Marie Curie - the story of the only woman who won two Nobel Prizes

Curie hypothesized that if a mixture produces more radiation than the uranium in it, it means that it contains another radioactive element or elements, and this is how she and her husband, Pierre Curie, discovered the elements radium and polonium

Today, November 7, is the 144th birthday of Marie Curie of Radium, the woman who won two Nobel Prizes - in physics in 1903 and in chemistry in 1911.

In 1903 she shared the prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and with Henri Bacchull.

Marie Curie was born in Poland on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, which then belonged to the Russian Empire under the name Maria Sklodowska, and was called Mania by her family members and friends and died in Savoy, France on July 4, 1934. She died of a blood disease resulting from her exposure to large amounts of radiation.

Kiri had four brothers and sisters. Both her parents were teachers. Her father was a patriot who fought for a free Poland, which made it difficult for him to keep his job. When Marie was 11, her older sister died of typhus and her mother died of tuberculosis.

She graduated from high school at the age of 15 with high grades. She worked as a private tutor for children in Poland before moving to Paris at the age of 24 to study mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne. Her goal was to get a teaching certificate and return to Poland.

However, life had a different direction, and Marie met a French scientist named Pierre Curie, in the spring of 1894. Pierre was the head of the laboratory at the School of Physics and Industrial Chemistry in Paris. She married him and they had two daughters, Iran who was born in 1897 and Eve in 1904. Marie and Pierre worked together in the laboratory, the work that won her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, making Curie the first woman to win the Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1903 was awarded in half to Henry Bachurel for the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity. Marie and Pierre Curie won the second half for their research into the details of the phenomenon of radiation discovered by Bacorel.

Marie Curie studied the radiation emanating from elements that we now recognize as radioactive elements including uranium, radium and thorium, an element that Curie later discovered was also radioactive. She discovered that the intensity of radiation from uranium can actually be measured; She discovered that the intensity of the radiation is proportional to the amount of uranium or thorium in the compound - and it doesn't matter which compound.

She also discovered that the ability to emit radiation does not depend on the arrangement of the atoms in the molecule. Therefore, she concluded that this must be an internal property of the atom itself, a revolutionary discovery for its time.

When she realized that some compounds containing uranium or thorium radiated more strongly than the uranium, she hypothesized that there must be an unknown element in the compound, which has a stronger radiation than uranium and thorium. Her work raised the issue of her husband who left his research on crystals and joined the "detective work" together with his wife. And Marie was right. In 1898, the two discovered two more elements that produce radiation: radium (named after the Latin word for 'beam') and polonium (named after Marie's homeland, Poland).

The second Nobel Prize was awarded to her in 1911, this time in chemistry for her discoveries and research of the elements radium and polonium. She is the only woman to date to win the Nobel Prize twice.

The daughter of Marie and Pierre, who was killed in an accident in 1906, Irene Julio-Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 and she also won together with her husband, Frédéric Julio for synthesizing new radioactive elements.