The Light in the Shed

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867. At that time, Poland had no country of its own. Warsaw was ruled by the Russian Empire, and Polish children were forbidden to learn their own history in school.

Maria's parents were both teachers. She was the youngest of five children, and she had an extraordinary memory. She finished school top of her class at fifteen.

But women were not allowed to study at the University of Warsaw.

The Flying University

So Maria joined the "Flying University", a secret, illegal network of classes that moved from house to house to avoid the authorities, where young Polish people, including women, could learn science, history and literature.

Maria and her older sister Bronisława both dreamed of studying in Paris, at the Sorbonne, where women were admitted. But there was no money. So the sisters made a pact. Maria would work as a governess and send money to Bronisława while she studied medicine in Paris. Then, when Bronisława was a doctor, she would help Maria.

Maria worked as a governess for several years, teaching other people's children and studying on her own at night.

Paris

In 1891, at the age of twenty-four, she finally arrived in Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She called herself Marie, the French form of her name.

She lived in a tiny attic room. It was so cold in winter that she sometimes piled all her clothes on top of her bed to stay warm. She often lived on bread, butter and tea, and once fainted from hunger in a library. But in 1893 she came first in her degree in physics, and in 1894 second in mathematics.

That year she met Pierre Curie, a quiet, brilliant physicist. They were married in 1895, in a simple ceremony. Instead of a wedding dress, Marie wore a dark blue outfit she could later wear in the laboratory. For their honeymoon, they went on a cycling tour of France.

Something new

In 1896, the French scientist Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium gave off mysterious rays. Marie chose these rays as the subject of her doctoral research. She invented the word radioactivity to describe them.

Testing different minerals, she found that a uranium ore called pitchblende was far more radioactive than uranium alone could explain. She realised that it must contain some other, unknown element.

Pierre put aside his own research to join her. In 1898 they announced the discovery of two new elements. The first, Marie named polonium, after her homeland, Poland. The second they called radium, from the Latin word for ray.

The shed

To prove radium existed, they needed to separate a pure sample. That meant processing tonnes of pitchblende waste.

Their laboratory was an old wooden shed at the School of Physics, with a leaky glass roof. It was freezing in winter and stifling in summer. Marie spent years stirring huge cauldrons of boiling material with an iron rod nearly as tall as she was, and then carefully purifying the results.

After nearly four years, in 1902, she had isolated a tiny amount of radium chloride, about a tenth of a gram.

Eve Curie, their daughter, later described how her parents sometimes went back to the shed at night, and saw the faint, glowing blue light of their samples shining in the dark.

Two Nobel Prizes

In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel. Marie was the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize.

Three years later, in 1906, Pierre was killed when he was knocked down by a horse-drawn wagon in a Paris street. Marie was devastated. But she took over his teaching post, becoming the first woman professor at the Sorbonne.

In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. She is still the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

The little Curies

When the First World War began in 1914, Marie realised that X-ray machines could help surgeons find bullets and broken bones in wounded soldiers. She designed mobile X-ray units, fitted into cars, which became known as petites Curies, "little Curies". She learned to drive, and went to the front lines herself with her daughter Irène, then seventeen, to operate them. She also trained around 150 women as X-ray operators.

The cost

Nobody at the time understood how dangerous radiation was. Marie carried test tubes of radioactive material in her pockets and kept them in her desk drawer. Over the years, her health suffered badly.

She died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia, a blood disease almost certainly caused by her long exposure to radiation. Her notebooks are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes, and visitors who want to read them must sign a waiver.

Her daughter Irène went on to win her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1935, with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

Want to read more?

Eve Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie, published in 1937, is a classic and very moving. Barbara Goldsmith's Obsessive Genius is a shorter modern account. The Nobel Prize website has free biographies of both Marie and Pierre.