Marie Curie (1867-1934), French physicist, physics and chemistry Nobel Prize, here in 1921. (Photo by Apic)
School period
College/University
Gallery of Marie Curie
15-21 Rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France
Curie studied chemistry, mathematics, and physics at the Sorbonne, the most prestigious university in Paris. In summer 1893, aged 26, Marie finished as a top student in her master's physics degree course. Her thirst for knowledge pushed her to continue with her education: she completed a master's degree in chemistry in 1894, aged 27.
Career
Gallery of Marie Curie
1896
Paris, France
French physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934), Nobel prize of Physics in 1903, and Nobel prize of Chemistry in 1911 winner, here in her 1st laboratory in Paris in 1896. (Photo by Apic)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1899
Paris, France
Polish-born physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934) and her husband, French chemist Pierre Curie (1859-1906), hold hands with their daughter, Irene, in the garden of their home near Paris, France. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1903
French physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934). Photo by Eugene Pirou, 1903. (Photo by Apic)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1903
Portrait of the Polish-born French physicist Marie Curie, 1903. (Photo by Mondadori)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1903
Marie (1867-1934) and Pierre (1859-1906) Curie, French physicists and Nobel Prize winners. (Photo by Central Press)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1920
Polish Nobel Prize-winning chemist Marie Curie (1867-1934) working at her laboratory desk next to a large burner, c. 1920. (Photo by Pictorial Parade)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1923
Paris, France
A portrait of Marie Curie, who along with her husband, discovered radium, Paris, France, December 26, 1923. (Photo by Underwood Archives)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1925
Marie Curie and her daughter Irene, 1925. Colourised version. (Photo by Culture Club)
Gallery of Marie Curie
1931
Marie Curie in 1931, three years before her death. (Photo by Culture Club)
Gallery of Marie Curie
Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist who, along with her husband Pierre, researched radioactivity and discovered radium and polonium. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
Gallery of Marie Curie
Marie Curie (1867-1934) Polish-born French physicist in her laboratory with husband Pierre (1859-1906), eminent French chemist. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Marie Curie
Chemist Marie Curie (1867-1934). (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection)
French physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934), Nobel prize of Physics in 1903, and Nobel prize of Chemistry in 1911 winner, here in her 1st laboratory in Paris in 1896. (Photo by Apic)
Polish-born physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934) and her husband, French chemist Pierre Curie (1859-1906), hold hands with their daughter, Irene, in the garden of their home near Paris, France. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
15-21 Rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France
Curie studied chemistry, mathematics, and physics at the Sorbonne, the most prestigious university in Paris. In summer 1893, aged 26, Marie finished as a top student in her master's physics degree course. Her thirst for knowledge pushed her to continue with her education: she completed a master's degree in chemistry in 1894, aged 27.
Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist who, along with her husband Pierre, researched radioactivity and discovered radium and polonium. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
Marie Curie (1867-1934) Polish-born French physicist in her laboratory with husband Pierre (1859-1906), eminent French chemist. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Pierre Curie: With Autobiographical Notes by Marie Curie
(Marie Curie offers a memorable portrait of her equally fa...)
Marie Curie offers a memorable portrait of her equally famous husband and lab partner, Pierre Curie. A scientific biography as well as an intimate memoir, this unique narrative recaptures Pierre Curie's youthful research and his first scientific breakthrough, the discovery of piezoelectricity. It further explores his pioneering work in crystallography and magnetism along with the couple's most famous achievement, the discovery of radium. In addition to firsthand accounts of laboratory work and techniques, Marie Curie offers observations on her husband's personality and character, their family life, and the work of their scientific contemporaries, including Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy, Friedrich Oskar Giesel, and Henri Becquerel. Curie also reconstructs her studies of radiation, discussing equipment, procedures, and results. These rare insights into two of history's great scientific minds will fascinate students of science and all readers interested in scientific discovery.
Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist. 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.
Background
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 Zofia, Józef, Bronisława, and Helena.
Both of Curie's parents were teachers. Her father, Władysław, was a math and physics instructor. When she was only 10, Curie lost her mother, Bronisława, to tuberculosis.
Education
Marie started attending a boarding school, then moved to a gymnasium - a selective school for academically strong children. Aged 15, Marie graduated from high school, winning the gold medal for top students. She was passionate about science and wanted to continue learning about it.
Two obstacles stood in Marie's way: her father had too little money to support her ambition to go to university and higher education was not available for girls in Poland. Marie's sister Bronisława faced exactly the same problems. To overcome the obstacles they faced, Marie agreed to work as a tutor and children's governess to support Bronisława financially. This allowed Bronisława to go to France and study medicine in Paris.
For the next few years of her life, Marie worked to earn money for herself and Bronisława. In the evenings, if she had time, she studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics textbooks. She also attended lectures and laboratory practicals at an illegal free "university" where Poles learned about Polish culture and practical science, both of which had been suppressed by the Russian Tsarist authorities.
In November 1891, aged 24, Marie followed Bronisława to Paris. There she studied chemistry, mathematics, and physics at the Sorbonne, the most prestigious university in Paris. The course was, of course, taught in French, which Marie had to reach top speed in very quickly.
At first, she shared an apartment with Bronisława and Bronisława's husband, but the apartment lay an hour away from the university. Marie decided to rent a room in the Latin Quarter, closer to the Sorbonne. This was a time of hardship for the young scientist; winters in her unheated apartment chilled her to the bone.
In summer 1893, aged 26, Marie finished as a top student in her master's physics degree course. She was then awarded industrial funding to investigate how the composition of steel affected its magnetic properties. The idea was to find ways of making stronger magnets.
Her thirst for knowledge pushed her to continue with her education: she completed a master's degree in chemistry in 1894, aged 27.
By mid-1897 Curie's scientific achievements were two university degrees, a fellowship (a scholarship), and a monograph on the magnetization of tempered steel. The couple's first daughter, Irène, had just been born, and it was then that the Curies turned their attention to the mysterious radiation from uranium recently discovered by Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908). It was Marie's hunch that the radiation was an atomic property, and therefore had to be present in some other elements as well. Her search soon established the fact of similar radiation from thorium, and she invented the historic word "radioactivity."
While searching for other sources of radioactivity, the Curies had turned their attention to pitchblende, a mineral well known for its uranium content. To their immense surprise, the radioactivity of pitchblende far exceeded the combined radioactivity of the uranium and thorium contained in it. From their laboratory, two papers reached the Academy of Sciences within six months. The first read at the meeting of July 18, 1898, announced the discovery of a new radioactive element, which the Curies named polonium after Marie's native country. The other paper, announcing the discovery of radium, was read at the December 26 meeting.
From 1898 to 1902 the Curies converted several tons of pitchblende, but it was not only the extremely precious centigrams of radium that rewarded their superhuman efforts. The Curies also published, jointly or separately, during those years a total of thirty-two scientific papers. Among them, one announced that diseased, tumor-forming cells were destroyed faster than healthy cells when exposed to radium.
In November 1903 the Royal Society of London gave the Curies one of its highest awards, the Davy Medal. A month later followed the announcement from the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, that three French scientists, A. H. Becquerel and the Curies were the joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1903. Finally, even the academics in Paris began to stir, and a few months later Marie was appointed director of research at the University of Paris.
The year 1905 brought the election of Pierre to the Academy of Sciences and their travel to Stockholm, where, on June 6, he delivered the Nobel Prize lecture, which was in fact their joint address. Pierre ended his speech with the double-edged impact on mankind of every major scientific advance. Pierre said that he believed "mankind will derive more good than harm from the new discoveries."
The joyful time for this husband-and-wife team would not last long. On the rainy mid-afternoon of April 19, 1906, Pierre was run down by a heavy carriage and killed instantly. Two weeks later the widow was asked to take over her late husband's post. Honors began to pour in from scientific societies all over the world on a woman left alone with two small children and with whom the gigantic task of leadership in radioactivity research was now left. In 1908 she edited the collected works of her late husband, and in 1910 she published her massive Traité de radioactivité. Shortly after this work, Curie received her second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. Still, Curie was unable to win over the Academy of Sciences, who once again denied her membership.
Curie devoted much of her time during World War I (1914-1918) to equipping automobiles in her own laboratory, the Radium Institute, with x-ray (Roentgen) apparatus to assist the sick. It was these cars that became known in the war zone as "little Curies." By the end of the war, Curie was past her fiftieth year, with much of her physical energy already spent - along with her savings, which she had patriotically invested in war bonds. But her dedication was inexhaustible. The year 1919 witnessed her installation at the Radium Institute, and two years later her book La Radiologie et la guerre was published. In it, she gave a most informative account of the scientific and human experiences gained for radiology during the war. At the end of the war, her daughter Irène, a physicist, was appointed as an assistant in her mother's laboratory.
Shortly afterward, a momentous visit took place in the Radium Institute. The visitor was Mrs. William B. Meloney, editor of a leading magazine in New York and representative of the countless women who for years had found in Curie their ideal and inspiration. A year later Meloney returned to tell Curie that a nationwide subscription in America had produced the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, which was needed to purchase a gram of radium for her institute. She was also asked to visit the United States with her daughters and collect the precious gift in person. Her trip was an absolute triumph. In the White House, President Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) presented her with the golden key to the little metal box containing the radium.
On questions other than scientific, Curie rarely uttered public comment of any length. One of the exceptions was her statement at a conference in 1933 on "The Future of Culture." There she rallied to the defense of science, which several panelists held responsible for the dehumanization of modern life. "I am among those," she emphasized, "who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician; he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanism, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its own beauty."
The most heartwarming experience of the last phase of Curie's life was probably the marriage of her daughter Irène in 1926 to Frédéric Joliot (later Joliot-Curie), the most gifted assistant at the Radium Institute. Before long it was evident to her that their union would closely resemble her own marvelously creative partnership with Pierre Curie.
She worked almost to the very end and succeeded in completing the manuscript of her last book, Radioactivité. In the last years her younger daughter, Ève, was her great support. Ève was also her mother's faithful companion when Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934.
(Marie Curie offers a memorable portrait of her equally fa...)
1923
Religion
Curie, being Polish and living most of her life in France, was surrounded by Catholicism and her mother was an active Catholic. Her father, who was a physics professor in Warsaw, is cited as having been a "freethinker," which is code for an atheist.
Curie herself was not religious and is often considered an atheist, but it seems more likely given her scientific worldview that she was more of an agnostic. She said: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
Politics
Marie Curie was a bit of a revolutionary. During her youth in Warsaw, she participated in a student’s revolutionary organization protesting Russian occupation of that part of Poland, and ultimately was forced to flee to Krakow (then a part of the Austrian Empire) to escape a potential backlash.
Curie was fiercely loyal to France in her later years and during World War I, she drove ambulances (that she had equipped with x-ray equipment for the French government) to the front lines of the war.
However, France was not always kind to her, and in her battles with the patriarchal scientific community there, Curie became a champion of early feminism. She was the first woman to get a Doctor of Philosophy degree in research science in Europe, the first woman professor at the Sorbonne, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in different scientific disciplines. She certainly proved for many women that they could run with the scientific big dogs.
Despite her brilliance, Curie was denied a place in the French Academy of Sciences, with the stated reason being: "Women cannot be part of the Institute of France." As a result, she wouldn't allow the Academy to publish her work for the next ten years.
Views
Marie Curie, and other scientists of her time, knew that everything in nature is made up of elements. Elements are materials that can’t be broken down into other substances, such as gold, uranium, and oxygen. When Marie was born, there were only 63 known elements. At the time she began her work, scientists thought they had found all the elements that existed. But they were wrong.
Marie began testing various kinds of natural materials. One substance was a mineral called "pitchblende." Scientists believed it was made up mainly of oxygen and uranium. But Marie's tests showed that pitchblende produced much stronger X-rays than those two elements did alone. She began to think there must be an undiscovered element in pitchblende that made it so powerful.
To prove it, she needed loads of pitchblende to run tests on the material and a lab to test it in. Pierre helped her find an unused shed behind the Sorbonne's School of Physics and Chemistry. There, Marie put the pitchblende in huge pots, stirred and cooked it, and ground it into powder. She added chemicals to the substance and tried to isolate all the elements in it. Every day she mixed a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as herself.
After months of this tiring work, Marie and Pierre found what they were looking for. In 1898, Marie discovered a new element that was 400 times more radioactive than any other. They named it "polonium," after her native country. Later that year, the Curies announced the existence of another element they called "radium," from the Latin word for "ray." It gave off 900 times more radiation than polonium. Marie also came up with a new term to define this property of matter: "radioactive."
It took the Curies four laborious years to separate a small amount of radium from the pitchblende. In 1902, the Curies finally could see what they had discovered. Inside the dusty shed, the Curies watched its silvery-blue-green glow. Marie later remembered this vividly: "One of our pleasures was to enter our workshop at night. Then, all around us, we would see the luminous silhouettes of the beakers and capsules that contained our products."
Marie presented her findings to her professors. She suggested that the powerful rays, or energy, the polonium and radium gave off were actually particles from tiny atoms that were disintegrating inside the elements. Marie's findings contradicted the widely held belief that atoms were solid and unchanging. Originally, scientists thought the most significant learning about radioactivity was in detecting new types of atoms. But the Curies' research showed that the rays weren't just energy released from a material's surface, but from deep within the atoms. This discovery was an important step along the path to understanding the structure of the atom.
An atom is the smallest particle of an element that still has all the properties of the element. Periodic table creator Dmitri Mendeleev and other scientists had insisted that the atom was the smallest unit in matter, but the English physicist J. J. Thompson, responding to X-ray research, concluded that certain rays were made up of particles even smaller than atoms. The work of Thompson and Curie contributed to the work of New Zealand-born British scientist Ernest Rutherford, a Thompson protégé who, in 1899, distinguished two different kinds of particles emanating from radioactive substances: "beta" rays, which traveled nearly at the speed of light and could penetrate thick barriers, and the slower, heavier "alpha" rays.
Marie considered radioactivity an atomic property, linked to something happening inside the atom itself. Rutherford, working with radioactive materials generously supplied by Marie, researched his "transformation" theory, which claimed that radioactive elements break down and actually decay into other elements, sending off alpha and beta rays. The Curies had resisted the decay theory at first but eventually came around to Rutherford's perspective. It confirmed Marie's theory that radioactivity was a subatomic property.
In 1904, Rutherford came up with the term "half-life," which refers to the amount of time it takes one-half of an unstable element to change into another element or a different form of itself. This would later prove an important discovery for radiometric dating when scientists realized they could use "half-lives" of certain elements to measure the age of certain materials.
In 1905, an amateur Swiss physicist, Albert Einstein, was also studying unstable elements. According to his calculation, very small amounts of matter were capable of turning into huge amounts of energy, a premise that would lead to his General Theory of Relativity a decade later. In 1906, Marie voiced her acceptance of Rutherford's decay theory.
By then, Thompson was calling the particles smaller than atoms "electrons," the first subatomic particles to be identified. Thompson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the electron and for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases. In 1911, Rutherford made another breakthrough, building upon Thompson's earlier theory about the structure of the atom. He outlined a new model for the atom: mostly empty space, with a dense "nucleus" in the center containing "protons."
Marie's isolation of radium had provided the key that opened the door to this area of knowledge. She had created what she called "chemistry of the invisible." The age of nuclear physics had begun.
Membership
In 1920, Marie Curie became the first female member of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
In 1921, in the United States, she was awarded membership in the Iota Sigma Pi women scientists' society.
In 1924, Curie became an Honorary Member of the Polish Chemical Society.
The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
1920
Iota Sigma Pi
1921
Polish Chemical Society
1924
Personality
Marie Curie didn't have very many hobbies. She loved to work in her laboratory trying to discover new things to improve science. Her passion for science was above and beyond.
Physical Characteristics:
Marie's health began to deteriorate during the 1920s. After years of being exposed to radioactive materials and carrying test tubes of radium in her pockets, Marie died of aplastic anemia - a serious blood condition where the bone marrow does not create enough blood cells - at the age of 66.
Quotes from others about the person
Ernest Rutherford: "I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies."
Albert Einstein: "Not only did she do outstanding work in her lifetime, and not only did she help humanity greatly by her work, but she invested all her work with the highest moral quality. All of this she accomplished with great strength, objectivity, and judgment. It is very rare to find all of these qualities in one individual."
Interests
Reading
Connections
Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on July 26, 1895. They were introduced by a colleague of Marie 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.
In 1897, Marie and Pierre welcomed a daughter, Irène. The couple had a second daughter, Ève, in 1904.
Marie suffered a tremendous loss in 1906 when Pierre was killed in Paris after accidentally stepping in front of a horse-drawn wagon.
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 1936, Ève Curie wrote the first of many biographies devoted to her famous mother, Madame Curie, which became a feature film a few years later.
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.