Marie Curie's Shed

Part One · A Student in Paris

Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867, and her name at birth was Maria Sklodowska. Her parents were teachers who valued learning, and she was an outstanding student from a very young age. At that time, however, Poland was ruled by a foreign empire, and women were not allowed to attend the university in Warsaw. Marie refused to abandon her dream of studying science. She worked as a tutor for several years, saved her money carefully, and helped her older sister pay for medical school in Paris, hoping that her own turn would come afterward. She never lost her love of books and numbers, and even as a girl, she could read for hours, and she did not mind the noise around her.

In 1891, Marie finally traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne, one of the most respected universities in Europe. She arrived with very little money, and she rented a tiny attic room that was freezing in the winter. Some days she ate little more than bread and tea, because she was so absorbed in her studies that she forgot about meals. Her determination paid off. She earned a degree in physics and then another in mathematics, finishing near the top of her class both times despite the difficulties that she faced. The city was new and strange to her, and she had to learn French well, but she kept her eyes on her goal and did not give up.

In Paris she met a quiet, thoughtful physicist named Pierre Curie, who shared her passion for research. They discovered that they enjoyed talking about science as much as anything else, and they were married in 1895. Their partnership soon became one of the most productive in the history of science. A few years later, they had a daughter named Irene, who would also become a famous scientist. The family lived modestly, and the couple spent most of their waking hours in the laboratory, working side by side on difficult problems. They also loved to ride their bicycles in the countryside, and those quiet trips gave them a rest from the long days in the lab.

Part Two · The Mystery Rock

In 1896, a French scientist named Henri Becquerel noticed that a metal called uranium gave off mysterious rays, even when it was kept in the dark. Marie decided that this strange puzzle would be the subject of her research. She measured the rays with a delicate instrument that Pierre and his brother had invented, and she discovered that the strength of the rays depended only on how much uranium was present. Eventually she gave this behavior a name, radioactivity, which is the word that scientists still use today. At first, nobody knew what these rays were or where they came from, so it was a mystery, and Marie loved a good mystery very much.

Marie tested many different minerals, and she noticed something that astonished her. A black, heavy rock called pitchblende, which contains uranium, was far more radioactive than the uranium inside it should have allowed. She reasoned that the rock must hide some other substance, one that nobody had ever found. It was a bold idea, because most scientists of the time believed that the list of elements was nearly complete. Pierre was so impressed that he put aside his own work in order to help her search for the unknown material. She did not know if she was right, and she had to test her idea, and testing it would take a great deal of time and hard work.

They needed a place to work, and the school where Pierre taught could offer only an old shed that had once been used as a storeroom. The roof leaked when it rained, the floor was made of packed dirt, and the stove hardly warmed the room in winter. In summer, the glass roof made the shed unbearably hot. Marie later wrote that it was a miserable place, yet she also remembered those years as the happiest and most peaceful time of her whole life, since she and Pierre could focus completely on their work. There was no money for a fine laboratory, and no one else wanted the space, so they made the best of what they were given.

Part Three · The Shed

In 1898, the Curies announced that they had found two new elements inside the pitchblende. Marie named the first one polonium, in honor of her homeland of Poland, which was not even an independent country at that time. The second one gave off so much radiation that they called it radium, from the Latin word for ray. Many scientists doubted that these elements really existed, because the Curies had not yet produced any pure sample that others could examine. To convince the doubters, they would need to isolate radium. It was a thrilling moment for the two scientists, but an announcement was not enough, and they knew that the hardest work was only starting.

That task turned out to be enormously difficult, because the amount of radium in the rock was almost unimaginably small. The Curies obtained several tons of pitchblende from a mine in Bohemia, and Marie spent four years processing it. She boiled the material in huge iron pots and stirred the bubbling mixture with a rod that was nearly as tall as she was. Then she dissolved it, filtered it, and separated it into smaller and smaller portions. It was exhausting physical labor, and the fumes made her cough. Pierre helped with the measuring while Marie did most of the heavy work, and day after day, the same steps were repeated again and again.

By 1902, Marie had obtained about one tenth of a gram of pure radium salt, which is roughly the weight of a few grains of rice. It had taken tons of rock to produce a speck. Late in the evening, the Curies sometimes returned to the shed to look at their work. The tiny containers of radium glowed in the darkness with a soft blue-green light. Marie later said that the glowing tubes looked like faint fairy lights shining on the shelves, and she found the sight beautiful. Their friends were amazed that so small a bit could matter so much, because it was proof that the Curies were right, and the doubters were quiet at last.

Part Four · A Life of Firsts

The world soon recognized how important the discovery was. In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel, and Marie became the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize. Sadly, in 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident in Paris. Marie was heartbroken, yet she did not stop working. The university asked her to take over his position, and she became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne, where she continued the research that they had begun together. She had two small daughters to raise, yet she taught, wrote, and kept up her research, and she managed all of it with quiet strength and calm.

In 1911, Marie received a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium. She was the first person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and her record is still rare today. Doctors had already learned that radium could treat certain kinds of illness, because its rays could damage unhealthy cells. Marie did not try to become wealthy from the discovery. She and Pierre had decided not to patent the process, so that researchers around the world could use it freely. The idea caught the attention of the public, and newspapers around the world printed her picture, and people lined up to hear her speak.

When World War One began in 1914, Marie wanted to use her knowledge to help wounded soldiers. X-ray machines could show doctors where a bullet or a broken bone was hidden, but most of the machines were in big city hospitals, far from the battlefields. Marie helped build small vehicles that carried X-ray equipment directly to the front, and these vehicles became known as little Curies. She learned to drive one herself, and she taught many young women to operate the machines. Thousands of soldiers were helped by this work. The job was not easy or safe, and the roads were rough, but she kept going, and her cars rolled on to wherever the doctors were needed.

Marie Curie died in 1934, after an illness that was probably caused by years of working with radioactive materials. In her day, nobody yet understood how dangerous those materials could be, and scientists often handled them with bare hands. Today the notebooks she left behind are still slightly radioactive, and they are kept in special boxes. Her courage and curiosity changed science and medicine, and she remains an inspiring example of what one determined person can accomplish, even in a leaky old shed with a dirt floor. Her daughter Irene carried on the family work and won a Nobel Prize of her own, and so the Curie story lived on, across the years, in a second generation.