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how did marie curie discover radium

how did marie curie discover radium

how did marie curie discover radium

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Marie Curie

Marie Salomea Skłodowska Curie (/ˈkjʊəri/ KURE-ee; French: [kyʁi]Polish: [kʲiˈri], born Maria Salomea Skłodowska Polish: [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska]; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.

Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner on her first Nobel Prize, making them the first ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.

Marie was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw’s clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her elder sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work.

She married the French physicist Pierre Curie in 1895 , and she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with him and with the physicist Henri Becquerel for their pioneering work developing the theory of “radioactivity”—a term she coined. In 1906 Pierre Curie died in a Paris street accident. Marie won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium, using techniques she invented for isolating radioactive isotopes.

how did marie curie discover radium
how did marie curie discover radium

1932

Under her direction, the world’s first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. In 1920 she founded the Curie Institute in Paris, and in 1932 the Curie Institute in Warsaw; both remain major centres of medical research. During World War I she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.

While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie, who used both surnames, never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland She named the first chemical element she discovered polonium, after her native country.

Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy (Haute-Savoie), France, of aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I. In addition to her Nobel Prizes, she has received numerous other honours and tributes; in 1995 she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in Paris’ Panthéon, and Poland declared 2011 the Year of Marie Curie during the International Year of Chemistry. She is the subject of numerous biographical works, where she is also known as Madame Curie.

The Curies Discover Radium

Women physicists were a rarity in the 19th century, but even rarer were husband-and-wife collaborative teams. Pierre and Marie Curie made history not only in that respect, but also because their scientific teamwork led to the discovery of radioactivity and two new elements in the periodic table, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

A native of Poland, Marie Curie was born Maria Sklodowska. Her father was a schoolteacher who had lost his prestigious position because of his pro-Polish sentiments at a time when Poland was divided up among Austria, Prussia and czarist Russia.

The family was poor, but her father exposed Marie and all her siblings to the classics of literature, as well as science.

Marie could not enroll at the University of Warsaw; women were not admitted. Instead, she, her sister Bronya, and several other friends attended a “floating university“: an illegal night school whose classes met in changing locations to evade the czarist authorities. She worked as a governess for several years, helping pay for Bronya’s tuition at medical school in Paris.

1891

Finally, it was her turn. Marie set out for Paris, in the fall of 1891 to pursue studies at the University of Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne. Although her math and science background was woefully inadequate, Marie worked hard to catch up with her peers, and eventually finished first in her master’s degree physics course, also earning a second in mathematics the following year.

In the spring of 1894, Marie’s search for laboratory space led to a fateful introduction to Pierre Curie, a scientist some 10 years her senior who had done pioneering work on magnetism.

The son of a respected physician, Pierre had the benefit of private tutoring as a child, soon demonstrating a passion and gift for mathematics. He earned a master’s degree by age 18, and three years later discovered the piezoelectric effect with his older brother, Jacques.

They found that when pressure is applied to certain crystals, they generate electrical voltage, and when placed in an electric field, those same crystals became compressed. They used this effect to build a piezoelectric quartz electrometer to measure faint electric currents, which Marie would use in her research.

Pierre later discovered a fundamental relationship between magnetic properties and temperature. Today, the temperature at which permanent magnetism disappears is known as the “Curie point.”

1895

It was Marie who encouraged Pierre to write up this latter work as a doctoral thesis. He received his PhD in March 1895, along with a promotion to a professorship at the Municipal School, and the couple married three months later.

For her own doctorate, Marie chose to focus on the mysterious uranium rays discovered in early 1896 by Henri Becquerel, a few months after Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays.

Marie conducted numerous experiments confirming Becquerel’s observations that the electrical effects of uranium rays are constant, regardless of whether solid or pulverized, pure or in a compound, wet or dry, or whether exposed to light or heat. She also validated his conclusion that those minerals with a higher proportion of uranium emitted the most intense rays.

how did marie curie discover radium
how did marie curie discover radium

And she took those findings one step further, forming the hypothesis that the emission of rays by uranium compounds was an atomic property of the element uranium—something built into the very structure of its atoms. She coined the term “radioactivity” to describe this unique effect, which she also found in thorium compounds.

Intrigued by his wife’s findings, Pierre joined forces with her. She had found that two uranium ores, pitchblende and chalcolite, were much more radioactive than pure uranium, and concluded their highly radioactive nature was due to as yet undiscovered elements. As a team, the Curies worked to separate the substances in these ores and then used the electrometer to make radiation measurements to “trace” the minute amount of unknown radioactive element among the fractions that resulted.

the discovery of polonium and radium

Marie Sklodowska, as she called before marriage, was born in Warsaw in 1867. Both her parents were teachers who believed deeply in the importance of education. Marie had her first lessons in physics and chemistry from her father. She had a brilliant aptitude for study and a great thirst for knowledge; however, advanced study was not possible for women in Poland. 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.

So it was not until she was 24 that Marie came to Paris to study mathematics and physics. Bronya now married to a doctor of Polish origin, and it was at Bronya’s urgent invitation to come and live with them that Marie took the step of leaving for Paris. By then she had been away from her studies for six years, nor had she had any training in understanding rapidly spoken French. But her keen interest in studying and her joy at being at the Sorbonne with all its opportunities helped her surmount all difficulties. To save herself a two-hours journey, she rented a little attic in the Quartier Latin.

how did marie curie discover radium
how did marie curie discover radium

1893

There the cold was so intense that at night she had to pile on everything she had in the way of clothing so as to be able to sleep. But as compensation for all her privations she had total freedom to be able to devote herself wholly to her studies. “It like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I at last permitted to know in all liberty,” she writes.

And it was France’s leading mathematicians and physicists whom she was able to go to hear, people with names we now encounter in the history of science: Marcel Brillouin, Paul Painlevé, Gabriel Lippmann, and Paul Appell. After two years, when she took her degree in physics in 1893, she headed the list of candidates and, in the following year, she came second in a degree in mathematics. After three years she had brilliantly passed examinations in physics and mathematics. Her goal was to take a teacher’s diploma and then to return to Poland.

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