Polish Origins
She was the unlikeliest of revolutionaries: a 30-year-old graduate student … a woman at a time when they were essentially unheard of in physics and chemistry … from Poland, a country hardly known for its leadership in science. Yet in four short years, Marie Curie’s discoveries would transform our understanding of matter and make her one of the most famous women in the world.
She was born sgpslot situs slot scatter super zeus pragmatic play gampang menang at a time when Warsaw had been swallowed by Russia and Poland literally wiped off the map. The daughter of two teachers, Maria excelled in science and math. But in Russian-ruled Poland, women were not allowed to attend university, let alone become scientists. Her only hope was to go to Paris. But because her family could not afford to send her, Maria would first have to work for six long years as a governess to support her older sister’s studies. Only at age 24 did she finally get her chance. “She waited her turn, and she didn’t give up,” says biographer Susan Quinn. “And when the turn came, she took it.”
Paris and Pierre
In Paris, Maria reveled in the freedom and technological sophistication of the most modern city in the world. At the Sorbonne, she graduated first in her class in physics, and soon after graduation she met a physicist named Pierre Curie. They married in 1895 and immediately began a family. But in 1897, even with a young daughter to care for, Marie set her sights on earning something no other woman in France had ever received: a doctorate in physics.
Discovering Radioactivity
While scientists all around her were investigating the latest exciting discovery – X-rays – Marie focused her dissertation on a different kind of ray given off by the element uranium. These “uranic rays,” discovered by French physicist Henri Becquerel just a year earlier, had the strange power to “ionize” the air around them, making it a better conductor of electricity. Marie was in a unique position to investigate these rays, because Pierre was a world expert on ways to measure minute electrical currents. Using instruments Pierre had invented, Marie began what she expected to be a workmanlike study of this new phenomenon. But she soon discovered that the element thorium also gave off these rays. Since it was no longer appropriate to call them “uranic rays,” Marie proposed a new name: “radioactivity.”
New elements
Even more surprising, Marie next found that a uranium ore called pitchblende contained two powerfully radioactive new elements: polonium, which she named for her native Poland, and radium. To convince skeptical chemists that radium was real, Marie spent four years isolating one tenth of a gram of radium chloride from ten tons of pitchblende. In the process she discovered that radium glowed in the dark, pouring out heat and light, seemingly forever.
What’s inside the atom?
In time, other scientists would explain this mysterious phenomenon: The energy came from radium atoms breaking down, spitting out pieces of themselves and turning into different elements. Marie Curie had overturned two of the bedrock principles of chemistry: that atoms are the smallest units of matter, and that one element cannot turn into another.
If radioactivity was atoms falling apart, then atoms must have parts. Thanks to this Polish expatriate … this graduate student … this young mother … scientists had a pressing new question to answer: What’s inside the atom? That question would occupy scientists around the world for the next 30 years and beyond.
The Radium Craze
Radium’s wondrous ability to glow in the dark wasn’t only of interest to scientists. It also inspired a worldwide craze – a rush of radium-laced products that promised to cure everything from impotence to hair loss. What few people realized was that most of these products were not only ineffective but dangerous. Just how dangerous only became clear when the “Radium Girls” – women hired to apply radium-laced paint to watches and dials – began dying horribly. Marie and Pierre Curie were among the first to see evidence of the potential harmful effects of radiation. And yet, perhaps reluctant to admit the negative effects of the magical element they had discovered, and hoping its power could be harnessed to cure cancer, they were slow to acknowledge the harm radiation could do, even to themselves. For more on this fascinating chapter, watch The Radium Craze.
