Mary Curie

Manya Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1867. When she was nineteen years old she began to work as a governess in the rural town of Szczuki. Five years later she enrolled in the University of Paris. Few years later she received her licence és sciences physiques, the French equivalent of a master’s degree in physics.

In 1894 she went to France’s Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to study the magnetism of steels and she got her degree in mathematics, after that she met Pierre Curie, the man who married her in the following year.

At the age of thirty, Mary Curie began her investigation of “Becquerel rays” as her doctoral thesis and her husband joined her work. Soon they announced the discovery of polonium and radium. Then, she began her four-years effort to prepare a pure sample of radium.

By the time she received her doctorate in physics from the University of Pans, Pierre Curie, Henri Becquerel and Mary shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of radioactivity

After eleven years of marriage, Pierre died when a horse-drawn wagon ran over him in a busy Paris street. After that the University of Paris selected Mary Curie to succeed her husband as professor of physics, and she became the university’s first female professor.

When she was forty four, France’s Academy of Sciences refused to grant Curie membership because she was a woman. Next, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium.

When World War I started, Mary Curie began setting up a network of portable and hospital-based X-ray machines to treat wounded soldiers. Finally, when World War I ended, Curie officially opened the Radium Institute of the University of Paris.

Three years later, she did her first visit to United States to raise money for the Radium Institute.

Eventually, in 1934, Mary Curie died of leukemia caused by radiation poisoning at the age of 67 in France.