Marie Curie, born in 1867, was a pioneering scientist known for her groundbreaking work in radioactivity. Despite facing gender barriers, she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and made significant discoveries, including polonium and radium. She applied her research during World War I to aid soldiers and developed mobile X-ray units. However, her exposure to radiation led to health issues, and she passed away in 1934. Curie's legacy as a remarkable scientist and a trailblazer for women in science continues to inspire.
1. In 1927, 29 of the top physicists gathered at the prestigious Solvay conference in Brussels. The only woman in attendance was Marie Curie.
2. Marie Curie was born Maria Salamaya Sklodowska on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland. She was the youngest child of teachers, her mother being Brana Swadovska, the head teacher of a prestigious boarding school for girls, and her father, Vladislav Swadovsky, a physics and math teacher.
3. Marie Curie's father lost his savings through a bad investment to support their five children. The family had to take in students to survive.
4. Marie Curie's eldest sibling, her sister Sophia, caught typhus from one of the lodgers and died a few years later. When Maria was 10, her mother died of tuberculosis.
5. Marie Curie finished high school at the top of her class but wasn't allowed to attend university because she was a woman. The Russian Empire banned women from getting a university education.
6. Marie Curie and her sister Bronislava enrolled in the secretive "floating university" in Warsaw. Marie hoped to eventually join her sister in medical school in Paris.
7. Marie Curie worked as a governess tutor and studied in her spare time while working for relatives, the Zorovskies. She fell in love with their son Cashmere, who would become a mathematician.
8. Marie Curie finally had the means to join her sister in Paris in 1891 when she was 24. She used the name Marie and enrolled at the University of Paris, known as the Sorbonne, where she studied physics and mathematics.
9. Marie Curie earned a degree in physics and then another in mathematics. She planned on returning to Poland but then met Pierre Curie, a well-known physicist and an outsider.
10. Marie Curie and Pierre Curie married in 1895. They pioneered research on magnetism and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903.
11. Marie Curie discovered an element that was 400 times more radioactive than uranium. This element was named polonium.
12. Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered another element that gave off 900 times more radiation than polonium - radium.
13. Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1903.
14. Marie Curie became the first female professor in France after her husband's death.
15. Marie Curie won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium.
16. Marie Curie was in the middle of setting up a giant laboratory at her newly created Radium Institute when World War I broke out.
17. Marie Curie used her research to save the lives of French soldiers during World War I. She had studied the work of German scientist Wilhelm Rontgen who had discovered x-rays.
18. Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, a blood disease likely due to exposure to large amounts of radiation over her lifetime, in 1934.