Marie Curie

Chapter 1 · The Flying University

Studying illegally in occupied Poland

1867 – 1891 · Warsaw · Szczuki

Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867, in a Poland that did not exist as a state — the city was under Russian rule, and Polish history and language were being suppressed in schools. Her father taught physics and mathematics, her mother ran a girls' boarding school. When the Russian authorities removed laboratory instruction from schools, her father brought the apparatus home, and Maria grew up handling it.

The household was struck hard: her eldest sister Zofia died of typhus in 1876, and her mother of tuberculosis in 1878, when Maria was ten. She won the gold medal at her high school at fifteen and then had nowhere to go, because the University of Warsaw did not admit women.

She attended the Flying University instead — an illegal, itinerant institution that held classes in private rooms, changing location to avoid the police, and which taught women.

With her sister Bronisława she made a pact: Maria would work to fund Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, and Bronisława would then support her. Maria spent several years as a governess in the countryside, in one household falling in love with the son of the family, whose parents forbade the marriage because she was a poor employee. She also secretly taught peasant children to read Polish, which was illegal.

In 1891, aged twenty-four, she arrived at the Sorbonne. She lived in an unheated attic, sometimes fainting from hunger, and finished first in her physics degree in 1893 and second in mathematics the following year.

Why this matters

Curie's education was obtained illegally, at a distance and years late — a reminder of how completely women and colonised populations were excluded from formal science in the nineteenth century.

You have met the student who had to study in secret. What would you ask her?

Ask Marie Curie

• “What was the Flying University?”
• “Why could you not attend university in Warsaw?”
• “What was the pact you made with your sister?”
• “How did you live during your first years in Paris?”
• “Why did you teach peasant children illegally?”

Chapter 2 · The Shed

Two new elements, extracted from tonnes of rock

1894 – 1902 · Paris

In 1894 she met Pierre Curie, already known for work on crystals and magnetism. They married in 1895; she wore a dark blue dress she could also use in the laboratory.

For her doctoral research she chose Henri Becquerel's recent discovery that uranium salts emitted rays without any external energy source. Using an electrometer Pierre and his brother had built, she measured the effect precisely and established the crucial fact: the intensity depended only on the quantity of uranium present, not on its chemical form. The rays therefore came from inside the atom itself — a radical conclusion when atoms were still thought indivisible. She coined the term radioactivity.

She then found that pitchblende, a uranium ore, was far more active than its uranium content could explain, and concluded it must contain unknown elements. In 1898 the Curies announced two: polonium, named for her occupied homeland, and radium.

Proving it meant isolating them. They worked in a converted shed with a leaking roof, described by the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald as a cross between a stable and a potato cellar. Marie processed tonnes of pitchblende residue by hand, stirring boiling vats with an iron rod nearly her own height, in a space with no ventilation. After four years she obtained a tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

She described going back at night to see the tubes glowing faintly in the dark, which she called fairy lights. Nobody yet understood what the radiation was doing to them.

Why this matters

Curie's demonstration that radioactivity is a property of the atom itself, not of a chemical compound, opened the way to nuclear physics and to the understanding that atoms have internal structure.

You have the discovery. What would you ask her?

Ask Marie Curie

• “How did you know the rays came from inside the atom?”
• “Why did pitchblende point to unknown elements?”
• “What were the working conditions in the shed?”
• “Why did you name an element after Poland?”
• “What did you and Pierre think the glow was?”

Chapter 3 · Two Prizes and a Death in the Street

Recognition that had to be argued for

1903 – 1911 · Paris · Stockholm

In 1903 the Nobel Committee proposed a physics prize for Becquerel and Pierre Curie for radioactivity. Marie was not on the list. Pierre wrote to insist that she be included, and the prize was shared three ways. She became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.

On 19 April 1906 Pierre slipped crossing a wet Paris street and was killed by a horse-drawn wagon. Marie, thirty-eight, with two young daughters, wrote a private journal addressed to him for the next year. The Sorbonne offered her his chair, and she became its first woman professor. At her first lecture she began at the sentence where Pierre had stopped.

In 1911 two things happened. She was refused election to the French Academy of Sciences by two votes, in a campaign in which she was attacked as a foreigner and as a woman; press coverage falsely called her Jewish as an additional slur.

And the newspapers discovered her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre's who was separated from his wife. Stolen letters were published; crowds gathered outside her house; she was denounced as a foreign homewrecker. The Nobel Committee, which had just awarded her a second prize — Chemistry, alone, for the discovery of polonium and radium and the isolation of radium — suggested she might prefer not to attend the ceremony.

She went, and stated in her lecture that a prize for scientific work should not be affected by rumours about a private life. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”

— Attributed to Marie Curie; widely quoted in this form, closest to a passage in Eve Curie's 1937 biography

Why this matters

The Langevin affair shows how differently a woman scientist's private life was treated: Langevin's career was untouched, while Curie was told she should not collect a prize she had already won.

You have the recognition and the hostility together. What would you ask her?

Ask Marie Curie

• “How close did you come to being left off the 1903 prize?”
• “How did you carry on working after Pierre's death?”
• “Why did the press attack you over Paul Langevin?”
• “Why did you go to Stockholm when told not to?”
• “What did being rejected by the Academy of Sciences mean?”

Chapter 4 · The Little Curies

X-ray units driven to the front line

1914 – 1918 · Paris · The Western Front

When war broke out in 1914, Curie's response was practical. Surgeons at the front were operating on wounds without knowing where bullets or shrapnel fragments lay, and X-ray equipment existed only in city hospitals far behind the lines.

She designed mobile radiography units — ordinary vehicles fitted with an X-ray machine, a darkroom and a dynamo driven by the car engine to generate current where there was no electricity. She raised the money, persuaded wealthy women to donate cars, and had around twenty built. They were nicknamed *petites Curies*. Alongside them she equipped roughly two hundred fixed radiological posts in field hospitals.

She learned to drive, learned basic vehicle repair, and drove to the front herself with her daughter Irène, then seventeen, who operated equipment and later trained others. Marie also organised training courses that qualified around 150 women as radiographers.

An estimated million or more wounded men were examined using the units and posts she established. She additionally collected radon from her radium supply into sealed needles for use in treating damaged tissue.

She received no payment and tried to donate her Nobel gold medals to the war effort; the Bank of France refused to melt them.

Neither she nor the operators had protection worth the name, and the exposures were heavy. She had already refused, with Pierre, to patent the radium isolation process, on the principle that scientific findings belong to everyone — a decision that cost her a fortune and left her permanently short of funding for her institute.

Why this matters

Curie's mobile X-ray units are one of the clearest examples of fundamental research being turned into practical medicine at speed, and they established radiography as a battlefield tool.

You have the war work. What would you ask her?

Ask Marie Curie

• “How did you power an X-ray machine in a field with no electricity?”
• “Why did you refuse to patent the radium process?”
• “What did your daughter Irène do at the front?”
• “How did you persuade people to give you cars?”
• “Did you know what the radiation was doing to you?”

Chapter 5 · What Radium Cost

Illness, an institute, and a family of laureates

1920 – 1934 and after · Paris · Passy

After the war Curie built the Radium Institute in Paris into a major research centre, deliberately training women and international students at a time when few laboratories would take either. She toured the United States twice, where public subscriptions raised enough money to buy her a gram of radium each time, and travelled reluctantly, disliking celebrity.

Radium had meanwhile become a commercial craze: it was sold in toothpaste, tonics and cosmetics. The catastrophe of the radium dial painters in the United States, young women who were told to point their brushes with their lips and who died of jaw necrosis and cancers, made the dangers unmistakable in the 1920s.

Curie's own health had been failing for years — cataracts requiring several operations, chronic fatigue, fingertips cracked and scarred from handling sources. She resisted the conclusion that radium was responsible.

She died on 4 July 1934 of aplastic anaemia, a failure of the bone marrow, almost certainly caused by prolonged radiation exposure. Her laboratory notebooks remain radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes; researchers who consult them sign a waiver.

In 1935 her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law Frédéric shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering artificial radioactivity. In 1995 Marie and Pierre's remains were moved to the Panthéon, and she became the first woman placed there on her own merits.

Her discoveries led directly to radiotherapy, to nuclear physics, and — through a chain she did not live to see — to nuclear weapons.

Why this matters

Curie's death from her own discovery is the founding case in radiation safety: the protective standards used in every hospital and reactor today exist because of what happened to her generation of researchers.

You have the whole life and its cost. What would you ask her?

Ask Marie Curie

• “Why did you resist believing radium was making you ill?”
• “What did you want the Radium Institute to be?”
• “What happened to the radium dial painters?”
• “How did you feel about becoming a celebrity?”
• “Would you still refuse to patent, knowing what it cost you?”

What Marie Curie changed

Curie established radioactivity as an atomic property, discovered polonium and radium, and opened the field that became nuclear physics. Her radiotherapy work founded a branch of cancer treatment still in use, and her wartime mobile X-ray units brought radiography into emergency medicine. She remains the only person to hold Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

A debate that continues

Historians examine how much Curie's exclusion from honours reflected sexism and xenophobia rather than scientific judgement, and discuss how far the risks of radiation could reasonably have been recognised earlier than they were.

Keep exploring — ask Marie Curie

• “How did you keep measuring accurately in such rough conditions?”
• “What did you want your daughters to learn from your work?”
• “What would you tell a student facing the barriers you faced?”

Related lives

• Rosalind Franklin — The Dark Lady of DNA
• Niels Bohr — Architect of the Quantum Atom
• Louis Pasteur — Father of Germ Theory
• Dmitri Mendeleev — Author of the Periodic Table

Related themes

Radioactivity and the atom · Women in science · Medical physics