Marie Curie: A Pioneering Physicist Essay, Research Paper

Marie Curie: A Pioneering Physicist

Aspirations come from hopes and dreams only a dedicated person can conjure up. They can range from passing the third grade to making the local high school football team. Marie Curie’s aspirations, however, were much greater.

Life in late 19th century Poland was rough. Being a female in those days wasn’t a walk in the park either. Marie Curie is recognized in history by the name she took in her adopted country, France. Born in Poland in 1867, she was christened Manya Sklodowska. In the year of her birth, Poland was ruled by the neighboring Russia; no Pole could forget it, or at least anyone involved in education, as both Manya’s parents were. Manya’s mother was a headmistress of a girls’ school. The Russians insisted that Polish schools teach the Russian language and Russian history. The Poles had to teach their children their own

language and history in secrecy.

Manya enjoyed learning but her childhood was always overshadowed by depression. At the young age of six, her father lost his job and her family became very poor. In the same year of 1873, her mother died of tuberculosis. As if that wasn’t enough tragedy for the family already, two of her sisters died of typhus as well. Her oldest sister, Bronya, had to leave school early to take care of the family. Despite all these hardships and setbacks, Manya continued to work hard at school.

Although her sister Bronya had stopped going to school to act as the family’s housekeeper, she desperately wanted to go on studying to become a doctor. This was almost impossible in Poland, however. In Poland, women were not allowed to go to college. Many Poles took the option to flee from Russian rule and live in France; this is exactly what Bronya did. She had set her heart on going to Paris to study at the famous Sorbonne University (The University of Paris). The only problem now was that she had no money to get there.

Manya and Bronya agreed to help each other attain their educations. Manya got a job as a governess and sent her earnings to support Bronya in Paris. Then, when Bronya could afford it, she would help Manya with her schooling and education in return. Manya went to live in a village called Szczuki with a family called Zorawski. Aside from teaching the two children of the family for seven hours a day, she organized lessons for her own benefit as well. Manya spent her evenings, late evenings, and even mornings devouring books on mathmatics and science.

Bronya finished her studies and married a Polish doctor, Casimir Dluski. They invited Manya to live with them in Paris while she went to college. Manya didn’t want to leave her country and most importantly, her family. Her eagerness for the quest of knowledge overcame her fear of the unknown, nonetheless. She travelled to Paris in an open railroad car on a trip that lasted three days in the Polish winter. She arrived safely to her long-since- childhood dream, the city of Paris. Manya Sklodowska quickly became Marie.

While Marie improved her French, she stayed with Bronya and her husband. They lived more than an hour away from the university. Marie wanted to be nearer to her work, so she eventually ended up moving out of her sister’s home and into a single cold damp room, eating only enough to keep her alive. Fortunate enough for a scholarship, Marie was able to go on studying until she had completed two courses. In her final exam-inations, she came in first in the subject of mathematics and second in physics. By 1894, at the age of 27, Marie had acquired not one, but two degrees from France’s top university and also became a totally fluent speaker of the French language.

Marie had always ruled love and marriage out of her life’s program. She was obsessed by her dreams, harassed by poverty, and over driven by intensive work. Nothing else counted; nothing else existed. She did, however, meet a young man every day at Sorbonne and at the laboratory. Marie and her destiny actually met on coincidence. Marie needed somewhere to conduct her experiments for research ordered by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry. The lab at Sorbonne was too crowded with students, in addition to not having the right equipment. A friend of hers suggested a friend’s laboratory. His name was Pierre Curie. Marie soon completed her commitment to her adopted country by

marrying this Frenchman.

Marie and Pierre Curie got married in 1895. The two of them combined probably made up the best team of scientists ever. Pierre had made important discoveries about magnetism. Marie decided to follow this up by looking at the magnetic properties of steel. In the same year of their marriage, a German scientist by the name of Wilhelm Roentgen made an accidental discovery. He found that certain substances produced rays of energy that would pass through soft materials as opposed to hard materials. Due to the fact that scientists often use the symbol “x” to stand for anything unknown, he called his mysterious discovery the “x-ray.” The x-ray was more than an amusing puzzle. By directing x-rays and photographic film at a solid object that consisted of both soft and hard substances a positive image can be made of the hard substance. A prime example would be the human body. This discovery now made it possible to look inside the human body without performing surgery. Within the few days of the findings, x-rays were used to locate a bullet in a man’s leg. The world of medicine had acquired a major new tool for examining the sick and injured.

The year after Roentgen’s discovery, a French researcher and a friend of the Curie’s, Antoine Henri Becquerel found that a rare substance called uranium gave off rays that seemed to be very much like the x-rays that Wilhelm Roentgen had described.

In 1897, the year of Roentgen’s discovery, Marie Curie gave birth to her very first daughter, Irene. Despite being caught up in family life, Marie was still determined to go on with her scientific work. She decided to follow up Becquerel’s discovery and do special research on the study of uranium and the rays it produced.

Elements are the raw materials of our universe. Everything is made up of these basic substances. Scientists are able to break things down into their various elements and tests can be made to discover its array of properties.

In the small damp laboratory in the back of Sorbonne’s School of Physics and Chemistry, Marie began a long, tedious and painstaking series of experiments that tested every element known to man. She found that only the two elements uranium and thorium gave off rays. “Radioactivity” was the name Marie gave to this property. Marie soon again made another important discovery about a mineral called allied pitch-blende, a black substance, somewhat stiff like that of tar, which contains tiny quantities of uranium but absent of thorium. Pitchblende gave off eight times more rays than the uranium that it contained. It was, utilizing Marie’s new term, more radioactive. Marie figured out that pitchblende must therefore contain another element,which was also radio-active that no one had discovered as of yet. Pierre was so overwhelmed with this discovery, he quit his own work to join in his wife’s research and find out more on this new element. The Curie team decided to call it radium.

Marie realized that the new element within the pitchblende was in minute quantities only, therefore, to isolate any respectable amount to test and measure large portions of pitchblende were needed. To separate the radium from the pitchblende, it would have to be heated, which purifies the substance. While working with the pitchblende, another element was discovered which wasn’t

radioactive, therefore not radium. Marie named this element polonium, in honor of her native homeland Poland.

Marie’s experiments were now being conducted in an abandoned wooden shed, furnished with only old kitchen tables, a cast-iron stove and a blackboard. One evening, in 1902, after four long years of exhausting work, Marie decided to go back to their lab and check on the experiments they had done earlier in the day. When Marie and Pierre got to the laboratory, they saw a “faint blue glow” in the darkness; it was the radium.

Radium proved to be one of the world’s most important discoveries, especially for its miraculous medical uses. Radium was measured to be two million times more radioactive than uranium. The smallest amount of radium was capable of giving off immense radiation. Radium is extremely powerful and, unless used with care and in a controlled environment, very dangerous. Unfortunately, this was not known in the days of the Curies. While working with radioactive materials, both Pierre and Marie suffered from many illnesses and pains. They encountered aching arms and legs, sores, colds and blisters that never seemed to go away. They often pinned these problems to their lack of rest due to being in the laboratory. Only later did the two connect their improvement in health with their absence from the radium. The Curie’s great discovery prompted scientists and doctors to work and further develop its uses. It was found that radiation could be used to destroy unhealthy growth in the human body, thus helping to stop cancer. Besides being able to cure, radium can also kill. Handling and controlling the radium is the first and foremost dilemma. The Curie’s found this out the hard way…

The discovery of radium did, however, bring the Curies something they were proud of. In 1903, Marie Curie was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science. At the awards ceremony, Marie showed how grateful she was by wearing a new dress. The Curies were then showered with awards and honors from then on. That same year, Pierre was invited to London to give a lecture on radium. In

November of that year, the Royal Society, Britain’s leading association of scientists, presented Pierre and his wife with one of its highest awards, the Davy Medal. Not a month later, they heard from the Academy of Sciences in Sweden that the Nobel Prize for physics was to be awarded to the Curies along with Henri Becquerel. Marie and Pierre felt too ill to make the journey to Sweden to accept the prize in person, so Becquerel accepted the medals for them. The Nobel Prize included a rather large sum of money… 70,000 gold francs. The Curies accepted the money finance for their experiments. This released Pierre from his teaching so that he could concentrate on research and to repay to kindness and support they had received from their friends and family over the years. They also gave gifts to poor Polish students and made a few improvements to their small apartment.

One new comer that the Curies didn’t mind was Eve, their second daughter, born in December in 1904. Her arrival didn’t disrupt the Curies research and teaching, as their first child Irene had threatened. The Curie’s lust for science still lingered.

In the year of 1905, Pierre was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences and became a Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne. Early in the following year, tragedy struck. Crossing the road in a shower of rain, Pierre stepped out from behind from a cab straight into the path of a heavy horse drawn wagon. The driver tried to stop the wagon, but all was in vain. The weight of his load was too great for him to stop, and the left back wheel crushed Pierred as he lay stunned in the road. Pierre Curie died instantly.

Marie was shattered by the news of her husband’s death but soon recovered the determination to carry on with her work. The French government proposed to recognize Pierre’s work to the nation by granting Marie a pension for herself and her children. She refused saying, “I am young enough to earn my living and that of my children…”

The Sorbonne agreed with her because The Faculty of Science voted unanimously that she should succeed Pierre as Professor. It was a unique tribute, for she became not only the first woman professor at Sorbonne but the first at any French university.

Marie had felt it was her duty to succeed her husband. He had always said he would have liked to see Marie teach a class at Sorbonne. Marie at last showed her final feeling on the matter by the way in which she gave her first public speech lecture to a packed crowd.

In the year of 1910, four years after Pierre’s death, Marie published a long account of her discoveries of radioactivity. This led to her being awarded a second Nobel Prize. Not for another fifty years would anyone accomplish such a remarkable honor. This time, Marie went to Stockholm in Sweden to accept her prize in person. 1911 should have been a year of triumph, but it turned out to be a awful year of anguish, however. The awarding of Marie’s second Nobel Prize was controversial because many say it was given to her out of pity of her husband. That same year, Marie failed by two votes to be elected to be in the Academy of Sciences. Worse yet, some newspapers said that her close friendship with the scientist Paul Langevin was wrong because he was a married man with four children.

Marie received many spiteful letters and became distressed. A spell in the nursing home and a trip to England helped her to recover. Marie’s real cure for her problems was definitely her work. The Sorbonne at last decided to give her what she needed to do it properly – a special institute for the study of radium, newly-built on a road renamed in honor of her husband, “Rue Pierre Curie.” Marie was thrilled with this new project and gave it, as her own personal gift, the precious radium she and Pierre had prepared with their own hands. This radium was precious in every sense. It was vital for further

scientific research. It was essential for it’s use in medicine and it was worth more than a million gold francs.

The Radium Institution was finished on July 13, 1914. Less than a week later, World War I broke out. Marie gave up all thought of scientific work in her new institute and threw herself behind the cause of her adopted country. Before dedicating herself to the war, Marie made a special trip to Bordeaux, in western France and put the precious gram of radium away in a bank vault.

Marie donated all her money toward the war efforts including her own personal savings in gold to be melted down. She even offered her medals, but the bank refused them. Marie quickly saw that there was one service that she could do for France that no one else could – organize a mass x-ray service for the treatment of wounded soldiers. During the course of the war, Marie, along with volunteers, equipped 20 cars as mobile x-ray units and set up more than 200 hospital rooms with x-ray equipment. Over a million men were x-rayed, which

saved tens of thousands of lives and prevented an untold number of amputations. Between 1916 and 1918, Marie Curie trained 150 people including 20 American Expeditionary Force members in x-ray technology of radiology. After the war ended, Marie continued to train radiologists for another two years.

Marie disliked reporters and kept away from journalists. One American reporter, Mrs. Marie Melaney was persistent. Marie finally gave in to her and agreed to an interview. The two quickly became friends. Mrs. Melaney understood how Marie had put aside her scientific work during the war and knew that in the whole of France there was only one gram of radium that Marie had presented to the newly-established institute. Mrs. Melaney went back to the United States and asked the country for a sum of $100,000 for another gram of radium for Marie’s research. Marie was widely known and millions dutifully complied. In 1921, Marie was invited to the United States to receive her radium. After stepping out into the public just once, the world fell in love.

She became sort of and ambassador for science, traveling to other countries, educating as well as still receiving honors. In 1925, the Polish government erected another radium institute, this time in her honor – The Marie Sklodowska/Curie Institute. The President of Poland laid the first corner stone while Marie laid the second. The women of the United States acknowledged her a second time and collected enough money to produce yet another gram of radium to be presented to the Polish Institute for its research and treatment program.

In may of 1934, Marie Curie was stricken to her bed due to the flu. Being too weak to fight against the virus, she died in a sanitarium in the French Alps. She was quietly buried on July 6, 1934 and laid to rest next to her husband Pierre.

Marie Curie was a woman of the ages. She represented true humanity in the pursuit of perfection. Marie found humanity’s perfection in chemistry and her work. Loving what she did and devoting herself to the sciences is what made her happy in the sense that true perfection was found.