Ms. Berrios

9/16/02

Curie, Marie Sklodowska

Curie, Marie Sklodowska Polish-French chemist and physicist. Born Warsaw, Poland, Nov. 7, 1867. Died near Chamonix, France, July 4, 1934. In 1896, after Antoine Henri Becquerel’s discovery of the radioactivity of uranium, Marie Curie began studying the other elements and many minerals for the same property. She found that of the known elements, thorium was also radioactive. Studying the mineral pitchblende, she found that its radioactivity was much greater than its uranium content and suspected the presence of a new radioactive element.

Her husband, Pierre Curie, realizing the importance of her research, left his own studies to join her. In 1898 they discovered two new radioactive elements in pitchblende. They named these elements polonium and radium. During the next four years, the Curies laboriously refined eight tons of pitchblende to obtain one gram of radium compounds. They used this material to determine the atomic weight of radium and some of its other properties.

For these discoveries the Curies were awarded, jointly with Becquerel, the 1903 Nobel prizes. Marie Curie received her early scientific training from her father, a professor of physics in Warsaw, which was then under Russian domination. As a result of her association with student revolutionaries, she was forced to leave Poland for Cracow, then under Austrian rule. In 1891 she arrived in Paris , and two years later she received a degree from the Sorbonne.

In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, who was then a professor of physics at French technical school. After her husband’s death in 1906, Marie succeeded him as professor of physics at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she was appointed first director of the Curie Institute of Radium, and she later founded a similar laboratory in her native Warsaw.