It is worth viewing, on those infrequent occasions when it is shown on Turner Classic Movies, usually during Greer Garson week. William B. Ashworth, Jr. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw umkc. Scientist of the Day - Eve Curie December 6, Nov Dec They named the element polonium, after Curie's native country of Poland.
They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende and called that radium. In , the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element. When World War I broke out in , Curie devoted her time and resources to help the cause. She championed the use of portable X-ray machines in the field, and these medical vehicles earned the nickname "Little Curies. After the war, Curie used her celebrity to advance her research.
She traveled to the United States twice — in and in — to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw. Curie won two Nobel Prizes, for physics in and for chemistry in She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize as well as the first person—man or woman—to win the prestigious award twice. She remains the only person to be honored for accomplishments in two separate sciences.
Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in , along with her husband and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. With their win, the Curies developed an international reputation for their scientific efforts, and they used their prize money to continue their research. In , Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium.
While she received the prize alone, she shared the honor jointly with her late husband in her acceptance lecture. Around this time, Curie joined with other famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, to attend the first Solvay Congress in Physics and discuss the many groundbreaking discoveries in their field.
Curie died on July 4, , of aplastic anemia, believed to be caused by prolonged exposure to radiation. She was known to carry test tubes of radium around in the pocket of her lab coat. Her many years working with radioactive materials took a toll on her health.
Curie made many breakthroughs in her lifetime. Remembered as a leading figure in science and a role model for women, she has received numerous posthumous honors. Marie became the first and one of only five women to be laid to rest there. In , Amazon announced the development of another biopic of Curie, with British actress Rosamund Pike in the starring role.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! A difficult pregnancy had forced Marie to spend less time in the lab just as she was gathering data for a doctoral thesis.
By the time her second daughter, Eve, was born in , Marie had grown accustomed to the disdain of colleagues who thought she spent too much time in the lab and not enough in the nursery. Georges Sagnac, a friend and collaborator, eventually confronted her. But read scientific publications she did. In labs across Europe, scientists were studying new and surprising phenomena.
Henri Becquerel was noting the emission of a different kind of mysterious rays, those from uranium salts. Thomson discovered negatively charged particles, which we now know as electrons and which we now know are the source of X-rays. At first, she and other scientists were baffled about the source of the high-energy emissions. She wondered whether the emitted rays were violating a basic law of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy. Finally, she posited a daring hypothesis: The rays emitted might be a basic property of uranium atoms, which we now know to be subatomic particles released as the atoms decay.
Her theory had radical implications. It further meant that atoms are not necessarily stable. The device allowed her to measure extremely low electrical currents in air near mineral samples that contained uranium. She soon repeated the experiment with thorium, which behaved in similar ways.
But she was puzzled by data that showed that the intensity of the radiation emitted by uranium and thorium was greater than expected based on the amounts of the elements she knew to be in her samples. In she indeed identified one of the substances and named it polonium, after her homeland. Five months later, she identified a second element, which the world came to know as radium. Pierre put his crystals aside to help his wife isolate these radioactive elements and study their properties.
Marie extracted pure radium salts from pitchblende, a highly radioactive ore obtained from mines in Bohemia. The extraction required tons of the substance, which she dissolved in cauldrons of acid before obtaining barium sulphate and other alkalines, which she then purified and converted into chlorides. The separation of radium from the alkalines required thousands of tedious crystallizations.
Working in a dilapidated shed with broken windows and poor ventilation, she nonetheless was able to make sensitive measurements. It is remarkable, says Baisden, that Curie calculated the atomic weight of radium so accurately given such deplorable conditions. Both Curies were plagued by ailments—burns and fatigue—that, in retrospect, were clearly caused by repeated exposures to high doses of radiation. Both, too, were resistant to the suggestion that their research materials caused their ailments.
In , Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics. Professors who reviewed her doctoral thesis, which was about radiation, declared that it was the greatest single contribution to science ever written.
Rumors of a Nobel Prize began to circulate, but some members of the French Academy of Sciences attributed the brilliance of the work not to Marie, but to her co-workers. These skeptics began to lobby quietly for the prize to be split between Becquerel and Pierre. But Pierre insisted to influential people on the Nobel committee that Marie had originated their research, conceived experiments and generated theories about the nature of radioactivity.
Both Curies shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Becquerel in It was the first Nobel to be awarded to a woman. Whether Marie Curie took the remark as an insult is not known—it surely rankles today—but it must be among the most grudging comments ever said to a laureate.
Moreover, the notion that Marie was a mere helpmeet to Pierre—one of the more persistent myths about her—was an opinion widely held, judging from published and unpublished comments by other scientists and observers.
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