About Her Life
The daughter of impoverished Polish schoolteachers, Marie worked as a governess in Poland to support her older sister in Paris, whom she eventually joined there. Already entranced with chemistry and physics, Marie took advanced scientific degrees at the Sorbonne, where she met and married physicist Pierre Curie. For her thesis she chose to work in a field just opened up by Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays and Henri Becquerel's observation of the mysterious power of samples of uranium compounds to expose photographic film. Becquerel also noted the power of these mysterious rays to enable gases like air through which they passed to conduct electricity—that is, the gases had been ionized. Marie used this effect to study the amount of radiation produced by uranium and thorium compounds. She found that air’s conductance varied only according to the amount of uranium or thorium in the compounds, not according to the amount of the compounds—suggesting that the amount of radiation was a phenomenon related to atoms, not molecules.
She soon convinced her husband to join in the endeavor of isolating more radioactive substances. In 1898, after laboriously isolating various substances by successive chemical reactions and crystallizations of the products, which they then tested for their ability to ionize air, the Curies announced the discovery first of polonium, then of radium compounds weighing about 0.1 gram that had been derived from tons of uranium ore. After Pierre 's death in 1906 in a streetcar accident, Marie achieved their objective of producing a pure specimen of radium.
Just before World War I, radium institutes were established for her in France and in Poland to pursue the scientific and medical uses of radioactivity. During the war Marie organized a field system of portable X-ray machines to help in treating wounded French soldiers.
After the war young scientists flocked to her laboratory in Paris to learn about radioactivity. Hers was one of the few scientific research centers in the world at the time to welcome women as well as men.
In the midst of her busy scientific career Marie raised two daughters—in part, with the help of her father-in-law. Disapproving of the rigid French school system, she was instrumental in setting up a cooperative school with a number of other professional parents. At the school, leading figures in science, history, literature, and studio art taught these subjects. Although the school lasted only for a few years, it left a lasting impression on its students.
Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel prizes. She shared the physics prize in 1903 for her discovery of radioactivity's cause and won the chemistry prize in 1911 for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
Her elder daughter Irène became a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, also with her husband, Frédéric Joliot. Mother and daughter both eventually died of leukemia induced by their long exposure to radioactive materials.
For Further Reading on the Web
Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity — an online exhibit from the Center for History of Physics, a division of the American Institute of Physics.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 — from Nobelprize.org.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1911 — from Nobelprize.org.
Selected Classic Papers from the History of Chemistry: The Nucleus: Isotopes and Radioactivity — from the Classic Chemistry Web site by Carmen Giunta, Le Moyne College Department of Chemistry; includes three papers by Marie Curie. |
