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Maria Sklodowska was born Polish. The only trouble was that in 1867 when she made her entrance to the world, there was no Poland.
A Polish Child
Warsaw was ruled by Russia, and they were working hard to squelch Polish nationalism of the kind that Maria’s parents championed. Her father taught physics and math at a government school. Instruction in the Polish language was forbidden. He was eventually fired.
Her mother was headmistress of a private girls’ school, which was not so heavily monitored, but was still subject to surprise visits by Russian inspectors.
Maria was a very talented student, one who could be counted on to recite the litany of the Tsars in perfect Russian while the other students hastily hid the Polish books. Decades later, she wrote in her autobiography that “this was a great trial to me, because of my timidity; I wanted always to run away and hide” (Curie, chapter 1). But interestingly, the earlier drafts suggest that she wasn’t so much timid as she was angry (Quinn, 45).
In 1878, Maria turned 11 years old, and her mother died after a long battle with tuberculosis. Despite her grief, Maria was sent to gymnasium, or high school, where “all instruction was given in Russian, by Russian professors, who, being hostile to the Polish nation, treated their pupils as enemies” (Curie, chapter 1). In four years, she graduated at the top of the class.
So at the age of 15, Maria had exhausted all the educational opportunities that Warsaw had to offer her. The university did not accept women.
The dream was to go to Paris, where the Sorbonne University was the best of the best, and they did accept women.
The problem was money, of course. However, Maria and her older sister Bronia had a plan. They would pool their resources. Maria was younger, so she would stay in Warsaw and get a job, helping to fund Bronia in Paris. Then, when Bronia had graduated, she would return the favor (Dry, 6; Curie, chapter 1).
Maria found being a governess mostly stultifying. Except for when she fell in love with her employer’s son. Then his family found out and they exploded, so he dumped her. That part wasn’t dull; it was painful.
Maria moved back to Warsaw, which did have compensating pleasures. For one thing, she could see her family more. Also, there was a Floating University. This was an illegal organization of academics who taught classes and ran study groups on the sly in various locations and at various times to avoid being caught by the Russian authorities. Maria was an enthusiastic member.
Also she now had access to a lab. It belonged to her cousin, and she could only use it on Sundays and some evenings, but it was thrilling to actually try some of the chemical experiments she had previously only been able to read about.
Higher Education
In 1891, her turn finally arrived. Bronia had graduated with her medical degree, and she urged Maria to come to Paris. Maria was twenty-four years old, and from now on she would be known as Marie (the French version of her name).
Attending school at the Sorbonne was not quite what you might expect. There was no tuition. You did have some fees for qualifying tests and diplomas, but money troubles were mostly about living expenses, not about school itself. There was also no set course of study. Students went to lectures (or not), did research (or not), took exams (or not). Basically, you did as much or as little as you chose, and if you felt like it, you took the qualifying exams, which you either passed or did not. If you passed, you got a diploma (Quinn, 89).
Marie thrived on this independent study method. She started out living with her sister, but commuting was such a waste of time, as was her extroverted brother-in-law’s desire for chitchat all the time. She soon got herself her own garret room in the Left Bank. The room froze in winter, and she had zero help with any kind of housekeeping. She lived on bread, chocolate, eggs, and fruit (Curie, chapter 1). She was very happy.
Marie doesn’t spend any time discussing how male-dominated the Sorbonne was. But it was male dominated. Sure, they accepted women, but that was a pretty recent development. The French word for student was étudiant, which is masculine. The feminine form is étudiante. That’s certainly what I learned in my French classes. What I did not learn there is that at the Sorbonne in the 19th century, étudiante also had another meaning. It meant the mistress of a male student because for a long time no one even considered that she might be—you know—a student herself (Dry, 14; Quinn, 95).
In 1893, Marie took the top score in the examinations for a degree in physical sciences. Only one other woman graduated with that degree that year. Marie also won a scholarship to permit her to stay for a second degree in math.
She was working on that second degree when she met Pierre Curie. He was not very rich, nor was he very romantic, but he was a scientist. (Those were things they had in common.) In 1895 they married, and she became Madame Curie.
She accepted France as her permanent home. She did not accept the normal wife role of house and home. She had finished her degree in math, and now that she was staying in France, she studied for her teaching certificate, gave birth to a daughter named Irene, and continued with her plans for a doctorate.
Discovering Radioactivity
Her chosen topic of study was based on some findings by Henri Becquerel. Becquerel had noted that uranium gave off an invisible phosphorescence. He had published this, but no one had followed up on it. Marie planned to figure out where the energy was coming from.
With the help of a piezoelectric quartz electrometer, a device invented by Pierre Curie, Marie began to test many rocks and minerals. She soon found that pure uranium wasn’t the only substance which had the Becquerel rays. The rays were particularly strong in pitchblende, a waste product of uranium mining. Rays from pitchblende were far stronger than they were in pure uranium.
From this, Marie deduced that there was another unknown element in the pitchblende mix. One that was stronger than uranium (Sobel, 40). At this point, Pierre abandoned his own projects to join hers. Hers was far more interesting.
On July 18, 1898, Marie and Pierre joint-authored a report. They described the new element, which they named polonium, in honor of Marie’s homeland (Sobel, 41).
A few months later, they further dissected their pitchblende and found that polonium was not the only additional element in there. On December 26, 1898, they announced the discovery of radium, which was far, far more radioactive than either polonium or uranium (Sobel, 52; Dry, 37). Radioactive is a word coined by Marie Curie.
Having come this far, Marie decided to isolate the polonium and the radium. It was grueling. She had deduced their existence, but she had no idea how very, very small the amounts would be. She ordered literal tons of pitchblende. Then she would repeatedly boil it, crystallize it, and separate it, and she eventually arrived at 1/10 of a gram of radium (Dry, 45).
This was not the first or the last time that new elements were added to the periodic table. But Marie’s great insight was that radioactivity was a property of the atom itself. That is to say, it was not a product of temperature, a chemical reaction, or any other external factor.
This was a potential upheaval of theoretical physics, which said energy could not be either created or destroyed. Alternatively, it could be an upheaval of chemistry, which said elements were invariable. These two laws could not be simultaneously true in the face of radioactivity. Radium exuded energy. That energy did not appear to be coming from outside the atom. Therefore, it must be coming from within the atom. Either it was creating energy ex nihilo (thereby breaking the laws of physics), or the radium would eventually run out of energy and become something else (thereby breaking the laws of chemistry). Some chemists were still debating whether atoms even existed, but they had all agreed that atoms or no atoms, individual elements didn’t just turn into something else. We gave up on alchemy centuries earlier, for crying out loud!
At the time, it was not totally clear which law was breaking, but I’ll just let you know it’s the second one. Chemistry had to revise its laws; atoms do exist and they are not invariable. The half-life of radium is 1,620 years.
Marie didn’t know that because her instruments were not sensitive enough to detect the changes within the miniscule amount of decay that happened during her initial studies (a few months). Or even the studies of her lifetime, for that matter. To the general public, it appeared that Marie had found an inexhaustible supply of energy. This was very exciting.
Radium also had its own eerie beauty. It glowed in the dark! The Curies also noticed that it burned the skin. This was not considered a bad thing. On the contrary, it was assumed that radium could burn away tumors and other skin abnormalities. It was going to be a beautiful thing for medicine. It looked, in fact, very much like alchemy. Except that it was real.
In 1902, Marie isolated radium’s atomic weight at 225. That was the missing piece to prove to chemists that it really existed and get it listed on the periodic table. In 1903, she defended her dissertation and received her doctorate.
The Nobel Prize
It was also in 1903 that Pierre received a letter from a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Academy was midway through deciding the Nobel Prizes for that year, and they were considering splitting the prize in physics: half to Henri Becquerel for discovering radiation, and the other half to Pierre Curie for further research on it. Not Marie Curie. Just Pierre Curie.
Now it is certainly true that Pierre was heavily involved in all the work on polonium and radium. But it was nonetheless Marie’s project originally. He joined her, not the other way around. She wrote the first paper on it alone. She discovered the radiation in pitchblende alone. At least one member of the nominating committee knew this perfectly well. And still they were planning to nominate Pierre, not Marie (Quinn, 188).
Fortunately, Pierre also knew it perfectly well. He could have kept quiet, but he didn’t. Instead he wrote to the Swedish Academy and said, “If it is true that one is seriously thinking about me, I very much wish to be considered together with Madame Curie with respect to our research on radioactive bodies” (Dry, 64-65; Quinn, 189).
Good man. I like him!
In the end the prize was split one-half to Henri Becquerel, one-fourth to Pierre Curie, and one-fourth to Marie Curie.
Marie Curie was the first woman to win any Nobel Prize, and it launched her to international fame, but the only reason she got it was because she had a husband who stood up for her. Spouses of the world, take note, please. I have previously covered two other Nobel Prize winners on this show: Selma Lagerlof (episode 6.8) and Bertha von Suttner (episode 14.10). Both were worthy winners, but it is interesting to wonder whether they would have received it had Pierre Curie not opened the door by insisting that his wife be included.
From Triumph to Grief
Unfortunately, the Nobel was not an unmixed blessing. The praise and the money were all very well, but both of the Curies wrote about how annoying they found the publicity. They wanted to do research. They didn’t want to give speeches and attend banquets and all that other nonsense. Even years later, Marie wrote “The overturn of our voluntary isolation was a cause of real suffering for us and had all the effect of disaster … Of course, people who contribute to that kind of trouble generally mean it kindly. It is only that they do not realize the conditions of the problem” (Curie, chapter 2).
What Marie says less about was that there were other causes of suffering in their lives too. Neither she nor Pierre were in good health. Particularly Pierre.
They did blame their work, but only in the sense that they were obsessive workaholics who needed to relax and take a break sometimes. The idea that the radioactivity itself might be to blame had not yet been taken seriously. The Curies had only the most rudimentary safety precautions in place.
Radium was on the open market by 1904, with ads promising everything from curing cancer to cleaning your hair to returning your skin to its youthful vitality (Dry, 57). A substance so scarce might not seem like a good candidate for commercial possibilities, but you didn’t need much to have a big effect, and the commerce was helped along by the fact that the Curies chose not to patent anything. They were pure scientists, interested in science for its own sake. Not for getting rich.
In late 1904, the Curies had two pieces of good news. Marie gave birth to a second daughter, and the Sorbonne created a professorship for Pierre. Marie was hired as his assistant. The modern woman might be annoyed by that, but Marie had never, ever been paid to do her research before. So this was financially a step up and that was good, I guess?
It later proved to be more than just good. It was essential. Because in 1906, Pierre was struck by a horse-drawn carriage as he crossed the street. He died immediately.
Marie wrote her grief in her journal: how she kissed his cold face for the last time, how she buried him with his favorite picture of her, how she would never give another the place he had occupied in her life, and finally, “Everything is over, Pierre is sleeping his last sleep beneath the earth; it is the end of everything, everything, everything” (Dry, 72).
A Scientist on Her Own
Like so many widows before her, Marie found that her grief was overwhelmed by financial worry. No one paid women the amount Pierre had earned, and even he hadn’t been rich. But Marie was much, much more fortunate than most of her fellow widows. Thanks to Pierre and his letter, she was a well-known award-winning scientist herself, even if her official title was “Assistant” to someone who was now dead.
I am pleased to say that the Sorbonne noticed Marie’s situation. And more surprisingly, they did something about it. The professorship they had created for Pierre was now empty, so they gave it to Marie. She was the first female professor in France, and her salary quadrupled. Public approval of her was higher than ever.
For the next several years, her professional attention turned to the practical problems presented by radium. How would radioactivity be measured? The chosen unit was a Curie. One Curie equals the amount emitted by one gram of radium. The Curie lab was very busy, and a favored destination for many young scientists on the make, including many women.
In 1911, Marie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for isolating radium as a pure salt and determining its atomic weight. At the time, Marie was the only person who had ever received two Nobels, and for even longer she was the only person who has received Nobels in two separate disciplines. (Now she is one of two people in that last category.)
But she came very, very close to not getting that second Nobel. In the very same week that the award was announced, news of a far, far more personal and painful nature also broke.
For several years, she had been working with a fellow scientist by the name of Paul Langevin. Only it turned out that their relationship hadn’t stayed professional. And he was married. With children.
The press, which had treated Marie like a secular saint, was suddenly far more interested in this fall from grace than they were in a second Nobel. That was old news.
Private letters were published, and duels were fought over it (I’m not kidding). Marie was accused of being a wicked foreigner who wrecked the home of a good, honest French woman. Marie was particularly upset when the press portrayed her as having disappeared into Belgium for a secret tryst with Langevin. Yes, they had both gone to Belgium at the same time. It was a work trip! All the great scientists of the day had gone to that conference, including Albert Einstein.
Einstein liked Curie. He wrote to her that he had much appreciated meeting both her and Langevin. He advised that “If the rabble continues to be occupied with you, simply stop reading that drivel. Leave it to the vipers it was fabricated for.”
He was less kind when he wrote to another friend, saying that he didn’t believe the gossip anyway because Madame Curie was “not attractive enough to become dangerous for anyone” (Quinn, 310). At any rate, Einstein was about to begin his own affair and wreck his own marriage (see episode 14.16 on his first wife), so perhaps his attitude was more self-serving than surprising.
The Swedish Academy was less two-faced, but no kinder. The prize had already been offered, but one member told Marie she ought to turn it down. Her response was tart: “The prize has been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” She telegrammed the Academy to let them know she would be there for the award ceremony (Dry, 91).
Paul Langevin separated from his wife. But his later relationship with Marie was purely platonic. In fact, within a few years he was back together with his wife. And he took a mistress. Just not a famous one, so that was apparently okay with the press. No wonder Marie was annoyed (Quinn, 331).
As for Marie, she went back to work. Her Radium Institute was completed in July 1914. One month later, France entered World War I. All the scientists who should have been in the Institute were suddenly very busy elsewhere. Or dead.
Marie During the War and After
Marie was busy too. She spent the war years working on a different kind of radiation. X-rays were important for treating wounded men. Within ten days of troop mobilization, she got herself appointed as the Director of the Red Cross Radiology Service.
In her new role role, she quickly realized that it wasn’t enough to outfit hospitals with the X-ray machines. The men who needed emergency surgery were out on the front line, far away from any hospital. So Marie convinced wealthy Parisians to donate their cars. She retrofitted them with X-ray equipment, using the car itself to produce the necessary electricity. She also learned to drive so that she could participate directly (Curie, chapter 3).
Marie’s war work seemed to rehabilitate her with the public. She was back to being a scientific saint. One of the women who thought so was an American named Missy Meloney. Missy visited Marie, and when Marie told her she couldn’t afford any more radium for her institute, Missy decided to raise the money for her. Missy organized a full-on promotional tour of the United States, including a book deal. At the end of Marie’s grand tour across the US, President Harding presented her with the gift of one gram of radium, plus $50,000 of research money, all raised by Missy’s efforts among wealthy and powerful Americans (Dry, 106-110; Curie, chapter 3).
Her later years involved many trips to many places, both for scientific conferences and also with the League of Nations. She built a second Radium Institute in Poland. That one was supplied with radium collected by another publicity tour of the United States, and she got that one done just in time. She left on October 26, 1929. The stock market crashed three days later.
Despite all this activity, Marie’s health was failing rapidly. When we look at it with modern knowledge of radiation’s effects, it’s actually astonishing that she coped as well as she did. She was remarkably tough. But it eventually took its toll. She had severe cataracts, humming in her ears, fainting spells, and kidney disease. When she died on July 4, 1934, the official cause of death was aplastic pernicious anemia, which means that her bone marrow could no longer produce blood cells. It was almost certainly a result of radiation poisoning.
Radium turned out to be far more dangerous than Marie ever imagined, but there is no doubt that her discoveries did have major positive health impacts as well. Radiation therapy for cancer is far more effective than any treatment we had before Marie. She also had a huge influence on women in the sciences. It was (and in some branches still is) a man’s world, but Marie proved it didn’t have to be that way.
Today I have a special thank you to someone who asked to remain unnamed, but signed up as a Patreon supporter at the Her Highness level. Supporters like this wonderful anonymous person help keep this show running for everyone, and as my thank you, supporters can get ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and bonus content in the new newsletter, depending on the level of support. For example, just this past week I dropped a supporters-only episode on Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the English Channel (get it on Patreon or on Substack).
Selected Sources
Curie, Marie. “Pierre Curie (and Autobiographical Notes).” http://www.gutenberg.org, 1923. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/69617/69617-h/69617-h.htm.
Doctor Y. “Marie Curie’s Notebooks.” American Council on Science and Health, 2022. https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/01/03/marie-curie%25E2%2580%2599s-notebooks-16033.
Dry, Sarah. Curie. London: Haus Pub, 2003.
Quinn, Susan. Marie Curie : A Life. Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Sobel, Dava. The Elements of Marie Curie. Grove Press, 2024.