Madam Marie Curie - Lady Scientist who Discovered Radium

Marie Curie was born at Warsaw the capital of Poland. Her maiden name was Marie-Sklodowska, but after getting married to Pierre Curie, she became famous as Madam Curie.

Marie curie started her career as the co-helper to Prof. Becquerel, the discoverer of radioactivity. Becquerel had left some pieces of uranium in the drawer of his table a few years earlier. One day, Marie took out these pieces and used them to weigh photo plates. When these photo-plates were developed she saw a strange jumble of lines on those. Marie became suspicious that some rays had emanated from the uranium which affected the photo plates.

In order to solve the mystery behind this incident, Marie resigned from the assistantship of Prof. Becquerel. One night, Marie and her husband studied the map of Europe, and discovered that in the small Bohemia a country of uranium pitchblende was found in plenty. The Curie couple requested the government of Bohemia to donate them ten thousand kilograms of pitchblende free of cost. The government accepted their request and the Curies obtained pitchblende for their experimentation.

For months together, both wife and husband did a lot of hard work to extract radium from pitchblende. Their main shift laboratory was covered with only with a tin roof which had many holes through which rain water would creep in. both of them, however, continued their research work against all odds.

In 1911, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work on the isolation of radium and polonium and for the study of the chemical properties of these elements.

After two years of their marriage the pair got a daughter whom they named Irene Curie. Irene Curie, just like her mother was exceptionally talented in science. In 1926, she married Fredrick Juliot. The husband-wife then synthesized artificial radioactive substances, for which, they were jointly awarded the Nobel prixe for chemistry in 1935.

In 1906, Pierre Curie died in a road accident. Madam Curie got a serious setback from this. In Paris, she established the Curie Institute of Radium. To honor her, a chemical element Curium and a unit of radioactivity Curie have been named after her.