Marie Curie

Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire. From her early years as a child, it was made clear that she was remarkable with her prodigious memory. She took work as a teacher as a cause of her father losing his savings and took part in the nationalist “free university,” receding in Polish to women workers. At the age of 18, she took a post as a governess. From her earnings, she was able to finance her sister Bronislawa’s medical studies in Paris, with the understanding that Bronislawa would in turn later help her to receive an education. Marie went to Paris in 1891 and proceeded to follow the lectures of Gabriel Lippman, Paul Appel, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. She was able to network and become friends with physicists who were already well known like Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton. She came first in the license of physical sciences in 1893, and in 1894, she began to work in Lippmann’s research laboratory and was placed second in the license of mathematical studies. She met her husband, Pierre Curie, in the spring of that year and proceeded to achieve results of world significance by discovering polonium in the summer of 1898 and that of radium a few months later. Henri Becquerel's discovery in 1896 of a new phenomenon (later called radioactivity) made Curie curious, and looking for a subject to thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She also discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C Schmidt did. Curie became fascinated with minerals, especially to a mineral named pitchblende, which its activity was superior to that of pure uranium and could only be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Her husband, Pierre Curie, proceeded to join her in the work she had undertaken to resolve this problem and this led to the discovery of new elements, polonium and radium. While her husband dedicated himself primarily to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state, which was finally achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. As a result of this research, Marie received her doctorate of science in June of 1903 and, with Pierre, was awarded to Davy Medal of the Royal Society. They also shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity in 1903 as well. After the death of her husband, Pierre Curie, in 1906, she devoted all of her energy to completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken. In 1911, she was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the isolation of pure radium.