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What is Marie Curie famous for?

• Well, she was the first famous woman scientist in the world. She is called the ‘Mother of Modern Physics’ for that reason.
• She coined the word ‘radioactivity’ after discovering the element radium (and also the lesser-known polonium).
• She won 2 Nobel prizes, something not even a man had done before her.
• And she became the first woman professor at the world-famous Sorbonne university in Paris.

“Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted” 
- Albert Einstein 

Even though Marie Curie is associated with France, her adopted country, she was actually born and brought up in Warsaw in Poland. She came from a highly educated and academic family although it was not a wealthy family. They had to take in lodgers to make ends meet. Her mother was headmistress of a school and her father was a physics teacher. Due to Russian rule over Poland, Poles were not well-paid nor were they able to advance their careers.

Like Galileo and Pasteur, some of the other scientists featured in this entertaining and educational DVD for children, Marie showed herself to be a clever, hard-working, school-loving girl from an early age and frequently came top in her exams.

Tragically, her mother died when she was still a small girl and Mr Curie was left to bring up the 5 children single-handedly. It was a hard life for Marie and there was little time for childlike pleasures. That’s why she herself recalled her visit to the Polish countryside at the age of 16 as a shining highlight of her young life. The carefree games, the flowers, the open fields must have seems a wonderful change from the grey, cold, dank city she had known for so long.

When she returned to Warsaw she was unable to continue her studies because women were not allowed to enrol at Warsaw University. She knew that women were accepted at the Sorbonne in Paris at that time. She agreed with her sister, Bronia, that she would work as a governess in Poland to earn money which would be used to pay for Bronia’s university fees. Then Bronia would pay for her to study after that.

So Marie spent 5 long years in what must have been a rather dreary job for such a brilliant mind, teaching unruly and spoilt children in the Polish countryside. Finally the day came when she boarded the train for Paris and a new phase in her life began.

In Paris she threw herself into her work, not caring about the dreadful living conditions she endured. She had no money for food either and survived on bread and tea. She was invited to share a laboratory – essential for her work – with a young scientist, named Pierre Curie. It wasn’t long before they married and Marie found time, in between all her experiments and work, to give birth to two daughters.

For their special research at the Sorbonne Marie and Pierre decided to look into mystery rays that emanated from certain rocks. At that time x-rays had just been discovered by Röntgen and Henri Bequerel, the French scientist, was already making headway with research into rays. After 4 years of hard work, tenacity and persistence in 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie succeeded in isolating the elements radium and polonium.

The science world was delighted and the wider world too. Marie Curie and her husband were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903. Marie herself was enthralled by these glowing stones and kept a pot of radium by her bed at all times. This is almost certainly why both she and Pierre repeatedly fell ill with unexplained symptoms. They both had burns on their skin from handling the radium.

Tragedy struck three years later when Pierre Curie was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. A month after his death, still dreadfully shocked, Marie accepted a post at the Sorbonne and shortly afterwards became a full professor, the first women to do so.

She spent the following years continuing her research and supervising the research of others. At the outbreak of World War I, Marie was keen to help the French war effort. She fitted ambulances with portable x-ray equipment and drove to the front lines with her daughters.

In 1920, she and her daughter Irène established the Curie Foundation to find medical applications for radium. Both she and her daughter went on to contract leukemia, probably from prolonged exposure to radioactivity. Marie Curie’s own notebooks are still so radioactive they cannot be handled! She died in 1934.

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