The life and achievements of Madame Marie Curie
(b.1867 - d.1934)
On 07 November 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, which was under the control of Czar Alexander II, Manya was the fifth child born to Polish Patriots, Bronislawa and Vladislav Sklodowski. She learned to be a Polish patriot, keeping Polish Nationalism alive in Czarist Russia. Bronislawa resigned as the head of a secondary school when Manya was born. The family moved to a boy's high school where Vladislav was a math and physics educator before being fired after constant harassment from Russian authorities. Although the Poles were under the constant watch of the Russian politzia, all members of the family "had much facility for intellectual work" according to Marie in her autobiography.
The eldest, Zosia died of typhus (which she contracted from a boarder), Bronya and JUzef became physicians, Hela became an educator and Maria was a two time Noble laureate.
At age 15, Manya graduated in the first rank and soon after collapsed brought on by possible fatigue or nervous problems. Some believe that this collapse was due to the depression she was burdened with from the deaths of her sister when she was 8, her mother when she was 10 and her grandmother when she was 13, as well as increased economic hardships. She spent the next year in the country with her cousins at the insistence of her father. That would be the only carefree year of her entire life.
Manya and Bronya joined friends in attending the Floating University. As women were not permitted to be educated and Polish nationalistic ideology was illegal, classes were held at night and moved from location to location. The participants of this fly-by-night institution believed that the hope of Poland lay in the effort to develop intellectual and moral strength. They hoped that these grassroots educational ideas would eventually create a likelihood of an eventual Polish Liberation.
Bronya and Manya made a pact that would allow Bronya to attend medical school in Paris. Manya worked as a governess for an agriculturist who owned a beet -sugar factory 150 mile north of Warsaw. Upon graduation, Bronya would then support Manya with her education. It was there that she met her first love, Kazmierz Zorawski,
who was the eldest of her employer. Although they were very fond of Manya, they did not welcome the engagement to their eldest son. Kazmierz broke of the engagement but continued to carry on a long distant romance for several years. Manya continued to work as the governess for several years after as she was committed to assisting Bronya with her tuition.
Lacking any formal laboratory experience, Manya's cousin, Joseph Boguski (a former assistant to Dimitry Medeleev) who ran the Museum of Industry and Agriculture (a secret Polish laboratory aimed to train Polish scientists), had one of his colleagues tutor Manya in Chemistry. Manya often failed at producing the expected results in laboratory experiments.
In the fall of 1891, Maria finally set off to join her sister in Paris. She traveled 4th class on a train which did not provide seating and therefore had to cary her own folding chair. She began her studies at the Sorbonne and in 1894, where she met Pierre Curie, and married in 1895.
German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X-rays in 1895 and in 1896 Henri Becquerel discovers U-rays disproving the theory that atoms are indivisible and unchangeable.
While Marie Curie was planning her Thesis, she decided that basing her work on Becquerel's rays was simple enough and that she would not need to do too much reading for bibliographic references. In 1898, while analyzing a sample of pitchblende, also known as uraninite, she determined that there must be additional elements in the ore aside from uranium. The two elements were isolated into polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium.
Pierre was so fascinated by her discovery that he put aside his research on crystals and assisted his wife in her research were often performed under difficult conditions. Laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake an increased teaching workload to make ends meet.
Marie Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular. This separation was in part to the work Pierre was doing with crystallization. Radium was crystallized with barium salts in order to extract the purified compound from the pitchblende. This process was completed over and over to reach a purer elemental compound. Radium was obtained from the rich pitchblende ore found in Joachimsthal, Bohemia which, contains about 1 g of radium in 7 tons of pitchblende.
Although some of the scientific community disputed the fact that two new elements were discovered by a woman, in 1898 Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev modified the periodic table to accommodate Radium and Polonium.
Yet still some things were unexplained and Polonium was hard to find in purer samples of pitchblende. In 1900 Ernest Rutherford stated that radioactive elements emit a gas when transmitting and thus defined half life and isotopes. This explained why Polonium was hard to come by as it only lasted for about 138 days.
In 1901 Pierre became the professor of Physics at the Sorbonne and was later nominated for the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henri Becquerel for their work on radiation and radium. Unfortunately, the discoverer of radium was not even considered for the Nobel Prize. After a long series of letters from colleagues to the President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Marie was finally permitted to share her husband's nomination.
She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903.
While crossing a rainy Paris street on 19 April 1906, Pierre Curie slips, falls and is run over by a military transport wagon carrying uniforms. His head was crushed instantly. The French government offered Marie a state pension, however, Marie refused any help from anyone. On 13 May 1906 , Marie takes Pierre's place at the Sorbonne as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position.
Since Pierre was no longer alive and Marie gained all of the credit for the discovery of Radium, on 09 August 1906, Lord Kelvin writes a letter to the editor in the London Times stating that Radium is a compound of Pb and 5 He and not an element. This infuriated Marie Curie and she decided that she must isolate Radium and define it's chemical properties so that no one will ever be able to contest her discovery again.
On 05 November 1906 Marie becomes the first female professor at the Sorbonne. In 1907 Andrew Carnegie established the Curie Scholarship to enable future scientists to assist Marie Curie in further lab experiments to isolate Radium.
Madame Curie published her Fundamental Treatise on Radioactivity in 1910. which stated that all radioactive elements give off certain measurable emissions. Alpha particles are positive and weigh 4 times the weight of Helium and can only pass though Aluminum foil(aka Tritium). Beta Particles negative, move at the speed of light, and pass through about 1/2 cm of aluminum. Gamma Rays are electromagnetic, radioactive and pass through a meter of concrete.
On 23 January 1911, she lost the bid on the seat in the French Academy of Sciences to Catholic candidate, Edouard Branly by 2 votes. Part of her loss can be attributed to the rumor that she was a Jew because of her face and handwriting, along with the love affair scandal with Langevin who was a married Frenchman. When Madame Curie arrived at her lab the day after the Langevin scandal hit the paper, she was greeted by an angry mob accusing her as a home wrecker. She was forced to flee to the family home for protection.
In 1911, the element Radium was finally isolated by Madame Curie and Debierne by the electrolysis of a solution of pure radium chloride employing a mercury cathode; on distillation in an atmosphere of hydrogen, this amalgam yielded the pure metal.
In 1911, an international standard committee was called in Brussels to create a standard that could be used to inter compare radium preparations from the principal laboratories in North America, UK, France, Germany and Austria. The preparation of a radium standard was assigned to Marie Curie, and in 1911 she prepared 21.99 milligrams of pure radium chloride in a sealed glass tube. The job of preparing multiple standards for distribution fell to a chemist, Otto Hönigschmid in Vienna, who was expert in gravimetric measurements and a leading authority on measurements of atomic weights. The standard was completed in 1913 and the International Radium Standards Commission was founded.
She was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and received it on 10 December 1911. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel prize and the firs person to have received two.
On 03 December 1912, Marie returned to the Sorbonne as the scandals of the previous year have subsided. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914 and in August of that year, the Radium institute was completed in the latin quarter of Paris on Rue Pierre-Curie.
With the outbreak of war, in October 1914, she coaxed wealthy investors to supply 20 vehicles which were rolled out to the front as the first mobile Radiology units. In 1915, Radon tubes were introduced to treat infectious wounds on the battle front.
In 1916, Marie's daughter, Irene, receives military recognition for her work with the radiology units, although Marie was never mentioned.
When the war ended on 11 November 1918, Madame Curie resumed her work at the Radium Institute.
May 1920 Curie in the US. Stated that the US had 50 times more radium than she did. $100,000 per gram. Journalist Mrs. William Brown Meloney began the Marie Curie Radium Campaign.
1920 Curie refused the Legion of Honor award as her husband did in 1903. Curie foundation started at the radium institute to over see the scientific and medical divisions and advance the treatment of cancer.
May 20, 1921 Warren G. Harding gives Marie 1 gram of radium
Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (Investigations on radioactive substances) (1904),L'Isotopie et les Eléments Isotopes (Isotopy and isotopic elements) and the classic Traité de radioactivité (Treatise on radioactivity) (1910).
In 1925, Marie Curie founded the Warsaw Radium Institute with Bronya as the director. Later that year she participated in a commission of the French Academy of Medicine that recommended the use of lead screens and periodic tests of the blood cells of workers in industrial labs where radioactive materials were prepared.
The importance of Mme. Curie's work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.
Mme. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Iréne, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work.
Again Marie Curie visited the United States on 30 October 1929 where Herbert Hoover gives her a gift of $50,000 which was donated by the friends of Science, to purchase Belgium radium to be used at the Redium Institute in Warsaw.
Marie Curie served on the commission on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations with Einstein from 1922 until her death in 1934.
Marie Curie died in Savoy, France, after a short illness, on July 4, 1934. “The disease was an aplastic pernicious anemia of rapid, feverish development,” the sanatorium director reported. “The bone marrow did not react, probably because it had been injured by a long accumulation of radiations.”
The Curie's elder daughter, Iréne, married Frédéric Joliot in 1926 and they were joint recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935. The younger daughter, Eve, married the American diplomat H.R. Labouisse. They have both taken lively interest in social problems, and as Director of the United Nations' Children's Fund he received on its behalf the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1965. She is the author of a famous biography of her mother,Madame Curie (Gallimard, Paris, 1938), translated into several languages.
April 1995, During the re interment of Pierre and Marie Curie at the Panthéon, the president of France said, “As the country bows before her ashes ...I form the wish, in the name of France, that everywhere in the world the equality of the rights of women and men might progress...By transferring these ashes of Pierre and Marie Curie into the sanctuary of our collective memory, France not only performs an act of recognition, it also affirms a faith in science, in research, and its respect for those who dedicate themselves to science, just as Pierre and Marie Curie dedicated their energies and their lives to science.”--President François Mitterand at the Panthéon, April 1995 world the equality of the rights of women and men might progress.”
The important events that I feel are most memorable are as follows:
- Discovered Radium and Polonium.
- Shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for work performed on radiation.
- Won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911 for the isolation of Radium and Polonium.
- Only person to have won two Nobel Prizes
- All of her children won Nobel prizes.
- Founded the Radium Institutes in Paris and Warsaw.
- Founded Nuclear Medicine
- Refused the Legion of Honor award in 1920.
- Member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay
- Member of the Committee of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations.
- Published over 433 papers and __ books
- Received the Davy Medal of Royal Society in 1903
- Received a gram of Radium from President Harding in 1921 worth $100,000.
- Received $50,000 from President Hoover in 1929 to purchase a gram Radium.
- First documented person to die from radiation poisoning and cancer.
- Worked with Einstein on the Manhattan Project.
- Received a multitude of honorary degrees and honors from around the world.
- Win a Nobel Prize
- Serve as the Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne
- Teach at the Sorbonne
Her researched helped the United States establish controls on radioactive substances set up by the US Public Health Service, Atomic Energy Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the US Department of Energy. Without her discoveries, we would not have Nuclear power, Chemotherapy or other branches of Nuclear Medicine.
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Bibliography:
All Biographies
American Institute of Physics
Details on the cleanup of the Canonsburg mill site can be accessed at http://www.eia.doe.gov/eneaf/nuclear/page/untra/canonsburg_title1.html.
The Standard Chemical Company photo album can be accessed at http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/Miscellaneous/photoalbum/photoalbum.htm.
The story of Marie Curie and the radium standards at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards can be accessed at http://www.physics.nist.gov/Gen Int/Curie/1921.html.
Please visit the following for more information:
Marie Curie in America
Radiological Society of North America
Canonsburg Site
Photos of Radium Mining in the US
Link to All Biographies site
American Insitute of Physics
Radium Standards
International Bureau of Weights and Measures(BIPM)
Nobel Prize Link
Periodic Table Link
