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende and called that radium. In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element.
Development of X-rays
When World War I broke out in 1914, Curie devoted her time and resources to help the cause. She championed the use of portable X-ray machines in the field, and these medical vehicles earned the nickname "Little Curies."
After the war, Curie used her celebrity to advance her research. She traveled to the United States twice — in 1921 and in 1929 — to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw.
Marie Curie's Nobel Prizes
Curie won two Nobel Prizes, for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize as well as the first person—man or woman—to win the prestigious award twice. She remains the only person to be honored for accomplishments in two separate sciences.
Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, along with her husband and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. With their win, the Curies developed an international reputation for their scientific efforts, and they used their prize money to continue their research.
In 1911, Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. While she received the prize alone, she shared the honor jointly with her late husband in her acceptance lecture.
Around this time, Curie joined with other famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, to attend the first Solvay Congress in Physics and discuss the many groundbreaking discoveries in their field.
Death
Curie died on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia, believed to be caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.
She was known to carry test tubes of radium around in the pocket of her lab coat. Her many years working with radioactive materials took a toll on her health.
Marie Curie's Legacy
Curie made many breakthroughs in her lifetime. Remembered as a leading figure in science and a role model for women, she has received numerous posthumous honors. Several educational and research institutions and medical centers bear the Curie name, including the Curie Institute and Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC).
In 1995, Marie and Pierre's remains were interred in the Panthéon in Paris, the final resting place of France's greatest minds. Marie became the first and one of only five women to be laid to rest there. In 2017, the Panthéon hosted an exhibition to honor the 150th birthday of the pioneering scientist.
The story of the Nobel laureate was back on the big screen in 2017 with Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge, featuring Polish actress Karolina Gruszka. In 2018, Amazon announced the development of another biopic of Curie, with British actress Rosamund Pike in the starring role."
"Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in Physics, and with her later win, in Chemistry, she became the first person to claim Nobel honors twice. Her efforts with her husband Pierre led to the discovery of polonium and radium, and she championed the development of X-rays.
Who Was Marie Curie?
Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person — man or woman — to win the award twice. With her husband Pierre Curie, Marie's efforts led to the discovery of polonium and radium and, after Pierre's death, the further development of X-rays. The famed scientist died in 1934 of aplastic anemia likely caused by exposure to radiation.
Childhood and Education
Maria Sklodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw (modern-day Poland). Curie was the youngest of five children, following siblings Zosia, Józef, Bronya and Hela.
Both of Curie’s parents were teachers. Her father, Wladyslaw, was a math and physics instructor. When she was only 10, Curie lost her mother, Bronislawa, to tuberculosis.
As a child, Curie took after her father. She had a bright and curious mind and excelled at school. But despite being a top student in her secondary school, Curie could not attend the male-only University of Warsaw. She instead continued her education in Warsaw's "floating university," a set of underground, informal classes held in secret.
Both Curie and her sister Bronya dreamed of going abroad to earn an official degree, but they lacked the financial resources to pay for more schooling. Undeterred, Curie worked out a deal with her sister: She would work to support Bronya while she was in school, and Bronya would return the favor after she completed her studies.
For roughly five years, Curie worked as a tutor and a governess. She used her spare time to study, reading about physics, chemistry and math.
In 1891, Curie finally made her way to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She threw herself into her studies, but this dedication had a personal cost: with little money, Curie survived on buttered bread and tea, and her health sometimes suffered because of her poor diet.
Curie completed her master's degree in physics in 1893 and earned another degree in mathematics the following year.
Marriage to Pierre Curie
Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on July 26, 1895. They were introduced by a colleague of Marie’s after she graduated from Sorbonne University; Marie had received a commission to perform a study on different types of steel and their magnetic properties and needed a lab for her work.
A romance developed between the brilliant pair, and they became a scientific dynamic duo who were completely devoted to one another. At first, Marie and Pierre worked on separate projects. But after Marie discovered radioactivity, Pierre put aside his own work to help her with her research.
Marie suffered a tremendous loss in 1906 when Pierre was killed in Paris after accidentally stepping in front of a horse-drawn wagon. Despite her tremendous grief, she took over his teaching post at the Sorbonne, becoming the institution's first female professor.
In 1911, Curie’s relationship with her husband's former student, Paul Langevin, became public. Curie was derided in the press for breaking up Langevin's marriage, the negativity in part stemming from rising xenophobia in France.
Children
In 1897, Marie and Pierre welcomed a daughter, Irène. The couple had a second daughter, Ève, in 1904.
Irène Joliot-Curie followed in her mother's footsteps, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. Joliot-Curie shared the honor with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, for their work on the synthesis of new radioactive elements.
In 1937, Ève Curie wrote the first of many biographies devoted to her famous mother, Madame Curie, which became a feature film a few years later.
What Did Marie Curie Discover?
Curie discovered radioactivity, and, together with her husband Pierre, the radioactive elements polonium and radium while working with the mineral pitchblende. She also championed the development of X-rays after Pierre's death.
Radioactivity, Polonium and Radium
Fascinated with the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered that uranium casts off rays weaker than the X-rays found by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Curie took his work a few steps further.
Curie conducted her own experiments on uranium rays and discovered that they remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium. The rays, she theorized, came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics. Curie herself coined the word "radioactivity" to describe the phenomena.
Following Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, she continued her research with her husband Pierre. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Curie's native country of Poland.
They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende and called that radium. In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element.
Development of X-rays
When World War I broke out in 1914, Curie devoted her time and resources to help the cause. She championed the use of portable X-ray machines in the field, and these medical vehicles earned the nickname "Little Curies."
After the war, Curie used her celebrity to advance her research. She traveled to the United States twice — in 1921 and in 1929 — to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw.
Marie Curie's Nobel Prizes
Curie won two Nobel Prizes, for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize as well as the first person—man or woman—to win the prestigious award twice. She remains the only person to be honored for accomplishments in two separate sciences.
Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, along with her husband and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. With their win, the Curies developed an international reputation for their scientific efforts, and they used their prize money to continue their research.
In 1911, Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. While she received the prize alone, she shared the honor jointly with her late husband in her acceptance lecture.
Around this time, Curie joined with other famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, to attend the first Solvay Congress in Physics and discuss the many groundbreaking discoveries in their field.
Death
Curie died on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia, believed to be caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.
She was known to carry test tubes of radium around in the pocket of her lab coat. Her many years working with radioactive materials took a toll on her health.
Marie Curie's Legacy
Curie made many breakthroughs in her lifetime. Remembered as a leading figure in science and a role model for women, she has received numerous posthumous honors. Several educational and research institutions and medical centers bear the Curie name, including the Curie Institute and Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC).
In 1995, Marie and Pierre's remains were interred in the Panthéon in Paris, the final resting place of France's greatest minds. Marie became the first and one of only five women to be laid to rest there. In 2017, the Panthéon hosted an exhibition to honor the 150th birthday of the pioneering scientist.
The story of the Nobel laureate was back on the big screen in 2017 with Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge, featuring Polish actress Karolina Gruszka. In 2018, Amazon announced the development of another biopic of Curie, with British actress Rosamund Pike in the starring role."
Marie Curie
Posted from biography.com
Awards
Physics
Theoretical Physics
Science
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 7
9
9
0
Marie Curie: A Life of Sacrifice and Achievement
Marie Curie’s discoveries in radiation changed the world. She became one of the most important women in science and her research is still important to scient...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on December 31, 1911
Polish physicist, mathematician, and chemist Marie Curie [née Maria Sklodowska] received her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her work with radioactivity.
Marie Curie: A Life of Sacrifice and Achievement
Marie Curie’s discoveries in radiation changed the world. She became one of the most important women in science and her research is still important to scientists and doctors today.She became the first person - male or female - to win the Nobel Prize twice. And Marie’s discovery of the element radium helped unlock the mysteries of the atom. Yet she came from the most unlikely of circumstances. Marie Curie showed that through hard work and determination anything is possible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFjGrVVXuvU
Images:
1. Pierre & Maria Curie
2. Marie Curie when she was 16 years old
3. The Solvay Conference, probably the most intelligent picture ever taken, Brussels, 1927 seated in front row Marie Curie 3rd from left and Albert Einstein center
4. Marie Curie portrait taken about 1903 when she was awarded her first Nobel Prize
Biographies
1. nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/marie-curie/biographical
2. dorsetlife.co.uk/2012/12/like-a-beast-at-bay/
1. Background from {[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/marie-curie/biographical/]}
"Marie Curie Biographical
Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students’ revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.
Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie’s birth, and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.
Mme. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Irene, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work. She retained her enthusiasm for science throughout her life and did much to establish a radioactivity laboratory in her native city – in 1929 President Hoover of the United States presented her with a gift of $ 50,000, donated by American friends of science, to purchase radium for use in the laboratory in Warsaw.
Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L’Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes and the classic Traité’ de Radioactivité (1910).
The importance of Mme. Curie’s work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.
Mme. Curie died in Savoy, France, after a short illness, on July 4, 1934."
2. Background from {[https://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2012/12/like-a-beast-at-bay/]}
‘Like a beast at bay’: Marie Curie’s secret stay in Highcliffe
Ian Stevenson recounts the little-known story of Marie Curie's secret stay at Highcliffe
Published in December ’12
The pale, rather gaunt widow attracted hardly a glance from other holidaymakers enjoying the sand, sea and sun at Highcliffe in the summer of 1912. She was only 44, but looked older. Her hair was already turning grey and a kidney operation a few months earlier had left her thin and weak.
Hundreds of people must have passed by her on the beach or cliff top during her two-month stay at Highcliffe. None recognised the frail figure in a long black dress as one of the most famous women in the world, Madame Marie Curie.
Being incognita was vitally important to Marie, the brilliant pioneering scientist, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win it twice. For she had come secretly to Highcliffe not just for her health but also to escape from French newspapermen who were hounding her over claims of a scandalous love affair.
Marie’s much-needed break had been arranged by Hertha Ayrton, a valued friend in England. Hertha’s appearance, with her mass of frizzy black hair and sparkling green eyes, could hardly have been more different from Marie’s as they regularly walked together on Highcliffe beach and along the cliff top. But the women had much in common.
Both were physicists and the widows of physicists. Marie had two daughters, Hertha a daughter and a step-daughter. Another link was their Polish ancestry. Marie was born and raised in Poland, later going to study, live and work in France. Hertha was born in England to a Polish father who had fled from Tsarist persecutions against Jews in Poland.
The women had first met in 1903 when Marie visited the Royal Institution in London with her French husband, Pierre. That was the year the Curies jointly won the Nobel Prize for physics. Their discovery of radium – a radioactive metallic element found in pitchblende and other minerals – and the effect of radiation on cells was to revolutionise the treatment of cancer.
After Pierre’s tragic death in 1906, when he was knocked down by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris, Marie carried on their research and went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911 for her work on isolating radium and studying its chemical properties.
Hertha had done ground-breaking research work on the hissing caused by an electric arc and on how sand ripples are formed at the seaside. Although she had full encouragement from her husband – and former tutor – Professor William Ayrton, she constantly came up against gender prejudice in getting her work recognised. And that was another link with Marie Curie.
When Pierre Curie died, many English newspapers acclaimed him as the discoverer of radium. Hertha wrote to the Westminster Gazette: ‘Errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.’ She proceeded to show that radium had been discovered by Marie – alone and unaided – though her husband afterwards helped her to extract if from pitchblende.
Hertha, writing in French, had kept in touch with Marie since their first meeting and had visited her in Paris. So she had great sympathy for Marie when in 1911 she was battling against ill-health and scandal. French newspapers had discovered that Marie was having an affair with a married colleague, Paul Langevin, a former pupil of her late husband. Some that had once extolled her now branded her as a Polish temptress and a home-wrecker.
Because of the scandal, some people tried to discourage her from going to Sweden in December 1911 to collect her Nobel Prize. But she insisted: ‘I cannot accept the principle that the appreciation of the value of a scientific work can be influenced by the distortion and slander concerning my private life.’
Overwork and the anguish caused by the Langevin affair had already debilitated Marie when she went to Sweden. She returned in excruciating pain from a serious kidney infection – possibly a symptom of radiation sickness – but she was considered too weak to survive an operation, so it was postponed.
Hertha Ayrton, knowing the stressful problems that Marie was facing, had been pressing her for some time to come for a holiday in England. In February 1912, she wrote to Marie: ‘I shall take a house by the sea in Devonshire or Cornwall for the months of August and September, so you and your daughters will be able to have two months of sea bathing…..
‘You will not need to come to London before going there. I will meet you at Dover, or whichever port you come to, and we will all travel along the coast… in this way no one will know anything about your visit and if you come under another name you will be absolutely safe from intruding visitors…. If we can quite re-establish your health during your visit it will be a real joy to me.’
Marie had her kidney operation in March, soon after receiving Hertha’s letter. After a stay in a sanatorium she felt just about strong enough at the end of July to take up Hertha’s offer of a clandestine holiday in England. The destination was not to be Devon or Cornwall but the Mill House at Highcliffe, hidden away in the wooded Chewton Glen. The building, originally the 18th-century Chewton Mill, had been extended into a spacious house when it ceased to be a working water-mill in 1906.
Marie, travelling alone as Madame Sklodowska, her maiden name, crossed the Channel on the Calais-Dover ferry and was escorted to Highcliffe by Hertha. Her daughters, Irène, just coming up to fifteen, and seven-year-old Eve, who were then on holiday on the Brittany coast with their Polish governess, joined Marie a short while later.
No friend was better suited than Hertha to offer secret shelter and nursing care to Marie. As a leading campaigner for women’s rights, Hertha had made her house in Norfolk Square, near London’s Hyde Park, a haven for suffragettes. Many suffragettes arrested for their ‘Votes for Women’ activities went on hunger strike in prison. Instead of force-feeding them as was done initially, the Government adopted a ‘cat and mouse’ policy of releasing them when they were near starvation, then re-arresting them after they recovered. Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, the movement’s main leaders, who were so weak that they left prison on stretchers, were among the so-called ‘mice’ nursed back to health by Hertha at her home.
Apart from Hertha and the three Curies, the holiday party at Highcliffe included Miss Manley – an English governess for the children and, at times, Hertha’s daughter Barbara, a militant suffragette who had recently spent time in Holloway Prison. Another guest was Evelyn Sharp, who would later write a biography of Hertha with the dedication: ‘To Marie Curie – This memoir of her friend.’
‘We were a merry party in spite of many preoccupations: the children saw to that,’ Evelyn recalled in her book. ‘Irène Curie already showed promise of the genius for mathematics one would expect to find in one bearing her name … little Eve, adored by her mother and spoilt by everyone else who came under her sway.’
In France, Marie’s illness and her need to hide away from the newspapers had meant long separations from her daughters, who were cared for by their governess. Now, at Highcliffe, she could enjoy time with them and record their progress in a notebook. ‘Irène learns English and is in good health,’ she wrote. ‘Eve takes bathes in the sea despite the cold.’
The amiable Hertha took to the children, holding adult discussions on mathematics with the serious Irène and giving piano accompaniment for the lively Eve to sing French songs. Marie’s health slowly improved in the refreshing sea air, though she was still in pain. In a letter from the Mill House dated 19 August, she told Ellen Gleditsch, her Norwegian laboratory assistant and friend: ‘Unfortunately I am still suffering and can’t write at length.’
Importantly for her peace of mind, she remained just another holidaymaker at Highcliffe. ‘Her secret was so well preserved (naturally, in a household accustomed to sheltering “mice”!) that no
newspaper discovered her presence in England,’ wrote Evelyn Sharp.
Two years after that memorable Highcliffe holiday the First World War erupted in Europe. Both Marie and Hertha used their different skills to help Allied troops. Marie, who had found that X-rays could locate objects such as shrapnel inside a body, established a fleet of X-ray vans that helped to treat wounded troops. She drove the vans to the front herself. Hertha invented the Ayrton fan, a flapping device used to clear battlefield trenches of noxious gases and bring in currents of fresh air. It was credited with saving many Allied lives during gas attacks.
After the war, Hertha and Marie exchanged letters right up until Hertha’s death in 1923 at the age of 69. Marie was 67 when she died in 1934 of leukaemia, possibly a result of repeated exposure to high levels of radiation during her research.
Just a year later her daughter Irène and son-in-law Frédéric Joliet-Curie won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. They had discovered artificial radioactivity and shared the prize for their synthesis of new radioactive elements. Marie’s other daughter, Eve, became a journalist and later toured the world with her American diplomat husband, Henry Labouisse, after he became executive director of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). In a remarkable link with his wife’s family, one of Labouisse’s first tasks on his appointment was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965.
The Curie girls never forgot Hertha Ayrton’s kindness to their mother at Highcliffe. In her biography of Marie, Eve recalled her suffering in 1912: ‘Tracked down by physical ills and human baseness, she hid herself like a beast at bay …. In the summer her friend, Mrs Ayrton, received her and her daughters in a peaceful house on the English coast. There she found care and protection.’
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles Hayden
Polish physicist, mathematician, and chemist Marie Curie [née Maria Sklodowska] received her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her work with radioactivity.
Marie Curie: A Life of Sacrifice and Achievement
Marie Curie’s discoveries in radiation changed the world. She became one of the most important women in science and her research is still important to scientists and doctors today.She became the first person - male or female - to win the Nobel Prize twice. And Marie’s discovery of the element radium helped unlock the mysteries of the atom. Yet she came from the most unlikely of circumstances. Marie Curie showed that through hard work and determination anything is possible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFjGrVVXuvU
Images:
1. Pierre & Maria Curie
2. Marie Curie when she was 16 years old
3. The Solvay Conference, probably the most intelligent picture ever taken, Brussels, 1927 seated in front row Marie Curie 3rd from left and Albert Einstein center
4. Marie Curie portrait taken about 1903 when she was awarded her first Nobel Prize
Biographies
1. nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/marie-curie/biographical
2. dorsetlife.co.uk/2012/12/like-a-beast-at-bay/
1. Background from {[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/marie-curie/biographical/]}
"Marie Curie Biographical
Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students’ revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.
Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie’s birth, and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.
Mme. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Irene, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work. She retained her enthusiasm for science throughout her life and did much to establish a radioactivity laboratory in her native city – in 1929 President Hoover of the United States presented her with a gift of $ 50,000, donated by American friends of science, to purchase radium for use in the laboratory in Warsaw.
Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L’Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes and the classic Traité’ de Radioactivité (1910).
The importance of Mme. Curie’s work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.
Mme. Curie died in Savoy, France, after a short illness, on July 4, 1934."
2. Background from {[https://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2012/12/like-a-beast-at-bay/]}
‘Like a beast at bay’: Marie Curie’s secret stay in Highcliffe
Ian Stevenson recounts the little-known story of Marie Curie's secret stay at Highcliffe
Published in December ’12
The pale, rather gaunt widow attracted hardly a glance from other holidaymakers enjoying the sand, sea and sun at Highcliffe in the summer of 1912. She was only 44, but looked older. Her hair was already turning grey and a kidney operation a few months earlier had left her thin and weak.
Hundreds of people must have passed by her on the beach or cliff top during her two-month stay at Highcliffe. None recognised the frail figure in a long black dress as one of the most famous women in the world, Madame Marie Curie.
Being incognita was vitally important to Marie, the brilliant pioneering scientist, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win it twice. For she had come secretly to Highcliffe not just for her health but also to escape from French newspapermen who were hounding her over claims of a scandalous love affair.
Marie’s much-needed break had been arranged by Hertha Ayrton, a valued friend in England. Hertha’s appearance, with her mass of frizzy black hair and sparkling green eyes, could hardly have been more different from Marie’s as they regularly walked together on Highcliffe beach and along the cliff top. But the women had much in common.
Both were physicists and the widows of physicists. Marie had two daughters, Hertha a daughter and a step-daughter. Another link was their Polish ancestry. Marie was born and raised in Poland, later going to study, live and work in France. Hertha was born in England to a Polish father who had fled from Tsarist persecutions against Jews in Poland.
The women had first met in 1903 when Marie visited the Royal Institution in London with her French husband, Pierre. That was the year the Curies jointly won the Nobel Prize for physics. Their discovery of radium – a radioactive metallic element found in pitchblende and other minerals – and the effect of radiation on cells was to revolutionise the treatment of cancer.
After Pierre’s tragic death in 1906, when he was knocked down by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris, Marie carried on their research and went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911 for her work on isolating radium and studying its chemical properties.
Hertha had done ground-breaking research work on the hissing caused by an electric arc and on how sand ripples are formed at the seaside. Although she had full encouragement from her husband – and former tutor – Professor William Ayrton, she constantly came up against gender prejudice in getting her work recognised. And that was another link with Marie Curie.
When Pierre Curie died, many English newspapers acclaimed him as the discoverer of radium. Hertha wrote to the Westminster Gazette: ‘Errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.’ She proceeded to show that radium had been discovered by Marie – alone and unaided – though her husband afterwards helped her to extract if from pitchblende.
Hertha, writing in French, had kept in touch with Marie since their first meeting and had visited her in Paris. So she had great sympathy for Marie when in 1911 she was battling against ill-health and scandal. French newspapers had discovered that Marie was having an affair with a married colleague, Paul Langevin, a former pupil of her late husband. Some that had once extolled her now branded her as a Polish temptress and a home-wrecker.
Because of the scandal, some people tried to discourage her from going to Sweden in December 1911 to collect her Nobel Prize. But she insisted: ‘I cannot accept the principle that the appreciation of the value of a scientific work can be influenced by the distortion and slander concerning my private life.’
Overwork and the anguish caused by the Langevin affair had already debilitated Marie when she went to Sweden. She returned in excruciating pain from a serious kidney infection – possibly a symptom of radiation sickness – but she was considered too weak to survive an operation, so it was postponed.
Hertha Ayrton, knowing the stressful problems that Marie was facing, had been pressing her for some time to come for a holiday in England. In February 1912, she wrote to Marie: ‘I shall take a house by the sea in Devonshire or Cornwall for the months of August and September, so you and your daughters will be able to have two months of sea bathing…..
‘You will not need to come to London before going there. I will meet you at Dover, or whichever port you come to, and we will all travel along the coast… in this way no one will know anything about your visit and if you come under another name you will be absolutely safe from intruding visitors…. If we can quite re-establish your health during your visit it will be a real joy to me.’
Marie had her kidney operation in March, soon after receiving Hertha’s letter. After a stay in a sanatorium she felt just about strong enough at the end of July to take up Hertha’s offer of a clandestine holiday in England. The destination was not to be Devon or Cornwall but the Mill House at Highcliffe, hidden away in the wooded Chewton Glen. The building, originally the 18th-century Chewton Mill, had been extended into a spacious house when it ceased to be a working water-mill in 1906.
Marie, travelling alone as Madame Sklodowska, her maiden name, crossed the Channel on the Calais-Dover ferry and was escorted to Highcliffe by Hertha. Her daughters, Irène, just coming up to fifteen, and seven-year-old Eve, who were then on holiday on the Brittany coast with their Polish governess, joined Marie a short while later.
No friend was better suited than Hertha to offer secret shelter and nursing care to Marie. As a leading campaigner for women’s rights, Hertha had made her house in Norfolk Square, near London’s Hyde Park, a haven for suffragettes. Many suffragettes arrested for their ‘Votes for Women’ activities went on hunger strike in prison. Instead of force-feeding them as was done initially, the Government adopted a ‘cat and mouse’ policy of releasing them when they were near starvation, then re-arresting them after they recovered. Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, the movement’s main leaders, who were so weak that they left prison on stretchers, were among the so-called ‘mice’ nursed back to health by Hertha at her home.
Apart from Hertha and the three Curies, the holiday party at Highcliffe included Miss Manley – an English governess for the children and, at times, Hertha’s daughter Barbara, a militant suffragette who had recently spent time in Holloway Prison. Another guest was Evelyn Sharp, who would later write a biography of Hertha with the dedication: ‘To Marie Curie – This memoir of her friend.’
‘We were a merry party in spite of many preoccupations: the children saw to that,’ Evelyn recalled in her book. ‘Irène Curie already showed promise of the genius for mathematics one would expect to find in one bearing her name … little Eve, adored by her mother and spoilt by everyone else who came under her sway.’
In France, Marie’s illness and her need to hide away from the newspapers had meant long separations from her daughters, who were cared for by their governess. Now, at Highcliffe, she could enjoy time with them and record their progress in a notebook. ‘Irène learns English and is in good health,’ she wrote. ‘Eve takes bathes in the sea despite the cold.’
The amiable Hertha took to the children, holding adult discussions on mathematics with the serious Irène and giving piano accompaniment for the lively Eve to sing French songs. Marie’s health slowly improved in the refreshing sea air, though she was still in pain. In a letter from the Mill House dated 19 August, she told Ellen Gleditsch, her Norwegian laboratory assistant and friend: ‘Unfortunately I am still suffering and can’t write at length.’
Importantly for her peace of mind, she remained just another holidaymaker at Highcliffe. ‘Her secret was so well preserved (naturally, in a household accustomed to sheltering “mice”!) that no
newspaper discovered her presence in England,’ wrote Evelyn Sharp.
Two years after that memorable Highcliffe holiday the First World War erupted in Europe. Both Marie and Hertha used their different skills to help Allied troops. Marie, who had found that X-rays could locate objects such as shrapnel inside a body, established a fleet of X-ray vans that helped to treat wounded troops. She drove the vans to the front herself. Hertha invented the Ayrton fan, a flapping device used to clear battlefield trenches of noxious gases and bring in currents of fresh air. It was credited with saving many Allied lives during gas attacks.
After the war, Hertha and Marie exchanged letters right up until Hertha’s death in 1923 at the age of 69. Marie was 67 when she died in 1934 of leukaemia, possibly a result of repeated exposure to high levels of radiation during her research.
Just a year later her daughter Irène and son-in-law Frédéric Joliet-Curie won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. They had discovered artificial radioactivity and shared the prize for their synthesis of new radioactive elements. Marie’s other daughter, Eve, became a journalist and later toured the world with her American diplomat husband, Henry Labouisse, after he became executive director of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). In a remarkable link with his wife’s family, one of Labouisse’s first tasks on his appointment was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965.
The Curie girls never forgot Hertha Ayrton’s kindness to their mother at Highcliffe. In her biography of Marie, Eve recalled her suffering in 1912: ‘Tracked down by physical ills and human baseness, she hid herself like a beast at bay …. In the summer her friend, Mrs Ayrton, received her and her daughters in a peaceful house on the English coast. There she found care and protection.’
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles Hayden
(9)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
Marie Curie - RADIUM Documentary
Marie Curie Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeVaEPFFNYc
Images:
1. The widowed Marie Curie with her daughters Eve and Irène in 1908.
2. Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), one of just two female scientists to ever win a Nobel in physics, shown here in her lab with her husband and French chemist Pierre (1859 – 1906)
3. Marie and Pierre Curie with their daughter Irène, 1904
4. Marie Curie in her lab
Background from {[https://www.livescience.com/38907-marie-curie-facts-biography.html]}
Marie Curie: Facts & Biography
By Mary Bagley - LiveScience Contributor June 26, 2019
A portrait of Marie Curie, taken about 1903 when she was awarded her first Nobel Prize. (Image credit: Public domain)
Marie Curie was a physicist, chemist and a pioneer in the study of radiation. She and her husband, Pierre, discovered the elements polonium and radium. They and Henri Becquerel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, and Marie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. She worked extensively with radium throughout her lifetime, characterizing its various properties and investigating its therapeutic potential. However, her work with radioactive materials was what ultimately killed her. She died of a blood disease in 1934.
Early life
Marie Curie was born Marya (Manya) Salomee Sklodowska on Nov. 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland. The youngest of five children, she had three older sisters and a brother. Her parents — father, Wladislaw, and mother, Bronislava — were educators who ensured that their girls were educated as well as their son.
Curie's mother succumbed to tuberculosis in 1878. In Barbara Goldsmith's book "Obsessive Genius," (W. W. Norton, 2005) she notes that Curie's mother's death had a profound impact on Curie, fueling a life-long battle with depression and shaping her views on religion. Curie would never again "believe in the benevolence of god," Goldsmith wrote.
In 1883, at the age of 15, Curie completed her secondary education, graduating first in her class. Curie and her older sister, Bronya, both wished to pursue a higher education, but the University of Warsaw did not accept women. To get the education they desired, they had to leave the country. At the age of 17, Curie became a governess to help pay for her sister's attendance at medical school in Paris. Curie continued studying on her own and eventually set off for Paris in November 1891.
When Curie registered at the Sorbonne in Paris, she signed her name as "Marie" to seem more French. Curie was a focused and diligent student, and was at the top of her class. In recognition of her talents, she was awarded the Alexandrovitch Scholarship for Polish students studying abroad. The scholarship helped Curie pay for the classes needed to complete her licianteships, or degrees, in physics and mathematical sciences in 1894.
Meeting Pierre Curie
One of Curie's professors arranged a research grant for her to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel. That research project put her in touch with Pierre Curie, who was also an accomplished researcher. The two were married in the summer of 1895.
Pierre studied the field of crystallography and discovered the piezoelectric effect, which is when electric charges are produced by squeezing, or applying mechanical stress to certain crystals. He also designed several instruments for measuring magnetic fields and electricity.
Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), one of just two female scientists to ever win a Nobel in physics, shown here in her lab with her husband and French chemist Pierre (1859 – 1906). (Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Radioactive discoveries
Curie was intrigued by the reports of German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and by French physicist Henri Becquerel's report of similar "Becquerel rays" emitted by uranium salts. According to Goldsmith, Curie coated one of two metal plates with a thin layer of uranium salts. Then she measured the strength of the rays produced by the uranium using instruments designed by her husband. The instruments detected the faint electrical currents generated when the air between two metal plates was bombarded with uranium rays. She found that uranium compounds also emitted similar rays. In addition, the strength of the rays remained the same, regardless of whether the compounds were in solid or liquid state.
Curie continued to test more uranium compounds. She experimented with a uranium-rich ore called pitchblende, and found that even with the uranium removed, pitchblende emitted rays that were stronger than those emitted by pure uranium. She suspected that this suggested the presence of an undiscovered element.
In March 1898, Curie documented her findings in a seminal paper, where she coined the term "radioactivity." Curie made two revolutionary observations in this paper, Goldsmith notes. Curie stated that measuring radioactivity would allow for the discovery of new elements. And, that radioactivity was a property of the atom.
The Curies worked together to examine loads of pitchblende. The couple devised new protocols for separating the pitchblende into its chemical components. Marie Curie often worked late into the night stirring huge cauldrons with an iron rod nearly as tall as she was. The Curies found that two of the chemical components — one that was similar to bismuth and the other like barium — were radioactive. In July 1898, the Curies published their conclusion: The bismuth-like compound contained a previously undiscovered radioactive element, which they named polonium, after Marie Curie's native country, Poland. By the end of that year, they had isolated a second radioactive element, which they called radium, derived from "radius," the Latin word for rays. In 1902, the Curies announced their success in extracting purified radium.
In June 1903, Marie Curie was the first woman in France to defend her doctoral thesis. In November of that year the Curies, together with Henri Becquerel, were named winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the understanding of "radiation phenomena." The nominating committee initially objected to including a woman as a Nobel laureate, but Pierre Curie insisted that the original research was his wife's.
In 1906, Pierre Curie died in a tragic accident when he stepped into the street at the same time as a horse-drawn wagon. Marie Curie subsequently filled his faculty position of professor of general physics in the faculty of sciences at the Sorbonne and was the first woman to serve in that role.
In 1911, Marie was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium. In honor of the 100-year anniversary of her Nobel award, 2011 was declared the "International Year of Chemistry."
Upon the death of Pierre Curie in a street accident, Marie Curie was named his successor to the chair of physics at the Sorbonne. It marked the first time a woman became a professor at the French university. An artist in the audience for her inaugural lecture created this drawing for the magazine cover of L’Illustration in 1906. (Image credit: Private Collection )
Later years
As her research into radioactivity intensified, Curie's labs became inadequate. The Austrian government seized the opportunity to recruit Curie, and offered to create a cutting edge lab for her, according to Goldsmith. Curie negotiated with the Pasteur Institute to build a radioactivity research lab. By July of 1914, the Radium Institute ("Institut du Radium," at the Pasteur Institute, now the Curie Institute) was almost complete. When World War I broke out in 1914, Curie suspended her research and organized a fleet of mobile X-ray machines for doctors on the front.
After the war, she worked hard to raise money for her Radium Institute. But by 1920, she was experiencing health problems, likely because of her exposure to radioactive materials. On July 4, 1934, Curie died of aplastic anemia — a condition that occurs when bone marrow fails to produce new blood cells. "The bone marrow could not react probably because it had been injured by a long accumulation of radiation," her doctor wrote.
Curie was buried next to her husband in Sceaux, a commune in southern Paris. But in 1995, their remains were moved and interred in the Pantheon in Paris alongside France's greatest citizens. The Curies received another honor in 1944 when the 96th element on the periodic table of elements was discovered and named "curium."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles Hayden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeVaEPFFNYc
Images:
1. The widowed Marie Curie with her daughters Eve and Irène in 1908.
2. Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), one of just two female scientists to ever win a Nobel in physics, shown here in her lab with her husband and French chemist Pierre (1859 – 1906)
3. Marie and Pierre Curie with their daughter Irène, 1904
4. Marie Curie in her lab
Background from {[https://www.livescience.com/38907-marie-curie-facts-biography.html]}
Marie Curie: Facts & Biography
By Mary Bagley - LiveScience Contributor June 26, 2019
A portrait of Marie Curie, taken about 1903 when she was awarded her first Nobel Prize. (Image credit: Public domain)
Marie Curie was a physicist, chemist and a pioneer in the study of radiation. She and her husband, Pierre, discovered the elements polonium and radium. They and Henri Becquerel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, and Marie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. She worked extensively with radium throughout her lifetime, characterizing its various properties and investigating its therapeutic potential. However, her work with radioactive materials was what ultimately killed her. She died of a blood disease in 1934.
Early life
Marie Curie was born Marya (Manya) Salomee Sklodowska on Nov. 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland. The youngest of five children, she had three older sisters and a brother. Her parents — father, Wladislaw, and mother, Bronislava — were educators who ensured that their girls were educated as well as their son.
Curie's mother succumbed to tuberculosis in 1878. In Barbara Goldsmith's book "Obsessive Genius," (W. W. Norton, 2005) she notes that Curie's mother's death had a profound impact on Curie, fueling a life-long battle with depression and shaping her views on religion. Curie would never again "believe in the benevolence of god," Goldsmith wrote.
In 1883, at the age of 15, Curie completed her secondary education, graduating first in her class. Curie and her older sister, Bronya, both wished to pursue a higher education, but the University of Warsaw did not accept women. To get the education they desired, they had to leave the country. At the age of 17, Curie became a governess to help pay for her sister's attendance at medical school in Paris. Curie continued studying on her own and eventually set off for Paris in November 1891.
When Curie registered at the Sorbonne in Paris, she signed her name as "Marie" to seem more French. Curie was a focused and diligent student, and was at the top of her class. In recognition of her talents, she was awarded the Alexandrovitch Scholarship for Polish students studying abroad. The scholarship helped Curie pay for the classes needed to complete her licianteships, or degrees, in physics and mathematical sciences in 1894.
Meeting Pierre Curie
One of Curie's professors arranged a research grant for her to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel. That research project put her in touch with Pierre Curie, who was also an accomplished researcher. The two were married in the summer of 1895.
Pierre studied the field of crystallography and discovered the piezoelectric effect, which is when electric charges are produced by squeezing, or applying mechanical stress to certain crystals. He also designed several instruments for measuring magnetic fields and electricity.
Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), one of just two female scientists to ever win a Nobel in physics, shown here in her lab with her husband and French chemist Pierre (1859 – 1906). (Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Radioactive discoveries
Curie was intrigued by the reports of German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and by French physicist Henri Becquerel's report of similar "Becquerel rays" emitted by uranium salts. According to Goldsmith, Curie coated one of two metal plates with a thin layer of uranium salts. Then she measured the strength of the rays produced by the uranium using instruments designed by her husband. The instruments detected the faint electrical currents generated when the air between two metal plates was bombarded with uranium rays. She found that uranium compounds also emitted similar rays. In addition, the strength of the rays remained the same, regardless of whether the compounds were in solid or liquid state.
Curie continued to test more uranium compounds. She experimented with a uranium-rich ore called pitchblende, and found that even with the uranium removed, pitchblende emitted rays that were stronger than those emitted by pure uranium. She suspected that this suggested the presence of an undiscovered element.
In March 1898, Curie documented her findings in a seminal paper, where she coined the term "radioactivity." Curie made two revolutionary observations in this paper, Goldsmith notes. Curie stated that measuring radioactivity would allow for the discovery of new elements. And, that radioactivity was a property of the atom.
The Curies worked together to examine loads of pitchblende. The couple devised new protocols for separating the pitchblende into its chemical components. Marie Curie often worked late into the night stirring huge cauldrons with an iron rod nearly as tall as she was. The Curies found that two of the chemical components — one that was similar to bismuth and the other like barium — were radioactive. In July 1898, the Curies published their conclusion: The bismuth-like compound contained a previously undiscovered radioactive element, which they named polonium, after Marie Curie's native country, Poland. By the end of that year, they had isolated a second radioactive element, which they called radium, derived from "radius," the Latin word for rays. In 1902, the Curies announced their success in extracting purified radium.
In June 1903, Marie Curie was the first woman in France to defend her doctoral thesis. In November of that year the Curies, together with Henri Becquerel, were named winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the understanding of "radiation phenomena." The nominating committee initially objected to including a woman as a Nobel laureate, but Pierre Curie insisted that the original research was his wife's.
In 1906, Pierre Curie died in a tragic accident when he stepped into the street at the same time as a horse-drawn wagon. Marie Curie subsequently filled his faculty position of professor of general physics in the faculty of sciences at the Sorbonne and was the first woman to serve in that role.
In 1911, Marie was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium. In honor of the 100-year anniversary of her Nobel award, 2011 was declared the "International Year of Chemistry."
Upon the death of Pierre Curie in a street accident, Marie Curie was named his successor to the chair of physics at the Sorbonne. It marked the first time a woman became a professor at the French university. An artist in the audience for her inaugural lecture created this drawing for the magazine cover of L’Illustration in 1906. (Image credit: Private Collection )
Later years
As her research into radioactivity intensified, Curie's labs became inadequate. The Austrian government seized the opportunity to recruit Curie, and offered to create a cutting edge lab for her, according to Goldsmith. Curie negotiated with the Pasteur Institute to build a radioactivity research lab. By July of 1914, the Radium Institute ("Institut du Radium," at the Pasteur Institute, now the Curie Institute) was almost complete. When World War I broke out in 1914, Curie suspended her research and organized a fleet of mobile X-ray machines for doctors on the front.
After the war, she worked hard to raise money for her Radium Institute. But by 1920, she was experiencing health problems, likely because of her exposure to radioactive materials. On July 4, 1934, Curie died of aplastic anemia — a condition that occurs when bone marrow fails to produce new blood cells. "The bone marrow could not react probably because it had been injured by a long accumulation of radiation," her doctor wrote.
Curie was buried next to her husband in Sceaux, a commune in southern Paris. But in 1995, their remains were moved and interred in the Pantheon in Paris alongside France's greatest citizens. The Curies received another honor in 1944 when the 96th element on the periodic table of elements was discovered and named "curium."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles Hayden
(4)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
The Mystery of Matter: “UNRULY ELEMENTS” (Documentary)
Over a single weekend in 1869, a young Russian chemistry professor named Dmitri Mendeleev invents the Periodic Table, bringing order to the growing gaggle of...
The Mystery of Matter: “UNRULY ELEMENTS” (Documentary)
https://youtu.be/wbuDmY5gpXQ?t=174
Images:
1. Marie Curie and her daughter Irene, who would later win a Nobel just like her mother
2. Marie Curie seated in her lab where spent most of her adult life - colorized
3. The international physics conference in Brussels in 1922. Notably, Marie Curie is the only woman in the group
4. The Curies, along with fellow scientist Henri Becquerel (left), received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of radioactivity.
Background from {[https://allthatsinteresting.com/marie-curie]}
Marie Curie's biography presents an inspiring portrait of a woman who overcame poverty and misogyny to make Earth-shattering scientific discoveries.
Marie Curie is a woman of many outstanding firsts. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics in 1903. Eight years later, she became the first person and only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, her two wins also cemented her as the only person to have ever won the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields — physics and chemistry.
Marie Curie’s Fragile Childhood
Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, she came into the world on Nov. 7, 1867, in what is now Warsaw, Poland. At the time, Poland was under Russian occupation. The youngest child of five, Curie was raised in a poor family, her parents’ money and property having been taken away due to their work to restore Poland’s independence.
Both her father, Władysław, and her mother, Bronisława, were proud Polish educators and sought to educate their children in both school subjects and their oppressed Polish heritage.
Her parents eventually enrolled the children in a secret school managed by a Polish patriot named Madame Jadwiga Sikorska, who secretly integrated lessons on Polish identity into the school’s curriculum.
In order to escape the strict oversight of Russian officials, Polish-related subjects would be disguised on the class schedules — Polish history was put down as “Botany” while Polish literature was “German studies.” Little Marie, or Manya, was a star pupil who always finished at the top of her class. And she wasn’t just a math and science prodigy, she excelled in literature and languages as well.
Her father encouraged Polish scientists to instill a sense of Polish pride into their students, too, and was later found out by Russian officials. Władysław lost his job, which also meant the loss of the family’s apartment and steady income.
To make ends meet, they got a new apartment — this time a rental — and Władysław started a boys’ boarding school. The flat quickly became overcrowded; at one point, they housed 20 students in addition to Curie’s parents and their five children. Curie slept on a couch in the dining room and would rise early to set the table for breakfast.
The overcrowding led to lack of privacy, but also health problems. In 1874, two of Curie’s sisters, Bronya and Zosia, contracted typhus from a few of the sick renters. Typhus spreads via fleas, lice, and rats, and flourishes in crowded places. While Bronya eventually recovered, 12-year-old Zosia did not.
Zosia’s death was followed by another tragedy. Four years later, Curie’s mother contracted tuberculosis. At the time, doctors still had very little understanding of the disease, which caused 25 percent of deaths in Europe between the 1600s and 1800s. In 1878, when Curie was just 10 years old, Bronisława died.
The experience of losing her beloved mother to an illness which science had yet to understand shook Curie’s to her core, plaguing her with lifelong grief and compounding her depression, a condition she would suffer through for the rest of her life. As a way to avoid processing the loss and grief she felt from both her mother’s and sister’s deaths, Curie threw herself into her studies.
She was undoubtedly talented but incredibly fragile from the loss. A school official who was concerned that Curie did not have the emotional capacity to cope had even recommended to her father that she be held back a year until she could recover from the grief.
Her father ignored the warning and instead enrolled her into an even more rigorous institute, the Russian Gymnasium. It was a Russian-operated school that used to be a German academy and had an exceptional curriculum.
Although young Marie Curie excelled academically, mentally she was fatigued. Her new school had better academic standing, but the strict Russia-controlled environment was rough, forcing her to hide her Polish pride. It was not until she suffered a nervous breakdown after graduation at age 15 that her father decided it would be best for his daughter to spend time with family in the countryside.
Marie Curie The Scientist
It turns out, fresh air and strawberry picking in the quiet countryside was the perfect antidote. The usually studious Marie Curie forgot about her books and enjoyed being lavished with gifts by her mother’s extended family, the Boguskis. She played games with her cousins, took long leisurely walks, and reveled in her uncles’ exciting house parties.
One night, according to the stories she told her daughter, Ève, Curie danced so much that she had to throw her shoes out the next day — “their soles had ceased to exist.”
In a carefree letter to her friend Kazia, she wrote: “Aside from an hour’s French lesson with a little boy I don’t do a thing, positively not a thing….I read no serious books, only harmless and absurd little novels….Thus, in spite of the diploma conferring on me the dignity and maturity of a person who has finished her studies, I feel incredibly stupid. Sometimes I laugh all by myself, and I contemplate my state of total stupidity with genuine satisfaction.”
Her time spent in the Polish countryside was one of the happiest times of her life. But the fun and games had to come to an end at some point.
Curie Goes To College
When she turned 17, Marie Curie and her sister Bronya both dreamed of going to college. Sadly, the University of Warsaw did not admit women at the time. In order for them to be able to pursue a higher education, they had to go abroad, but their father was too poor to pay for even one, let alone multiple university educations.
So the sisters hatched a plan.
Bronya would depart for medical school in Paris first, which Curie would pay for by serving as a governess in the Polish countryside, where room and board were free. Then, once Bronya’s medical practice found solid footing, Curie would live with her sister and attend university herself.
In November 1891, at age 24, Curie took a train to Paris and signed her name as “Marie” instead of “Manya” when she enrolled at the Sorbonne, to fit in with her new French surroundings.
Unsurprisingly, Marie Curie excelled in her studies and soon launched to the top of her class. She was awarded the Alexandrovitch Scholarship for Polish students studying abroad and earned a degree in physics in 1893 and another in mathematics the following year.
Toward the end of her stint at the Sorbonne, Curie received a research grant to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel. The project paired her with another researcher named Pierre Curie. The two had an instant attraction that was ingrained in their love of science and soon Pierre began courting her to marry him.
“It would…be a beautiful thing,” he wrote to her, “to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science.”
They were married in the summer 1895 in a civil service attended by family and friends. Despite it being her wedding day, Curie remained her practical self, choosing to don a blue woolen dress that she would be able to wear in the laboratory after her honeymoon, which she and Pierre spent riding bicycles in the French countryside.
Her union with Pierre would prove beneficial to both her private life and her professional work as a scientist. She was fascinated by German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays as well as Henri Becquerel’s discovery that uranium emitted radiation, or what he dubbed “Becquerel rays.” He believed that the more uranium — and uranium alone — a substance contained, the more rays it would emit.
Becquerel’s discovery was important, but Curie would build on it and discover something extraordinary.
Her Dedication As A Scientist Was Criticized After She Had Children
After her marriage, Marie Curie retained her ambitions as a researcher and continued to spend hours in the laboratory, often working alongside her husband. However, when she became pregnant with their first child, Curie was forced to step back from her work due to a difficult pregnancy. It put a lull in her research preparation for her doctoral thesis, but she endured.
The Curies welcomed their first daughter, Irène, in 1897. When her mother-in-law died weeks after Irène’s birth, her father-in-law, Eugene, stepped in to look after his grandchild while Marie and Pierre continued their work in the lab.
Curie’s unwavering dedication to her work continued even after the birth of their second child, Ève. By this time, she was already used to being chastised by her colleagues — who were mostly men — because they believed she should spend more time taking care of her children instead of continuing her groundbreaking research.
“Don’t you love Irène?” Georges Sagnac, a friend and collaborator, pointedly asked. “It seems to me that I wouldn’t prefer the idea of reading a paper by [Ernest] Rutherford, to getting what my body needs and looking after such an agreeable little girl.”
But being a woman of science at a time where women were not considered to be great thinkers simply because of their biology, Curie had learned to tune it out. She kept her head down and worked closer to what would be the breakthrough of a lifetime.
Marie Curie’s Breakthrough
In April 1898, Curie discovered that Becquerel rays weren’t unique to uranium. After testing how every known element affected the electrical conductivity of the air around it, she found that thorium, too, emitted Becquerel rays.
This discovery was monumental: It meant that this feature of materials — which Curie called “radioactivity” — originated from within an atom. Just a year prior, English physicist J.J. Thomson had discovered that atoms — previously thought to be the smallest particles in existence — contained even smaller particles called electrons. But no one had applied this knowledge or considered the massive power that atoms could hold.
Curie’s discoveries literally changed the field of science.
But Madame Curie — which people often called her — didn’t stop there. Still determined to unearth the hidden elements she had sniffed out, the Curies conducted larger experiments using pitchblende, a mineral containing dozens of different types of materials, to discover heretofore unknown elements.
“There must be, I thought, some unknown substance, very active, in these minerals,” she wrote. “My husband agreed with me and I urged that we search at once for this hypothetical substance, thinking that, with joined efforts, a result would be quickly obtained.”
Curie worked day and night on the experiments, stirring human-sized cauldrons filled with the chemicals she was so desperate to understand. Finally, the Curies got their breakthrough: They discovered that two of the chemical components — one similar to bismuth and the other similar to barium — were radioactive.
In July 1898, the couple named the previously undiscovered radioactive element “polonium” after Curie’s home country of Poland.
That December, the Curies successfully extracted pure “radium,” a second radioactive element they had been able to isolate and named after “radius,” the Latin term for “rays.”
She would go on to collaborate with the Austrian government to create a cutting-edge laboratory where she could conduct all her research, called the Institut du Radium. She went on a six-week U.S. tour with her daughters to raise funds for the new institute, during which she was awarded honorary degrees from such prestigious institutions as Yale and Wellesley universities.
She also earned awards and other distinguished titles from other countries that are too numerous to count; the press described her as the “Jeanne D’Arc of the laboratory.”
Her close work with radioactive elements resulted in significant scientific discoveries for the world, but cost Curie her health. On July 4, 1934, at the age of 66, Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, a blood disease in which the bone marrow fails to produce new blood cells. According to her doctor, Curie’s bone marrow could not function properly due to long-term exposure to radiation.
Curie was buried next to her husband in Sceaux, on the outskirts of Paris. She accomplished firsts even after her death; in 1995, her ashes were moved and she became the first woman to be interred at the Panthéon, a monument dedicated to the “great men” of France.
Marie Curie’s story is that of tremendous accomplishment, and while many attempted to shape her fate and narrative, focusing on a softer image of her as a wife, mother, and “martyr to science,” the brilliant scientist did it all simply for her love of the field. In her lectures, she proclaimed that her work with radium was that “of pure science…done for itself.”
FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Don VanceSFC (Join to see)
https://youtu.be/wbuDmY5gpXQ?t=174
Images:
1. Marie Curie and her daughter Irene, who would later win a Nobel just like her mother
2. Marie Curie seated in her lab where spent most of her adult life - colorized
3. The international physics conference in Brussels in 1922. Notably, Marie Curie is the only woman in the group
4. The Curies, along with fellow scientist Henri Becquerel (left), received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of radioactivity.
Background from {[https://allthatsinteresting.com/marie-curie]}
Marie Curie's biography presents an inspiring portrait of a woman who overcame poverty and misogyny to make Earth-shattering scientific discoveries.
Marie Curie is a woman of many outstanding firsts. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics in 1903. Eight years later, she became the first person and only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, her two wins also cemented her as the only person to have ever won the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields — physics and chemistry.
Marie Curie’s Fragile Childhood
Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, she came into the world on Nov. 7, 1867, in what is now Warsaw, Poland. At the time, Poland was under Russian occupation. The youngest child of five, Curie was raised in a poor family, her parents’ money and property having been taken away due to their work to restore Poland’s independence.
Both her father, Władysław, and her mother, Bronisława, were proud Polish educators and sought to educate their children in both school subjects and their oppressed Polish heritage.
Her parents eventually enrolled the children in a secret school managed by a Polish patriot named Madame Jadwiga Sikorska, who secretly integrated lessons on Polish identity into the school’s curriculum.
In order to escape the strict oversight of Russian officials, Polish-related subjects would be disguised on the class schedules — Polish history was put down as “Botany” while Polish literature was “German studies.” Little Marie, or Manya, was a star pupil who always finished at the top of her class. And she wasn’t just a math and science prodigy, she excelled in literature and languages as well.
Her father encouraged Polish scientists to instill a sense of Polish pride into their students, too, and was later found out by Russian officials. Władysław lost his job, which also meant the loss of the family’s apartment and steady income.
To make ends meet, they got a new apartment — this time a rental — and Władysław started a boys’ boarding school. The flat quickly became overcrowded; at one point, they housed 20 students in addition to Curie’s parents and their five children. Curie slept on a couch in the dining room and would rise early to set the table for breakfast.
The overcrowding led to lack of privacy, but also health problems. In 1874, two of Curie’s sisters, Bronya and Zosia, contracted typhus from a few of the sick renters. Typhus spreads via fleas, lice, and rats, and flourishes in crowded places. While Bronya eventually recovered, 12-year-old Zosia did not.
Zosia’s death was followed by another tragedy. Four years later, Curie’s mother contracted tuberculosis. At the time, doctors still had very little understanding of the disease, which caused 25 percent of deaths in Europe between the 1600s and 1800s. In 1878, when Curie was just 10 years old, Bronisława died.
The experience of losing her beloved mother to an illness which science had yet to understand shook Curie’s to her core, plaguing her with lifelong grief and compounding her depression, a condition she would suffer through for the rest of her life. As a way to avoid processing the loss and grief she felt from both her mother’s and sister’s deaths, Curie threw herself into her studies.
She was undoubtedly talented but incredibly fragile from the loss. A school official who was concerned that Curie did not have the emotional capacity to cope had even recommended to her father that she be held back a year until she could recover from the grief.
Her father ignored the warning and instead enrolled her into an even more rigorous institute, the Russian Gymnasium. It was a Russian-operated school that used to be a German academy and had an exceptional curriculum.
Although young Marie Curie excelled academically, mentally she was fatigued. Her new school had better academic standing, but the strict Russia-controlled environment was rough, forcing her to hide her Polish pride. It was not until she suffered a nervous breakdown after graduation at age 15 that her father decided it would be best for his daughter to spend time with family in the countryside.
Marie Curie The Scientist
It turns out, fresh air and strawberry picking in the quiet countryside was the perfect antidote. The usually studious Marie Curie forgot about her books and enjoyed being lavished with gifts by her mother’s extended family, the Boguskis. She played games with her cousins, took long leisurely walks, and reveled in her uncles’ exciting house parties.
One night, according to the stories she told her daughter, Ève, Curie danced so much that she had to throw her shoes out the next day — “their soles had ceased to exist.”
In a carefree letter to her friend Kazia, she wrote: “Aside from an hour’s French lesson with a little boy I don’t do a thing, positively not a thing….I read no serious books, only harmless and absurd little novels….Thus, in spite of the diploma conferring on me the dignity and maturity of a person who has finished her studies, I feel incredibly stupid. Sometimes I laugh all by myself, and I contemplate my state of total stupidity with genuine satisfaction.”
Her time spent in the Polish countryside was one of the happiest times of her life. But the fun and games had to come to an end at some point.
Curie Goes To College
When she turned 17, Marie Curie and her sister Bronya both dreamed of going to college. Sadly, the University of Warsaw did not admit women at the time. In order for them to be able to pursue a higher education, they had to go abroad, but their father was too poor to pay for even one, let alone multiple university educations.
So the sisters hatched a plan.
Bronya would depart for medical school in Paris first, which Curie would pay for by serving as a governess in the Polish countryside, where room and board were free. Then, once Bronya’s medical practice found solid footing, Curie would live with her sister and attend university herself.
In November 1891, at age 24, Curie took a train to Paris and signed her name as “Marie” instead of “Manya” when she enrolled at the Sorbonne, to fit in with her new French surroundings.
Unsurprisingly, Marie Curie excelled in her studies and soon launched to the top of her class. She was awarded the Alexandrovitch Scholarship for Polish students studying abroad and earned a degree in physics in 1893 and another in mathematics the following year.
Toward the end of her stint at the Sorbonne, Curie received a research grant to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel. The project paired her with another researcher named Pierre Curie. The two had an instant attraction that was ingrained in their love of science and soon Pierre began courting her to marry him.
“It would…be a beautiful thing,” he wrote to her, “to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science.”
They were married in the summer 1895 in a civil service attended by family and friends. Despite it being her wedding day, Curie remained her practical self, choosing to don a blue woolen dress that she would be able to wear in the laboratory after her honeymoon, which she and Pierre spent riding bicycles in the French countryside.
Her union with Pierre would prove beneficial to both her private life and her professional work as a scientist. She was fascinated by German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays as well as Henri Becquerel’s discovery that uranium emitted radiation, or what he dubbed “Becquerel rays.” He believed that the more uranium — and uranium alone — a substance contained, the more rays it would emit.
Becquerel’s discovery was important, but Curie would build on it and discover something extraordinary.
Her Dedication As A Scientist Was Criticized After She Had Children
After her marriage, Marie Curie retained her ambitions as a researcher and continued to spend hours in the laboratory, often working alongside her husband. However, when she became pregnant with their first child, Curie was forced to step back from her work due to a difficult pregnancy. It put a lull in her research preparation for her doctoral thesis, but she endured.
The Curies welcomed their first daughter, Irène, in 1897. When her mother-in-law died weeks after Irène’s birth, her father-in-law, Eugene, stepped in to look after his grandchild while Marie and Pierre continued their work in the lab.
Curie’s unwavering dedication to her work continued even after the birth of their second child, Ève. By this time, she was already used to being chastised by her colleagues — who were mostly men — because they believed she should spend more time taking care of her children instead of continuing her groundbreaking research.
“Don’t you love Irène?” Georges Sagnac, a friend and collaborator, pointedly asked. “It seems to me that I wouldn’t prefer the idea of reading a paper by [Ernest] Rutherford, to getting what my body needs and looking after such an agreeable little girl.”
But being a woman of science at a time where women were not considered to be great thinkers simply because of their biology, Curie had learned to tune it out. She kept her head down and worked closer to what would be the breakthrough of a lifetime.
Marie Curie’s Breakthrough
In April 1898, Curie discovered that Becquerel rays weren’t unique to uranium. After testing how every known element affected the electrical conductivity of the air around it, she found that thorium, too, emitted Becquerel rays.
This discovery was monumental: It meant that this feature of materials — which Curie called “radioactivity” — originated from within an atom. Just a year prior, English physicist J.J. Thomson had discovered that atoms — previously thought to be the smallest particles in existence — contained even smaller particles called electrons. But no one had applied this knowledge or considered the massive power that atoms could hold.
Curie’s discoveries literally changed the field of science.
But Madame Curie — which people often called her — didn’t stop there. Still determined to unearth the hidden elements she had sniffed out, the Curies conducted larger experiments using pitchblende, a mineral containing dozens of different types of materials, to discover heretofore unknown elements.
“There must be, I thought, some unknown substance, very active, in these minerals,” she wrote. “My husband agreed with me and I urged that we search at once for this hypothetical substance, thinking that, with joined efforts, a result would be quickly obtained.”
Curie worked day and night on the experiments, stirring human-sized cauldrons filled with the chemicals she was so desperate to understand. Finally, the Curies got their breakthrough: They discovered that two of the chemical components — one similar to bismuth and the other similar to barium — were radioactive.
In July 1898, the couple named the previously undiscovered radioactive element “polonium” after Curie’s home country of Poland.
That December, the Curies successfully extracted pure “radium,” a second radioactive element they had been able to isolate and named after “radius,” the Latin term for “rays.”
She would go on to collaborate with the Austrian government to create a cutting-edge laboratory where she could conduct all her research, called the Institut du Radium. She went on a six-week U.S. tour with her daughters to raise funds for the new institute, during which she was awarded honorary degrees from such prestigious institutions as Yale and Wellesley universities.
She also earned awards and other distinguished titles from other countries that are too numerous to count; the press described her as the “Jeanne D’Arc of the laboratory.”
Her close work with radioactive elements resulted in significant scientific discoveries for the world, but cost Curie her health. On July 4, 1934, at the age of 66, Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, a blood disease in which the bone marrow fails to produce new blood cells. According to her doctor, Curie’s bone marrow could not function properly due to long-term exposure to radiation.
Curie was buried next to her husband in Sceaux, on the outskirts of Paris. She accomplished firsts even after her death; in 1995, her ashes were moved and she became the first woman to be interred at the Panthéon, a monument dedicated to the “great men” of France.
Marie Curie’s story is that of tremendous accomplishment, and while many attempted to shape her fate and narrative, focusing on a softer image of her as a wife, mother, and “martyr to science,” the brilliant scientist did it all simply for her love of the field. In her lectures, she proclaimed that her work with radium was that “of pure science…done for itself.”
FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Don VanceSFC (Join to see)
(8)
(0)
7
7
0
Hard to imagine what modern medicine would be like without her discoveries.
(7)
(0)
4
4
0
Read This Next
Continue with Facebook 
Continue with Google