About Us
Marie Curie
1867 – 1934
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Marie Curie, formerly Marya Sklodowski, was born on November 7th, 1867 in Warsaw, at a time when the Polish capital was occupied by the Russians. She came from a family of teachers. The premature death of her sister and later her mother strengthened her belief in science, but weakened her belief in religion. |
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She was a brilliant student and dreamed of a scientific career, which at that time was unheard of for a woman. Lack of money forced her to become a private tutor and she made many sacrifices in order to help her sister Bronia study medicine in Paris, hoping that in due course, Bronia would be able to help her. It took eight years for Marya to save sufficient money to fulfil her dream to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, but in 1891 she finally managed it. She was an ambitious young woman and had an all-consuming desire to learn. Despite her poor living conditions and limited knowledge of French, she managed to graduate in physics in 1893 and then the following year she attained a mathematics degree. Whilst searching for a laboratory in Paris to continue with her experiments, she was introduced to Pierre Curie, a shy young man who was a professor at the School of Physics and highly regarded for his work on crystallography and magnetism. They married in July 1895. | |
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In 1897 Marie Curie decided to take a physics doctorate. During her studies she had heard about Henri Becquerel who was studying X-Rays, and had observed that uranium salt left an impression on a photographic plate in spite of its protective envelope. She wanted to investigate these 'uranium rays' for her doctoral thesis. She discovered that the intensity of the rays was in direct proportion to the amount of uranium in her sample. Nothing she did to the uranium affected the rays, thus showing that 'radioactivity is an atomic property'. Marie also noted that another substance, thorium, was 'radioactive', a term she herself invented. |