In October 1914, the first machines, known as 'Petits Curies', were ready, and Marie set off to the front. As Director of the Red Cross Radiological Service, she toured Paris, asking for money, supplies and vehicles which could be converted. The journey to the discovery had been long and arduous.ĭuring the First World War, Marie Curie worked to develop small, mobile X-ray units that could be used to diagnose injuries near the battlefront.

In 1902 Marie eventually isolated radium (as radium chloride), determining its atomic weight as 225.93. At the time they persevered in ignorance of the risks, often with raw and inflamed hands because they were continually handling highly radioactive material. During this time they began to feel sick and physically exhausted today we can attribute their ill-health to the early symptoms of radiation sickness. The work was heavy and physically demanding – and involved dangers the Curies did not appreciate. This involved working on a much larger scale than before, with 20kg batches of the mineral – grinding, dissolving, filtering, precipitating, collecting, redissolving, crystallising and recrystallising. Marie set about processing the pitchblende to extract the tiny quantities of radium. She got in touch with a factory in Austria that removed the uranium from pitchblende for industrial use and bought several tonnes of the worthless waste product, which was even more radioactive than the original pitchblende, and was much cheaper. Pitchblende is an expensive mineral, because it contains valuable uranium, and Marie needed a lot of it. In 1898, the Curies published strong evidence supporting the existence of the new element – which they called radium – but they still had no sample of it. They realised that pitchblende contained another new element, far more radioactive than polonium, but present in even smaller quantities. When the Curies investigated further, they found that the liquid left behind after they had extracted polonium was still extremely radioactive. Polonium was a new chemical element, atomic number 84. Eventually, they extracted a black powder 330 times more radioactive than uranium, which they called polonium. They ground up samples of pitchblende, dissolved them in acid, and began to separate the different elements present, using the standard analytical chemistry techniques of the time. Pierre and Marie Curie set about working to search for the unknown element. Marie was convinced she had found a new chemical element – other scientists doubted her results. Since nobody had ever found it before, it could only be present in tiny quantities, and it seemed to be very radioactive. Further work convinced her the very large readings she was getting could not be caused by uranium alone – there was something else in the pitchblende. Marie also noticed that samples of a mineral called pitchblende, which contains uranium ore, were a great deal more radioactive than the pure element uranium. He had shown that the rays were able to pass through solid matter, fog and photographic film and caused air to conduct electricity. The Curies became research workers at the School of Chemistry and Physics in Paris and there they began their pioneering work into invisible rays given off by uranium – a new phenomenon which had recently been discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel. It is of course this version of her name that our charity uses, along with our hospices, Marie Curie Nursing Service and our Companion service.

It was also around this time that she adopted the French spelling of her name – Marie. It was in Paris, in 1894, that she met Pierre Curie – a scientist working in the city – and who she married a year later.

She immediately entered Sorbonne University in Paris where she read physics and mathematics – she had naturally discovered a love of the subjects through her insatiable appetite for learning. However, when her sister offered her lodgings in Paris with a view to going to university, she grasped the opportunity and moved to France in 1891. To become a teacher – the only alternative which would allow her to be independent – was never a possibility because a lack of money prevented her from a formal higher education. Born Maria Sk łodowska on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, she was the youngest of five children of poor school teachers.Īfter her mother died and her father could no longer support her she became a governess, reading and studying in her own time to quench her thirst for knowledge.

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