Marie Curie Timeline

04.5

the discovery

Gustave Bémont

05

Henri Becquerel

04

turning point in her life

03

studies

02

childhood

01

marie curie TIMELINE

death of a great scientist

10

War and travels

09

creation of her institute

08

Langevin affair

07

second nobel prize

06

marie curie TIMELINE

Missy and America

Marie regularly refused all those who wanted to interview her. However, a prominent American female journalist, Marie Maloney, known as Missy, who for a long time had admired Marie, managed to meet her. Due to the press, Marie became enormously popular in America, and everyone seemed to want to meet her – the great Madame Curie.In spite of her diffidence and distaste for publicity, Marie agreed to go to America to receive the gift – a single gram of radium – from the hand of President Warren Harding. “I understand that it will be of the greatest value for my Institute,” she wrote to Missy. Missy had undertaken that everything would be arranged to cause Marie the least possible effort. In spite of this Marie had to attend innumerable receptions and do a round of American universities. Outwardly the trip was one great triumphal procession. She became the recipient of some twenty distinctions in the form of honorary doctorates, medals and membership in academies. Great crowds paid homage to her.

A second Nobel Prize

On 6 December, she gave birth to her second daughter, Eve. On 19 April 1906, Pierre died, accidentally hit by a horse-drawn carriage.Marie Curie took over from Pierre on 1 May 1906, becoming the first woman professor at the Sorbonne. Marie Curie became the first woman in France to be the head of a university laboratory. In 1910, assisted by Professor André-Louis Debierne, Marie Curie succeeded in isolating one gram of radium in the form of pure metal. André Debierne, who began as a laboratory assistant, became her faithful collaborator until her death and then succeeded her as head of the laboratory. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Langevin affair

On 4 November 1911, the ‘Langevin affair’ broke out: Paul Langevin's extramarital affair with Marie Curie. He had had marital problems for several years and had moved from his suburban home to a small apartment in Paris. Marie was depicted as the reason. Both were described in slanderous terms.

In December 1898, they discovered radium, thanks to samples that showed a more intense radioactivity than polonium. One of the most challenging tasks was to chemically isolate radium and polonium from the other ore components. These elements were present in minute quantities. As an expert in chemistry, Bémont played a crucial role in developing the purification steps. In 1898, they published the results of their work in scientific reports, confirming the discovery of two new radioactive elements.

The role of Gustave Bermont

Marie Curie, along with Pierre Curie and Bémont, worked to isolate substances more radioactive than uranium from an ore called pitchblende. They crushed, dissolved and crystallized tons of ore to separate the chemical components. In July 1898, the trio identified polonium, a new element they named after Marie Curie's native Poland.

The discovery

She had an excellent aid at her disposal – an electrometer for the measurement of weak electrical currents, which was constructed by Pierre and his brother, and was based on the piezoelectric effect.Results were not long in coming. Just after a few days, Marie discovered that thorium gives off the same rays as uranium. Her continued systematic studies of the various chemical compounds gave the surprising result that the strength of the radiation did not depend on the compound that was being studied. It depended only on the amount of uranium or thorium. Chemical compounds of the same element generally have very different chemical and physical properties: one uranium compound is a dark powder, another is a transparent yellow crystal, but what was decisive for the radiation they gave off was only the amount of uranium they contained. Marie drew the conclusion that the ability to radiate did not depend on the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule, it must be linked to the interior of the atom itself. This discovery was absolutely revolutionary. From a conceptual point of view it is her most important contribution to the development of physics. She now went through the whole periodic system. Her findings were that only uranium and thorium gave off this radiation.

Creation of her institute

At the end of 1909, Professor Émile Roux, Director of the Institut Pasteur, proposed the creation of an Institut du radium, dedicated to medical research into cancer and its treatment by radiotherapy - this would later become the Institut Curie. After the Peace Treaty in 1918, her Radium Institute, which had been completed in 1914, could now be opened. It became France’s most internationally celebrated research institute in the inter-war years.

WW2

Throughout the war she was engaged intensively in equipping more than 20 vans that acted as mobile field hospitals and about 200 fixed installations with X-ray apparatus., They were called the « petites Curies », and were set up to easily locate bomb shrapnels or bullets in soldier’s bodies. She trained young women in simple X-ray technology, she herself drove one of the vans and took an active part in locating metal splinters. Sometimes she found she had to give the doctors lessons in elementary geometry.

Next

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• Nobel prize

Next

Henry Becquerel

Pierre had managed to arrange that Marie should be allowed to work in the school’s laboratory, and in 1897, she concluded a number of investigations into the magnetic properties of steel on behalf of an industrial association. Deciding after a time to go on doing research, Marie looked around for a subject for a doctoral thesis and chose to study Becquerel’s findings on radiation of uranium. In 1898, Marie Curie was awarded the Gegner prize by the Académie des Sciences, worth 4,000 francs, for her work on the magnetic properties of metals. Pierre and Marie's aim was to isolate the elements responsible for the unknown radiation from radioactive rocks.

• To discover more over Becquerl's findings

Death of a Great Scientist

In the last ten years of her life, Marie had the joy of seeing her daughter Irène and her son-in-law Frédéric Joliot do successful research in the laboratory. She lived to see their discovery of artificial radioactivity, but not to hear that they had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1935. As Marie Curie suffered from excessive exposure to the radioactive elements she had been studying since 1898 and to the high doses of X-rays she received during X-rays of patients during the war. She died on the 4 of July from Leukaemia, in the sanatorium of Sancellemoz à Passy, she was 66.

Her chilhood

Marie Curie, whose birth name was Maria Sklodowska, came into existence in Warsaw on the 7th of November, 1867, as the daughter of a secondary education instructor. She obtained a broad education at nearby schools and gained some scientific knowledge from her father. After becoming part of a student revolutionary group, she concluded that it was prudent to vacate Warsaw, then controlled by Russia, and travel to Krakow, which was under Austrian jurisdiction at that time.(Context : Russification policy: following the revolt of 63, Polish was banned, the main language became Russian, and studying and teaching were banned.) So Marie Curie joined the Flying University, an illegal organisation that educated the population.

Turning point in her life

Since the beginning of 1894, she has also been working in Gabriel Lippmann's physical research laboratory, where the "Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale" gave her the work of researching into the magnetic properties of various steels. Now, however, there occurred an event that was to be of decisive importance in her life. She met Pierre Curie n 1994,. He was 35 years, eight years older, and an internationally known physicist, but an outsider in the French scientific community – a serious idealist and dreamer whose greatest wish was to be able to devote his life to scientific work. He worked at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry, and fell in love with him. She returned to Warsaw in 1995, but decided to come back and marry Pierre on 26 July 1895. On 12 September 1897, she gave birth to her first daughter, Irène.

Studies

As she couldn't study in Poland, she decided to follow her sister who went to Paris a few years earlier.Marie dreamed of being able to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, but this was beyond the means of her family. To solve the problem, Marie and her elder sister, Bronya, came to an arrangement: Marie should go to work as a governess and help her sister with the money she managed to save so that Bronya could study medicine at the Sorbonne. When Bronya had taken her degree she, in her turn, would contribute to the cost of Marie’s studies. In 1991, she went to Sorbonne to study physics and mathematics. Of the 776 students at the Faculty of Science in 1895, only 27 were women, and only seven of them were foreigners. During the summer, she was awarded a 600 rouble scholarship to study mathematics. She came first in her class in physics and second in maths. Her goal was to take a teacher’s diploma and then to return to Poland.