Marie Curie

Marie Curie

Marie Curie, who won Nobel Prize twice for her work on radioactivity, was born in Polish on November 7, 1867. Born as Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, she became the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize and the only woman to be awarded for two fields, physics and chemistry. She worked with her husband, Pierre Curie , and discovered polonium and radium. After her husband's death, she developed X-rays and died on July 4, 1934.

Discovery

Curie was fascinated with the work of a French physicist Henri Becquerel , who discovered that uranium casts off rays, than weaker X-rays found by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen.

Curie took Becquerel's work a few steps further, conducting her own experiments on uranium rays. She discovered that the rays remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium. The rays, she theorized, came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics and Curie herself coined the word radioactivity to describe the phenomena. Marie and Pierre had a daughter, Irene, in 1897, but their work didn't slow down.

Pierre put aside his own work to help Marie with her exploration of radioactivity. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Marie's native country of Poland. They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende, and called that radium. In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element.