They were married in in a civil service attended by family and a few friends. For the occasion, Marie donned a blue cotton dress, one practical enough to wear in the laboratory after the ceremony.
A difficult pregnancy had forced Marie to spend less time in the lab just as she was gathering data for a doctoral thesis. By the time her second daughter, Eve, was born in , Marie had grown accustomed to the disdain of colleagues who thought she spent too much time in the lab and not enough in the nursery. Georges Sagnac, a friend and collaborator, eventually confronted her.
But read scientific publications she did. In labs across Europe, scientists were studying new and surprising phenomena. Henri Becquerel was noting the emission of a different kind of mysterious rays, those from uranium salts. Thomson discovered negatively charged particles, which we now know as electrons and which we now know are the source of X-rays. At first, she and other scientists were baffled about the source of the high-energy emissions.
She wondered whether the emitted rays were violating a basic law of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy. Finally, she posited a daring hypothesis: The rays emitted might be a basic property of uranium atoms, which we now know to be subatomic particles released as the atoms decay. Her theory had radical implications. It further meant that atoms are not necessarily stable.
The device allowed her to measure extremely low electrical currents in air near mineral samples that contained uranium. She soon repeated the experiment with thorium, which behaved in similar ways. But she was puzzled by data that showed that the intensity of the radiation emitted by uranium and thorium was greater than expected based on the amounts of the elements she knew to be in her samples.
In she indeed identified one of the substances and named it polonium, after her homeland. Five months later, she identified a second element, which the world came to know as radium. Pierre put his crystals aside to help his wife isolate these radioactive elements and study their properties. Marie extracted pure radium salts from pitchblende, a highly radioactive ore obtained from mines in Bohemia. The extraction required tons of the substance, which she dissolved in cauldrons of acid before obtaining barium sulphate and other alkalines, which she then purified and converted into chlorides.
The separation of radium from the alkalines required thousands of tedious crystallizations. Working in a dilapidated shed with broken windows and poor ventilation, she nonetheless was able to make sensitive measurements. It is remarkable, says Baisden, that Curie calculated the atomic weight of radium so accurately given such deplorable conditions. Both Curies were plagued by ailments—burns and fatigue—that, in retrospect, were clearly caused by repeated exposures to high doses of radiation.
Both, too, were resistant to the suggestion that their research materials caused their ailments. In , Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics. Professors who reviewed her doctoral thesis, which was about radiation, declared that it was the greatest single contribution to science ever written. Rumors of a Nobel Prize began to circulate, but some members of the French Academy of Sciences attributed the brilliance of the work not to Marie, but to her co-workers.
These skeptics began to lobby quietly for the prize to be split between Becquerel and Pierre. But Pierre insisted to influential people on the Nobel committee that Marie had originated their research, conceived experiments and generated theories about the nature of radioactivity.
Both Curies shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Becquerel in It was the first Nobel to be awarded to a woman. By the time she and Pierre eventually submitted their discoveries for professional consideration, Curie had personally gone through multiple tons of uranium-rich slag in this manner. In , members of the French Academy of Sciences wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy in which they nominated the collective discoveries in the field of radioactivity made by Marie and Pierre Curie, as well as their contemporary Henri Becquerel, for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Yet, in a sign of the times and its prevailing sexist attitudes, no recognition of Curie's contributions was offered, nor was there even any mention of her name. Eventually, the wording of the official nomination was amended. Later that year, thanks to a combination of her accomplishments and the combined efforts of her husband and Mittage-Leffler, Curie became the first woman in history to receive the Nobel Prize.
After discovering Radium in , Curie and Pierre balked at the opportunity to pursue a patent for it and to profit from its production, despite the fact that they had barely enough money to procure the uranium slag they needed in order to extract the element.
On the contrary, the Curies generously shared the isolated product of Marie's difficult labors with fellow researchers and openly distributed the secrets of the process needed for its production with interested industrial parties.
Though not yet fully understood, the glowing green material captivated consumers and found its way into everything from toothpaste to sexual enhancement products. Nonetheless, she had no regrets. Einstein was so impressed by Curie, that he came to her defense later that year when she became embroiled in controversy and the media frenzy that surrounded it.
By this time, France had reached the peak of its rising sexism, xenophobia, and anti-semitism that defined the years preceding the First World War. Furthermore, it came to light that she had been involved in a romantic relationship with her married colleague, Paul Langevin, though he was estranged from his wife at the time.
Curie was labeled a traitor and a homewrecker and was accused of riding the coattails of her deceased husband Pierre had died in from a road accident rather than having accomplished anything based on her own merits. Though she had just been awarded a second Nobel Prize, the nominating committee now sought to discourage Curie from traveling to Stockholm to accept it so as to avoid a scandal. With her personal and professional life in disarray, she sank into a deep depression and retreated as best she could from the public eye.
Around this time, Curie received a letter from Einstein in which he described his admiration for her, as well as offered his heart-felt advice on how to handle the events as they unfolded. There is little doubt that the kindness shown by her respected colleague was encouraging. Soon enough, she recovered, reemerged and, despite the discouragement, courageously went to Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize.
When World War I broke out in , Curie was forced to put her research and the opening of her new Radium institute on hold due to the threat of a possible German occupation of Paris.
After personally delivering her stash of the valuable element to the safety of a bank vault in Bordeaux, she set about using her expertise in the field of radioactivity in order to aid the French war effort.
In , she became the first woman physics professor at the Sorbonne. In , she was given her own lab at the University of Paris. Then in , she won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Curie soon started using her work to save lives. Her discoveries of radium and polonium were important because the elements were radioactive, which meant that when their atoms broke down, they gave off invisible rays that could pass through solid matter and conduct electricity.
She used her groundbreaking understanding of radioactivity to help the x-ray take stronger and more accurate pictures inside the human body. In , during World War I, she created mobile x-ray units that could be driven to battlefield hospitals in France. After the war ended in , Curie returned to her lab to continue working with radioactive elements. But those can be dangerous in very large doses, and on July 4, , Curie died of a disease caused by radiation.
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