Polish-French physicist and chemist · 1867–1934
Marie Curie
Marie Curie discovered two elements, polonium and radium, and coined the word “radioactivity”. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
- Elements credited
- 2
- Discoveries
- 1898
- Co-discoverers
- 1
- Where
- France
The work
In 1897 Curie chose Henri Becquerel’s mysterious uranium rays as the subject of her doctoral thesis. Using a sensitive electrometer built by her husband Pierre, she found that the rays depended only on the amount of uranium or thorium present, so they had to come from the atoms themselves.
Some uranium ores, especially pitchblende, were far more active than their uranium content explained. She and Pierre concluded the ore held unknown elements. Working through tonnes of residue in a leaky shed, they announced polonium, named after her native Poland, in July 1898, and radium, from the Latin for “ray”, in December.
It took Marie four more years of hauling, dissolving and crystallising to prepare a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride and measure radium’s atomic weight, proving to sceptics that it was a real element.
Polonium and Radium side by side
Life and career
Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, then under Russian rule, she studied secretly at the illegal “Flying University” before moving to Paris in 1891. She graduated in physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne and married Pierre Curie in 1895.
She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone. After Pierre’s death she took over his professorship, the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. During the First World War she equipped mobile X-ray vans, the “petites Curies”, and drove them to the front. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by radiation.
Also known for
- Nobel Prizes in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911)
- Founded the Radium Institute in Paris, now the Curie Institute
- Mobile X-ray units in the First World War
Legacy
Her notebooks are still radioactive and kept in lead-lined boxes. Curium, element 96, is named after her and Pierre, and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won her own Nobel Prize in 1935.