The quiet, rational world of pipettes and problem-solving was a far cry from the political turmoil outside. But when Maria turned 18, financial reality dragged her away from this safe haven.
She struck a deal with her sister, Bronya. But after just two years, her left-wing politics had garnered the attention of Big Brother. So, aged 24, Maria moved to Paris and changed her name to Marie. But Parisian labs and loves changed the course of her life forever.
Finding work was also testing for a young girl in the maledominated world of science. Marie repeatedly tried to find a job in a lab, but kept being met with rejection. Eventually she was given the chance to carry out some trivial tasks. But her technical proficiency immediately attracted attention, gaining the respect of her colleagues. It was while working in these labs that she met a certain scientist named Pierre Curie. Both passionate about science, both leftist and secular, love soon blossomed.
Listen: Jenni Murray discusses her new book, which tells the stories of some of the most fascinating women in global history. In Pierre, Marie found a fellow intellect and confidant, someone with whom she could enjoy both musing over scientific theories and sharing excursions on their bicycles. Love-struck Pierre volunteered to jack in his whole career and move to Poland with her.
So the pair ended up marrying in in the suburbs of Paris, with untraditional Marie wearing a dark blue outfit instead of a bridal dress, which reportedly became one of her lab outfits. Aided by a device that Pierre had invented, Marie set about solving the puzzle of these strange rays. This discovery was nothing short of revolutionary. The gruelling hours paid off. In June , Marie and Pierre extracted a black powder times more radioactive than uranium, calling their discovery polonium.
Marie was unashamedly open about the fact that her native Poland inspired the name. This was groundbreaking. No woman had ever won a Nobel Prize before. The committee had voted for Becquerel to receive half the prize, and Pierre the other half.
So Pierre and Marie ended up both receiving a quarter of the prize. The Curies were the perfect match. While Pierre was a bit of a dreamer, Marie was a great networker, good at promoting their work.
But just when the Curies seemed to be flying high, Pierre had a tragic accident. Though she had just been awarded a second Nobel Prize, the nominating committee now sought to discourage Curie from traveling to Stockholm to accept it so as to avoid a scandal. With her personal and professional life in disarray, she sank into a deep depression and retreated as best she could from the public eye.
Around this time, Curie received a letter from Einstein in which he described his admiration for her, as well as offered his heart-felt advice on how to handle the events as they unfolded.
There is little doubt that the kindness shown by her respected colleague was encouraging. Soon enough, she recovered, reemerged and, despite the discouragement, courageously went to Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize. When World War I broke out in , Curie was forced to put her research and the opening of her new Radium institute on hold due to the threat of a possible German occupation of Paris.
After personally delivering her stash of the valuable element to the safety of a bank vault in Bordeaux, she set about using her expertise in the field of radioactivity in order to aid the French war effort. Not only did she personally instruct and supervise young women in the operation of the equipment, but she even drove and operated one such ambulance herself, despite the danger of venturing too close to the fighting on the front lines.
In another display of selflessness at the outset of the conflict, Curie had even tried to donate her gold Nobel Prize medals to the French National Bank, but they refused. Yet, from the very first years during which the scientists and their contemporaries were pioneering the study of radioactivity until the mids, little was concretely understood about both short and long-term health effects.
Pierre liked to keep a sample in his pocket so he could demonstrate its glowing and heating properties to the curious, and even once strapped a vial of the stuff to his bare arm for ten hours in order to study the curious way it painlessly burned his skin. Curie, in turn, kept a sample at home next to her bed as a nightlight. Diligent researchers, the Curies spent nearly every day in the confines of their improvised laboratory, with various radioactive materials strewn about their workspaces.
After regularly handling Radium samples, both were said to have had developed unsteady hands, as well as cracked and scarred fingers. Though the life of Pierre was tragically cut short in , at the time of his death he was suffering from constant pain and fatigue. Curie, too, complained of similar symptoms until succumbing to advanced leukemia in At no point did either consider the possibility that their very discovery was the cause of their pain and Curie's eventual death.
In fact, all the couple's laboratory notes and many of their personal belongings are still so radioactive today that they cannot safely be viewed or studied. However, the outbreak of the First World War interrupted her studies.
She joined her mother and began working as a nurse radiographer, operating x-ray machines to assist with the treatment of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Working in a dilapidated shed with broken windows and poor ventilation, she nonetheless was able to make sensitive measurements. It is remarkable, says Baisden, that Curie calculated the atomic weight of radium so accurately given such deplorable conditions.
Both Curies were plagued by ailments—burns and fatigue—that, in retrospect, were clearly caused by repeated exposures to high doses of radiation. Both, too, were resistant to the suggestion that their research materials caused their ailments. In , Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics. Professors who reviewed her doctoral thesis, which was about radiation, declared that it was the greatest single contribution to science ever written.
Rumors of a Nobel Prize began to circulate, but some members of the French Academy of Sciences attributed the brilliance of the work not to Marie, but to her co-workers.
These skeptics began to lobby quietly for the prize to be split between Becquerel and Pierre. But Pierre insisted to influential people on the Nobel committee that Marie had originated their research, conceived experiments and generated theories about the nature of radioactivity.
Both Curies shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Becquerel in It was the first Nobel to be awarded to a woman. Whether Marie Curie took the remark as an insult is not known—it surely rankles today—but it must be among the most grudging comments ever said to a laureate. Moreover, the notion that Marie was a mere helpmeet to Pierre—one of the more persistent myths about her—was an opinion widely held, judging from published and unpublished comments by other scientists and observers.
At the Sorbonne, it was Pierre who got the plum job, a full professorship. Marie was not promoted. Pierre hired more assistants and made Marie the official head of the laboratory, freeing her to conduct experiments and for the first time, be paid for it. The most successful collaboration between a husband and wife in the history of science ended suddenly on April 19, , when Pierre, apparently lost in thought, walked into traffic on the rue Dauphine and was killed instantly by an onrushing carriage.
Hundreds of people—students, artists, photographers, celebrities—lined up outside the university on November 5, , hoping to attend her first lecture. She gave no outward sign of mourning. She began by summarizing the recent breakthroughs in physics research. She wrote a diary during this time, addressed to her late husband, about continuing their research.
In , she published a page treatise on radioactivity. Neither Curie nor Langevin discussed their relationship with outsiders. The front-page coverage of the scandal threatened to overshadow another news story later that year: her second Nobel Prize. This one, in chemistry, was for the discovery of polonium and radium.
In her acceptance speech in Stockholm, she paid tribute to her husband but also made clear that her work was independent from his, spelling out their separate contributions and describing the discoveries she had made after his death.
At the end of , Curie became very ill. She had an operation to remove lesions from her uterus and kidney, followed by a long recovery. In , she began to travel again and return to science. In March of that year, Einstein paid her an extended visit, and later she opened and headed a new research facility in Warsaw.
As she was setting up a second institute, in Paris, World War I broke out. She outfitted 18 portable X-ray stations that could treat wounded soldiers on the front lines. She sometimes operated and repaired the machines herself, and established more permanent X-ray posts during the war.
Eve became a journalist and wrote the definitive biography, Madame Curie , published in
0コメント