Marie and Pierre Curie

Historical milestones

1859
15 May, birth of Pierre Curie in Paris.

1867
7 November, birth of Maria Sklodowska (future Marie Curie) in Warsaw (Poland)

1877
Pierre graduated in the physical sciences.

1878-1882
Pierre and his brother Jacques conducted a series of studies on piezoelectricity.

1882
Pierre started teaching at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry (EPCI) in Paris.

1883
In June, Maria Sklodowska graduated (gold medal winner) from high school in Poland.

1891
Maria arrived in Paris, in November, to undertake studies in the physical sciences and mathematics at the Sorbonne.

1891-1895
Pierre worked on magnetism.

1893
Marie graduated top of the year in physical sciences, in July.

Wedding photograph of Pierre and Marie Curie (1895) ©ACJC

1894
In January, Pierre formulated the principle of crystal symmetry.
Pierre and Marie met in the spring.
Marie graduated second in mathematics in July.

1895
On 6 March, Pierre completed his doctorate in physics (thesis on the magnetic properties of bodies at various temperatures, pressures and magnetic field intensities).
Pierre and Marie married on 26 July at Sceaux (near Paris).

1896
Marie Curie came first in competitive examinations for the recruitment of physics teachers.

1897
Birth of Irène their first daughter on 12 September.
In December, Marie started her thesis work at the EPCI on the “uranium rays” discovered by Becquerel.

Pierre and Marie Curie in the “discovery shed” at the EPCI ©ACJC

1898
12 April, Marie showed that thorium emits the same type of radiation as uranium (natural radioactivity).
Pierre left his studies of crystals to work with his wife.
18 July, Pierre and Marie announced the discovery of a new radioactive element - polonium. 26 December, in collaboration with Gustave Bémont, they announced the discovery of radium.

1900
26 October, Marie was appointed teacher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles in Sèvres.
Pierre started teaching physics to medical students in the annex of the Faculty of Sciences, on the rue Cuvier.

1903
25 June, Marie defended her thesis on radioactive substances other than uranium and thorium, entitled “Research on radioactive substances”.
10 December, Pierre and Marie Curie, together with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics (doc. pdf 112Ko - french version) for the discovery of natural radioactivity.

1904
Pierre was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne on 1 October.
Birth of Eve, their second daughter, on 6 December.

1906
Pierre Curie was run over by a horse-drawn wagon and died instantly on 19 April.
In November, Marie Curie replaced her husband as professor of physics at the Sorbonne, thus becoming the first woman to teach there. She was appointed full professor in 1908.

1911
10 December, Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the isolation of metallic radium and determination of its atomic mass.

1914-1918
In 1914, Marie Curie was appointed director of the physics and chemistry laboratory in the new Radium Institute (a position which she was only really able take up at the end of the war).
Assisted by her daughter Irène, Marie trained women as radiology nurses for army service. She fitted out small trucks destined for the front with radiology equipment: these were dubbed “little Curies”.

1921
Marie Curie went to the United States for the first time. The national campaign conducted among American women by the American journalist Missy Meloney raised 100 000 dollars (1 million gold francs), which was used to buy one gram of radium. In 1929, Marie Curie donated the gift of a second gram of radium to the Radium Institute in Warsaw.

1934
Marie Curie died from leukemia on 4 July, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium (Haute-Savoie).

1995
The ashes of Pierre and Marie Curie were transferred to the Panthéon on 20 April.

Marie and Pierre Curie, a pioneering couple

Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie ©ACJC

Pierre Curie was born in Paris on 15 May 1859 into a Protestant family of doctors from Alsace. Pierre and his elder brother Jacques were attracted to the sciences from childhood. Idealistic and independent, Pierre was unable to muster the discipline and systematic work demanded by traditional teaching. A private tutor prepared him for the baccalaureate exams, which he passed brilliantly at the age of 16.

At 18 years of age, he took a degree in the physical sciences. At 19, he was appointed preparator to Prof. Dessains, at the Paris Faculty of Sciences, and was physics demonstrator in the students' practical classes. He was tall and slim, with chestnut brown hair, was reserved in nature and had an intense look in his eyes which bore witness to a profound inner life. He was also an unrepentant and poetic dreamer, writing in his personal diary: “Life should be made into a dream and a dream into a reality”.

The discovery of piezoelectricity

Pierre Curie's first research work was to determine heat wavelengths. Later, with his brother, then Professor Friedel's preparator, he studied crystals in the mineralogy laboratory of the Sorbonne. They discovered the phenomenon of piezoelectricity (electrical polarization produced by the compression or dilatation of crystals with no center of symmetry). This observation led them to design a piezoelectric quartz to measure very weak electrical currents. Pierre Curie perfected the quadrant electrometer, which was later called the Curie electrometer.
In 1883, Jacques left for Montpellier and Pierre was appointed head of research at the new School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris, where he was to spend the next twenty-two years, in other words virtually his whole scientific career. The day after his thesis defense, in March 1895, he took up his new position as professor of physics. From 1895 to 1905, he taught general physics to EPCI students of various years.
In 1884, Pierre published a dissertation on questions of order and repeats and, in 1885, another report on symmetry and repeats, as well as a theoretical essay on crystal formation and the capillary constants of the different faces. By generalizing notions of symmetry known to crystallographers, he introduced them into physics.

The meeting of Pierre and Marie

Pierre and Marie Curie at Sceaux, 1895 ©ACJC

It would be a mistake to see Pierre Curie solely as a theoretician. While putting the finishing touches to his doctoral thesis on the magnetic properties of bodies at different temperatures, which he defended in 1895, he was also designing an aperiodic balance with direct reading of the last weights. Furthermore, he established the so-called Curie law and showed that above a certain critical temperature, now called the Curie point, the magnetic properties of ferromagnetics disappeared or were much reduced.
At Pierre Curie's thesis defense was a young physicist with whom Pierre had formed a friendship after a Polish physicist friend engineered their meeting in the spring of 1894. She was called Maria Sklodowska.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie ©ACJC

Maria was born on 7 November 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, the fifth child of two teachers. Misfortune struck early in her life, as her elder sister Zozia died of typhus, and her mother succumbed to tuberculosis. Maria took refuge in her studies, and was rewarded for her diligence when she won a gold medal. She gained the highest possible grade - five - in all subjects (including the four foreign languages then studied: Russian, French, German and English). When she graduated from university, Maria was a strictly educated young woman of noble sentiments: “there is in her nature a quiet dignity, a grace which will always accompany her enthusiasm, even her passion” (Eve Curie). Maria had to earn her living and for several years worked as a private tutor to the children of well-off families.

Young women were not allowed to study at the University of Warsaw, and Maria nurtured the ambition of studying physics at the Sorbonne, in Paris, at a time when the physical sciences attracted few women. She realized her dream in 1891. Two years after arriving in Paris, she graduated top of her class in physics, and the following year she graduated second in mathematics.

On 26 July 1895 she and Pierre Curie celebrated an informal wedding. In her book about Pierre she later wrote: “I was struck by the expression of his clear eyes and a slight sense of detachment in his attitude. His rather slow and deliberate way of speaking, his simplicity, his smile, both grave and youthful, inspired confidence” (Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, 1923). They honeymooned in Brittany, taking with them their wedding presents - two bicycles. Their first child, Irène, was born in September 1897, and their second daughter, Eve, in December 1904.

The discovery in the shed...

The shed at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry ©ACJC

In late 1897, shortly after the birth of Irène, Marie Curie started her doctoral work on the uranium rays discovered by Henri Becquerel. Pierre soon abandoned his own research to work with her in a shed at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. “My husband obtained the authorization of the director of the school to use a glassed-in study on the ground floor which was then being used as a storeroom and machine shop (…) we did not know where to do our chemical treatments. We had to organize them in an abandoned shed across a yard from the workshop containing our electrometric equipment. It was a wooden hut, with a bituminous floor and glass roof which let in the rain, devoid of all fittings. All that it contained was worn pine tables, a cast-iron stove which heated feebly, and the blackboard that Pierre loved to use. (…) In this makeshift laboratory, we worked virtually unaided for two years (…)”.

Inside the shed at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry ©ACJC

“(...) At this time we were completely absorbed by the new field that opened up before us, thanks to an unexpected discovery. We were very happy despite our difficult working conditions. We spent our days in the laboratory, often eating a simple lunch there like students. A great tranquility reigned in our run-down shed (…) We lived with just one concern, as in a dream” (Marie Curie, 1923)

Pierre and Marie Curie in the “discovery shed” at the EPCI (1898) ©ACJC

It was in this rough-and-ready laboratory that, in July and December 1898, the young couple discovered two new, particularly radioactive elements, polonium and radium.

In June 1903, Marie Curie defended her thesis on “new radioactive substances” and in December of the same year Pierre and Marie Curie, together with Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize for Physics, for the discovery of natural radioactivity.

France then started to take an interest in the two scientists, who had already been honored abroad. In 1905, Pierre was appointed professor at the Sorbonne, and was allocated a small laboratory on the rue Cuvier. Marie Curie was appointed chef de travaux (~ associate professor). But a tragic accident was to bring their collaboration to an untimely end. On 19 April 1906, Pierre was run over and killed by a horse-drawn wagon on the rue Dauphine.

Marie Curie continues alone...

After the death of Pierre Curie, her companion in both life and work, Marie Curie pursued alone the research that they had undertaken together. She studied the different radioactive families and sought to define the chemical properties of the various radioactive elements.
On 5 November 1906, she took over Pierre's lecture course at the Sorbonne at the very point where he had been interrupted. “(…) breaking with an age-old tradition, the Sorbonne for the first time welcomed a woman among its teachers.” “We had just lived one of those moments that count: thanks to Marie Curie, as confirmed by subsequent events, the high positions in university teaching and research had been opened up to women, who straight away entered at the top.” (Extracts from the Revue des Sévriennes , March 1957, speech given by Miss Schulhof, a former pupil of Marie Curie at Sèvres, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Marie Curie's lecture course at the Sorbonne).
Marie was appointed to the chair of general physics in 1908, despite much reluctance rooted in the antifeminism and chauvinism that prevailed in university circles at the time. She was the first woman to occupy a position of responsibility in higher education. Yet the Academy of Sciences did not admit her when she applied in 1910. Nonetheless, she was the first woman to sit at the Academy when, in 1922, she was elected to the Academy of Medicine.
In 1911, five years after Pierre's premature death, the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm awarded Marie a second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry, for the determination of the atomic weight of radium which she separated in its metallic state. While overseeing the education of her two daughters, Marie was battling to obtain a laboratory where she could continue her research and pursue the work she had shared with Pierre. “I want radioactivity, a science born in France, to be able to flourish there. For this we need an institute for research into radioactivity and its applications. The head of the institute should not only direct pure scientific research, but also contribute to the development of the industry of radioactive substances, through relations with industrialists, as is happening now. In addition he should provide technical advice to further progress in biological and medical research ” (Marie Curie).

A large laboratory for Marie Curie

Radium Institute at the end of its construction in 1914 ; the Pasteur Pavilion is on the right and the Curie Pavilion on the left ; between the two is the small pavilion that housed the laboratory for the treatment of radioactive substances ©ACJC

The University of Paris and the Institut Pasteur decided in December 1909 to build a laboratory for Marie Curie.

In “Pierre Curie”, the book she published in memory of her companion in life and work, Marie Curie wrote: “To ensure the continuation of his work, the Paris Faculty of Sciences paid me the great honor of offering me his chair. I accepted this weighty heritage in the hope one day of building, in his memory, a laboratory worthy of him, one that he never had but which would benefit others in developing his thinking. This hope is now in part realized, thanks to the joint initiative of the University and the Institut Pasteur, which led to the creation of a Radium Institute, composed of two laboratories, Curie and Pasteur, dedicated to the physicochemical and biological study of radium rays.” (Marie Curie, 1923)
So, the running of the Curie Pavilion was entrusted to Marie Curie, and Dr Claudius Regaud, a doctor and bench scientist from Lyon, was asked to run the Pasteur Pavilion.

Marie Curie and Claudius Regaud during a trip to Poland in 1932 ©ACJC

Work on the applications of radium to the life sciences calls for the dovetailing of physics and medicine. Doctors must have access to radioactive substances and skills in the physics of radioactivity, notably when measuring radioactive bodies used in therapeutic applications. This is why two pavilions of the Radium Institute face each other, not in a spirit of competition but to highlight their complementarity. The Radium Institute was built between 1909 and 1911 but had hardly started to function when the Great War broke out.

The war in a “little Curie”

Marie Curie at the wheel of a “little Curie” ©ACJC

The Radium Institute staff was mobilized during the 1914-1918 war, and the Curie and Pasteur laboratories were forced to suspend their activities.

During the war, Marie Curie rallied round by caring for the wounded as assistant to Antoine Béclère in the army's radiology department. The Army Health Service designed mobile surgical units for work close to the front. Eighteen “little Curies”, small trucks fitted out with radiological equipment, were produced. In 1916, Marie obtained the certificate required to drive petrol-driven vehicles and regularly went to the front, like the other volunteers. She trained her own daughter, Irène, who at the time was just 18 years old, and who also took X-rays of wounded soldiers throughout the war, in battlefield hospitals.

Marie and Irène Curie and their students of the American expeditionary corps, 1919 ©ACJC

In her laboratory at the Radium Institute, Marie Curie organized the training of radiology nurses and also set up an “emanation unit” to manufacture ampoules of radon for the care of the wounded. This was because it had just been observed that radon, the gas emanating from radium, could accelerate the healing of wounds, thereby enabling soldiers to return quickly to the front.

At the Radium Institute

Marie Curie in her office the Radium Institute ©ACJC

It was only when the war ended that the Radium Institute could fulfill its mission to teach radioactivity and give training in its techniques to scientists from around the world. Among these young scientists was Marie Curie's daughter, Irène, who became assistant to her mother, “la patronne” (the “boss”).

In 1921, a vast fundraising drive among American women, organized by the journalist Mrs. Marie Mattingly Meloney, known as "Missy" Meloney , raised enough money to buy from the Radium Chemical Company in Pittsburgh one gram of radium, which was donated to Marie Curie. Irène and Eve accompanied their mother in a six-week tour across the United States, where she was greeted triumphantly. In 1929, the American women admirers of Marie Curie gave her another gram of radium, which she donated to the University of Warsaw.

Marie Curie on the balcony of her laboratory at the Radium Institute, 1934 ©ACJC

In 1928, she set up a laboratory annex of the Radium Institute, at Arcueil, for the chemical treatment of radioactive bodies. Marie Curie was a member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations (the forerunner of UNESCO), in Geneva, where she met Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein.

Exhausted, Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934. “The illness that carried her off was an aplastic pernicious anemia of rapid feverish development. The bone marrow did not react, probably because it had been damaged by a long accumulation of radiation” wrote Dr Tobé, the director of the Sancellemoz sanatorium in the Haute-Savoie, where she had been transported a few days before. Marie Curie directed the physics and chemistry department of the Radium Institute from 1914 to 1934. The Curie Laboratory became one of the world's leading laboratories devoted to radioactivity. The 1930s were rich in discoveries. In January 1934, a few months before her death, Marie Curie had the pleasure of being present when her daughter and son-in-law Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity.