What kind of scientist was marie curie

She threw herself into her studies, but this dedication had a personal cost: with little money, Curie survived on buttered bread and tea, and her health sometimes suffered because of her poor diet. Curie completed her master's degree in physics in and earned another degree in mathematics the following year. Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on July 26, A romance developed between the brilliant pair, and they became a scientific dynamic duo who were completely devoted to one another.

At first, Marie and Pierre worked on separate projects. But after Marie discovered radioactivity, Pierre put aside his own work to help her with her research. Marie suffered a tremendous loss in when Pierre was killed in Paris after accidentally stepping in front of a horse-drawn wagon. Despite her tremendous grief, she took over his teaching post at the Sorbonne, becoming the institution's first female professor. Curie was derided in the press for breaking up Langevin's marriage, the negativity in part stemming from rising xenophobia in France.

Curie discovered radioactivity, and, together with her husband Pierre, the radioactive elements polonium and radium while working with the mineral pitchblende. She also championed the development of X-rays after Pierre's death. Curie conducted her own experiments on uranium rays and discovered that they remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium.

The rays, she theorized, came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics. Curie herself coined the word "radioactivity" to describe the phenomena.

Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in They named the element polonium, after Curie's native country of Poland. They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende and called that radium. In , the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element. When World War I broke out in , Curie devoted her time and resources to help the cause.

She championed the use of portable X-ray machines in the field, and these medical vehicles earned the nickname "Little Curies. After the war, Curie used her celebrity to advance her research. She traveled to the United States twice — in and in — to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw. Marie Sklodowska Curie — was the first person ever to receive two Nobel Prizes: the first in in physics, shared with Pierre Curie her husband and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of the phenomenon of radioactivity, and the second in in chemistry for the discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium.

The daughter of impoverished Polish schoolteachers, Marie Sklodowska worked as a governess in Poland to support her older sister in Paris, whom she eventually joined there. Already entranced with chemistry, she took advanced scientific degrees at the Sorbonne, where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist who had achieved fame for his work on the piezoelectric effect. In , after laboriously isolating various substances by successive chemical reactions and crystallizations of the products, which they then tested for their ability to ionize air, the Curies announced the discovery of polonium, and then of radium salts weighing about 0.

At the age of 17, Curie became a governess to help pay for her sister's attendance at medical school in Paris. Curie continued studying on her own and eventually set off for Paris in November Curie was a focused and diligent student, and was at the top of her class.

In recognition of her talents, she was awarded the Alexandrovitch Scholarship for Polish students studying abroad. The scholarship helped Curie pay for the classes needed to complete her licianteships, or degrees, in physics and mathematical sciences in One of Curie's professors arranged a research grant for her to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel.

That research project put her in touch with Pierre Curie, who was also an accomplished researcher. The two were married in the summer of Pierre studied the field of crystallography and discovered the piezoelectric effect , which is when electric charges are produced by squeezing, or applying mechanical stress to certain crystals.

He also designed several instruments for measuring magnetic fields and electricity. According to Goldsmith, Curie coated one of two metal plates with a thin layer of uranium salts. Then she measured the strength of the rays produced by the uranium using instruments designed by her husband. The instruments detected the faint electrical currents generated when the air between two metal plates was bombarded with uranium rays.

She found that uranium compounds also emitted similar rays. In addition, the strength of the rays remained the same, regardless of whether the compounds were in solid or liquid state. Curie continued to test more uranium compounds.

She experimented with a uranium-rich ore called pitchblende, and found that even with the uranium removed, pitchblende emitted rays that were stronger than those emitted by pure uranium. She suspected that this suggested the presence of an undiscovered element. In March , Curie documented her findings in a seminal paper, where she coined the term "radioactivity.