Marie Curie’s original name was Marie Sklodowska. Born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, died in Haute-Savoie, France on July 4, 1934. Polish-French chemist.
Mary Sklodowska's father was a physics teacher and her mother was the principal of a girls' school. She was influenced by her father since childhood and believed in and loved science. However, in 1885, in order to supplement her family's livelihood, she had to become a tutor. While Poland's language and culture were under Russian rule, she seems to have been passionately pursuing national revolutionary politics, although her main interest at this time seems to have been science. In 1880s Poland, no girl could receive any form of higher education, so she followed her sister to Paris in 1891. She lived a simple life and studied hard. In 1893, she graduated with first place in the Physics Department of the Sorbonne. She received a scholarship from Poland that allowed her to study mathematics for another year and graduate in second place.
In 1894 she met Pierre Curie and they married the next year. He is a relatively well-known physicist who has made several important discoveries and serves as the director of the laboratory of the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. Mary was currently looking for a research topic for an advanced degree. Her husband was completely sympathetic to her desire to continue her research, which was very different from the attitude held by the general population in France at the end of the 19th century. She was also blessed with timing and choice of topic: studying radioactivity. In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered the radioactivity of uranium. Marie Curie had reason to believe that there might be new elements in the pitchblende samples Becquerel had processed, but first she needed a place. jobs and uranium supplies. She got permission to work in her husband's laboratory. Her first task was to see if there were any other substances besides uranium that were radioactive. Her method was to place a substance on one of the plates of a sensitive electrometer designed by Pierre and see if an electric current was generated between the two plates. Soon she discovered that thorium was also radioactive.
Her next discovery was the most important in every sense of the word. She was trying to understand whether different compounds of uranium or thorium had different amounts of radioactivity. She concluded that no matter what uranium was combined with, whether it was wet or dry, powder or solution, there was no difference in radiation dose. The only factor to be considered was the uranium content. This means that the radioactive agent must be a property of uranium itself, rather than the result of the interaction between uranium and other substances. Radioactivity was supposed to be an atomic property and was soon recognized as a nuclear effect.
In 1898, Marie Curie made further progress when she discovered that two types of uranium minerals, bitumen ore and uranium mica, were more radioactive than uranium itself. From this, she correctly concluded that the two uranium ores must contain new radioactive elements. She immediately began her search, and by the end of the year she had demonstrated the existence of two new elements, calcium and polonium, both of which were highly radioactive. Since the harmful effects of these two elements were not recognized at that time. No precautions were taken against various levels of radiation (in fact, no one dares to touch Marie Curie’s notebooks from that period, it was too dangerous).
Her next goal is to prepare a certain amount of pure radium. The difficulty is that the content of radium in asphalt ore is very small, so a large amount of asphalt ore is needed. Thanks to the mediation of the Austrian government, the Curies managed to buy several tons of bitumen at a low price from the Bohemian mines. Her laboratory was too small to accumulate such a large amount of material, and she finally managed to obtain another shabby dissecting room on campus. The hut, which suffered from severe cold in winter and scorching heat in summer, was, as Wilhelm Ostwald later described it, a cross between a cowshed and a potato cellar. The work is arduous and monotonous. Due to equipment limitations, each batch can only process 20 kilograms. Each time it must be carefully dissolved, filtered, and crystallized. This procedure continued from month to month, with rain, snow, and sunshine in winter, spring, summer, and autumn, and continued until the beginning of 1902, when she finally prepared 0.1 grams of radium chloride. She took it to Eugene Demarsay, who had previously used spectroscopy to identify new elements. In this way, Demarsay was able to fully determine the atomic weight of radium, which was calculated to be 225.93.
An important question raised after the discovery of these new elements is, what is the nature of the radiation emitted in this way? Some people believe that there are at least two different rays, one that can be deflected by a magnetic field, and another that is not affected by the magnetic field and disappears after traveling a few centimeters (this is the alpha ray identified by Ernest Rutherford and beta rays). Another issue is the nature of the energy source, since Pierre Curie noted that 1 gram of radium emits approximately 100 calories per hour. Another mystery at that time was the discovery of induced radioactivity. They found that the metal plate was only close to the radium sample and did not touch it, but the metal plate became radioactive and remained radioactive for a period of time.
The mystery of radioactivity was not explained clearly by the Curies but by Rutherford and his students. Although Marie Curie was not a great theoretician, she was a great experimenter. She was perseverant and dedicated, and she followed important but boring experimental procedures for many years. She presented her doctoral thesis in 1903 and became the first woman in France to receive an advanced scientific research degree. In the same year, she and her husband won the Nobel Prize in Physics with Becquerel for studying radioactivity.
In 1904, Pierre Curie got a lecture at the Sorbonne, and Marie also got a part-time physics teacher position at a women's normal school in Sèvres. Her second daughter, Eve, was born that same year, and it was around this time that she first felt radiation sickness. The situation here makes it easy for us to understand that after completing her doctoral thesis, Marie Curie had no time to engage in research for many years. In 1906, Pierre unfortunately died in a car accident. Sorbonne recommended her to succeed her husband in giving lectures. From then on, she mainly organized research and raised funds. She made two long-distance trips to the United States in 1921 and 1929. During her first trip, someone asked her what she would like to get, and her answer was 1 gram of radium. Later, she returned to France from the United States with 1 gram of radium, worth $100,000. She also received a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Institution. In 1912, the Sorbonne began to build the Curie Laboratory to specialize in the study of radioactivity. Its completion in 1914 coincided with the First World War. Marie Curie's time was mainly used to train radiology students. The actual work of the laboratory did not begin until after the war. Later, her laboratory containing 1 gram of radium became one of the world's major research centers.
Her position in France is a bit strange. She is a foreigner and a woman. France has never known how to treat her. She is known to everyone as an outstanding scientist for her discovery of radium and polonium, and in 1911 she won her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry. Her prominence was recognized, as demonstrated by the founding of the Curie Laboratory. But almost at the same time she felt ostracized by the French Academy of Sciences. She agreed to put her name forward as the first major female academician candidate in 1910, but was unsuccessful. This undoubtedly hurt her feelings. She refused to put her name forward as a candidate again, and refused to do so for 10 years. Permission to publish her work in publications of the French Academy of Sciences. ...
Madame Curie finally received an honor. In 1910, the unit of measurement for the activity of radioactive substances was named Curie after her. She specifically insisted on defining this unit herself. Her major published work was the two-volume Treatise on Radioactivity (1910). The Curies' daughter Irene and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie continued their pioneering work on radioactivity, and they themselves won the Nobel Prize in Physics.