Warsaw, and a bargain between sisters
Maria Sklodowska was born in 1867 in Warsaw, then under Russian rule, into a family of teachers who lost their savings to bad investments and political reprisals. Universities in the empire were closed to women, so she attended the clandestine Flying University, which met in shifting private rooms. She and her elder sister Bronislawa made a pact: Maria would work as a governess to fund Bronislawa's medical studies in Paris, and Bronislawa would support her in turn. Maria kept her side of it for five years.
She reached Paris in 1891, enrolled at the Sorbonne, and lived on very little in an unheated attic while catching up on French scientific vocabulary. She finished first in her class in physics in 1893 and second in mathematics the following year. In 1894 she met Pierre Curie, a physicist working on crystals and magnetism who had already published significant work with his brother Jacques. They married in 1895; she wore a dark suit she could use afterwards in the laboratory.
A leaking shed and two new elements
Henri Becquerel had found that uranium salts emitted rays without any external light source. Curie chose the phenomenon for her doctorate and measured it with a sensitive electrometer built on a piezoelectric principle discovered by Pierre and Jacques. Her decisive insight was quantitative: pitchblende ore was far more active than its uranium content could explain, which meant it contained something else. In 1898 she and Pierre announced two new elements, polonium, named for the partitioned homeland then missing from the map of Europe, and radium.
Announcing them was not the same as proving them. Over four years they processed tonnes of pitchblende residue in a converted shed with a leaking roof, stirring boiling vats with an iron rod, to obtain a fraction of a gram of radium chloride. Marie coined the term radioactivity. When the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was proposed, the nomination named Becquerel and Pierre alone; Pierre pressed for her inclusion, and she became the first woman to receive the prize. The couple declined to patent their extraction process.
Widow, scandal, and the ambulances
Pierre was killed in 1906, run down by a heavy horse-drawn wagon on a wet Paris street. Marie took over his teaching post and became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, for isolating radium and characterising the new elements. The same year the French press exposed her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of Pierre's, and pursued her with a xenophobia that included false claims about her ancestry. The Academy of Sciences had already refused her election.
During the First World War she equipped mobile radiography vans, nicknamed the little Curies, trained women to operate them, and drove to casualty stations with her daughter Irene. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by years of unshielded exposure; her notebooks remain radioactive and are stored in lead-lined boxes. Irene and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie won their own Nobel Prize the following year, a continuation she did not live to see.
