• Manya Sklodowska •

Marie Curie, 1898

Manya Sklodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. She was the youngest of the five children, of a marriage dedicated to the teaching: his father was professor of secondary of physics and mathematics and its mother director of a school of young ladies.

In March 1890 her sister Bronia, then a medical student in Paris, urged her to join her; The work of Manya had contributed to finance the race of Bronia and between the two existed a pact of reciprocity.

In the autumn of 1891, he settled in Paris, at first trying to keep his knowledge up to date; In 1893 he obtained the degree in physical sciences and in 1894, helped by a scholarship, he graduated in mathematics.

▲ CURIE MARRIAGE ▲                                                                      

Wedding photo by Pierre and Marie Curie

In April of 1894 Marie, as it was called, met Perrie Curie Pierre had studied physics at the Sorbonne. In 1882 Pierre was appointed laboratory chief of the Municipal School of Physics and Chemistry, institution where he continued working when he met Marie and where he had devoted himself to the theoretical study of symmetry.

In 1891 he began to write a doctoral thesis on the magnetic properties of various substances as a function of temperature, a thesis he presented in March, 1895. Marie attended the reading of the thesis and was impressed; His relationship with Pierre Curie had lasted for twelve months, during which he had been more willing than she to marriage. They finally married on July 26 of that year; In 1897 his daughter Irene was born, to which seven years later another girl, Eva.

Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 and the observation made in 1896 by Henri Becquerel that uranium salts, even protected from light, emitted rays that, like X-rays, penetrated matter, they decided to investigate In his thesis the origin of that energy that the uranium compound used in darken the photographic emulsions through even metallic protections.

➼RADIOACTIVITY➼

The director of Pierre Curie accepted that Marie qualified as laboratory a dependency of the Municipal School of Physics and Chemistry that served as warehouse and engine room. Marie Curie began her research using the electrometer invented by Pierre and her brother to measure the current intensity caused by the various compounds of uranium and thorium, immediately proving that the activity of the uranium salts depended only on the amount of Uranium present, regardless of any other circumstance. 

Marie and Pierre in her laboratory

This was his most important discovery, since it showed that radiation could only proceed from the atom itself, independently of any added substance or chemical reaction. But Marie Curie did not hesitate to meditate on this result; Extended his investigations to the pecblenda and the calcolita finding that they were more active than the uranium. From this he deduced the existence in these minerals of another new substance, responsible for that greater activity.

Marie Curie proceeded to chemically treat pecmenda to produce a product that was 300 times more active than uranium: in July 1898 the marriage communicated its results to the Academy of Sciences proposing the name of "polonium" for the new element, Whose existence they hoped would be confirmed, and for the first time using the term "radioactive" to describe the behavior of substances such as uranium. But the subsequent investigations made them think of the existence of yet another new element in the pecblenda; After obtaining the purchase of several tonnes of mineral waste from the mines of Saint Joachimsthal dedicated to the exploitation of uranium, the existence of the element they called 'radio', announced in December of the same year, Was confirmed; Its atomic weight was established by Marie Curie in March 1902 as equal to 225.93.