On This Day: Marie and Pierre Curie Discover Radium

Husband-and-wife team Marie and Pierre Curie laid the cornerstone of the nuclear age with their research on radioactivity—a term that Marie coined to describe the rays emitted by uranium.

On Dec. 21, 1898, having already been credited with discovering the radioactive isotope polonium, named for Marie’s birth country, Poland, the duo identified another new element by observing the emissions from barium. It took three years to isolate this new element from naturally occurring compounds, and it was presented to the scientific community as “radium.”

The couple was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their research on a phenomenon called “spontaneous radiation.”

Marie, in a January 1904 article in Century magazine, reflected on how the advances being made in chemistry and physics at the time emphasized the need for further work in science overall. “Once more we are forced to recognize how limited is our direct perception of the world which surrounds us, and how numerous and varied may be the phenomena which we pass without a suspicion of their existence until the day when a fortunate hazard reveals them,” she wrote.

But Marie Curie’s endeavors broke new ground for the women's movement as well as science. Marie Sklowdowska Curie fought the sexual and nationalist prejudices of France’s Academy of Sciences, the discriminatory attitudes of which meant she lost a seat on its esteemed board in 1910 despite her exemplary career. Right-wing newspapers claimed that the Polish-born scientist “was not really French and thus undeserving of a seat in the French Academy,” according to the American Institute of Physics.

She was vindicated a year later when she won her second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. She grew to become an outspoken advocate for women in the sciences. In a May 14, 1921, speech to students at Vassar College, which was then an all-female institution, she said, “It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.”

Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium was a boon to medical science. However, before its potential for harm was understood, radiation was thought to be a panacea capable of curing all kinds of illnesses, and its over-zealous use had unfortunate side effects.

Marie

Marie went to Paris in 1891 and studied at the Sorbonne, where she received her doctorate in physics and met her husband Pierre Curie. After radioactivity was discovered in 1896, the married couple embarked on research that resulted in the discovery of two chemical elements: polonium and radium.

Marie and Pierre Curie were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their work on radiation. After her husband’s death in 1906, Marie took over his professorial position. Curie won her second Nobel Prize, again for her research into radioactivity, in 1911, that time for chemistry. Curie died of radiation poisoning in 1934.

Pierre

Born in Paris on May 15, 1869, into a family of scientists, Pierre Curie would become a leader in the research of magnetism and radioactivity. A lack of funds prevented him from entering the Sorbonne upon reaching adulthood, so he first worked at the storied institution as a laboratory instructor. He met his future wife, Maria Sklowdowska, while employed at the university.

Among his many discoveries he learned that a given substance’s magnetism changes at a certain temperature, now known as the “Curie point.” In 1903, the year he won the Nobel with his wife, the Royal Academy of London gave him the prestigious Davy Prize, and he was elected to France’s Academy of Sciences in 1905. He was killed in a carriage accident in 1906.

An article running in The New York Times on May 1, 1921, said that Marie Curie was destined for greatness thanks to her natural curiosity and industriousness. Elaborating on the scientist’s early life, the paper wrote, “Her nursery was a laboratory. Instead of dolls, she played with test tubes while her father, M. Sklowdowski, professor of physics at the University of Warsaw, was working at his experiments.”