Madame Marie Curie

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Madame Marie Curie

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The Science of Radioactivity

By Claire Goelst

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Early Life

Born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland

Given name was Marya Sklodowska, but her family and friends called her “Little Manya”

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Early Life cont.

Her father was a professor of math and physics

Her mother was a pianist, singer, and teacher

Her mother died of tuberculosis when Marya was 11

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Schooling

Graduated high school when she was 15

In 1891 she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris as “Marie” and graduated in 1893

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Pierre

She married Pierre Curie in July 1895

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Thesis Work

She decided that her thesis for her doctorate would be on Henri Becquerel’s mysterious “x-rays” that are given off by uranium

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Work with Uranium

Discovered that if you have a certain amount of uranium, then you get a certain amount of ray intensity, no matter what you did to the material

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Uranium Continued

Marie discovered that there was something going on inside the atom that created the rays, she named this effect “radioactivity”

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Radioactivity

She discovered that the only known elements that were radioactive were uranium and thorium

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Polonium

Pierre stopped his work on crystals to work with Marie

Marie continued her work, but with a different substance, pitchblende

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Polonium Cont.

They called this new substance polonium in honor of Marie’s homeland

In July 1898 they extracted a new element that was even more radioactive than uranium

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Radium

In January of 1899 another new element was discovered that was over 1 million times more radioactive than uranium, it was named radium

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