Pierre and Marie Curie set about working to search for the unknown element. Marie was convinced she had found a new chemical element – other scientists doubted her results. Since nobody had ever found it before, it could only be present in tiny quantities, and it seemed to be very radioactive. Further work convinced her the very large readings she was getting could not be caused by uranium alone – there was something else in the pitchblende. Marie also noticed that samples of a mineral called pitchblende, which contains uranium ore, were a great deal more radioactive than the pure element uranium. He had shown that the rays were able to pass through solid matter, fog and photographic film and caused air to conduct electricity. The Curies became research workers at the School of Chemistry and Physics in Paris and there they began their pioneering work into invisible rays given off by uranium – a new phenomenon which had recently been discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel. It is of course this version of her name that our charity uses, along with our hospices, Marie Curie Nursing Service and our Marie Curie Helper service. It was also around this time that she adopted the French spelling of her name – Marie. It was in Paris, in 1894, that she met Pierre Curie – a scientist working in the city – and who she married a year later. She immediately entered Sorbonne University in Paris where she read physics and mathematics – she had naturally discovered a love of the subjects through her insatiable appetite for learning. However, when her sister offered her lodgings in Paris with a view to going to university, she grasped the opportunity and moved to France in 1891. To become a teacher – the only alternative which would allow her to be independent – was never a possibility because a lack of money prevented her from a formal higher education. The information contained in this biography was last updated on December 4, 2017.Born Maria Sk łodowska on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, she was the youngest of five children of poor school teachers.Īfter her mother died and her father could no longer support her she became a governess, reading and studying in her own time to quench her thirst for knowledge. Mother and daughter both eventually died of leukemia induced by their long exposure to radioactive materials. Her elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, became a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, also with her husband, Frédéric Joliot. In the midst of her busy scientific career Curie raised two daughters-in part with the help of her father-in-law. During the war Curie organized a field system of portable X-ray machines to help in treating wounded French soldiers. 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. After Pierre’s death in 1906, when he was accidentally struck by a horse-drawn wagon, Marie achieved their objective of producing a pure specimen of radium. 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 of polonium, and then of radium salts weighing about 0.1 gram that had been derived from tons of uranium ore. Curie soon convinced her husband to join in the endeavor of isolating the “radioactive” substance-a word she coined. For her thesis she chose to work in a field just opened up by Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays and Becquerel’s observation of the mysterious power of samples of uranium salts to expose photographic film. Already entranced with chemistry, she took advanced scientific degrees at the Sorbonne, where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist who had achieved fame for his work on the piezoelectric effect. The daughter of impoverished Polish schoolteachers, Marie Sklodowska worked as a governess in Poland to support her older sister in Paris, whom she eventually joined there. Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania From Poland to Paris and the Radioactive
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