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Marie Curie (1867-1934)
Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1981, she enrolled in the Sorbonne in Paris, and two years later she recieved her degree in physics. In 1985 she married Pierre Curie, and the two were interested in the new concept of radioactivity which was then just surfacing after Roentgen's discovery of X-rays and Becquerel's discovery of uranium being radioactive. Marie began to study uranium, and used piezoelectric techniques to measure the radiations of pitchblende (ore containing uranium). She realized that the radiation of the pitchblende was much greater than that of uranium; leading her to deduce that more radioactive substances were present in the ore. In 1898 the Curies discovered the two new elements radium and polonium, and in the following years they parsed through almost a ton of pitchblende to extract a fraction of a gram of radium. In 1903, the Curies shared the Nobel Prize with Becquerel for the discovery of radioactive elements. In 1911, after the death of her husband, she recieved another Nobel Prize (in chemistry), for her work on radium. In 1914 she became the head of the Paris Institute of Radium. She died on July 4, 1934 due to an illness caused by overexposure to radioactivity. |