Marie and Pierre Curry

Marie and Pierre Curie

Throughout the 1800s, our views on science have drastically changed, mostly thanks to Marie and Pierre Curie. Marie and Pierre were married physicist and chemist who made many discoveries such as Radiation. They weren't your typical scientists, they were just average people, Marie was proclaimed to be an everyday woman from Poland. While Pierre had more of a substantial background, he was a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity. But the two both found love in each other when she moved to France for University when she was not accepted into Poland university because of her gender, but when she met Pierre who knew they would forever change science.

         Marie studied the radiation of all compounds containing the known radioactive elements, including uranium and thorium. She found out that the ability to produce radiation does not depend on the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule, you can measure the strength of the radiation from uranium and the force of the radiation is related to the amount of uranium or thorium in the compound. Not too long after her investigation, her husband Pierre stopped his research to help his wife with hers. Together they decided there might be an element in the compound that had a stronger radiation than Uranium. In 1898 Marie and Pierre discovered two new radioactive elements radium and polonium.

         In 1903 The Curies and Henri Becquerel won a Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering radioactivity. A year later Pierre Curie died in a car collision, Marie then dedicated herself to her work. she became the first person to win a second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry and took Pierre’s place at a university in Paris becoming the school's first female teacher. 1938 Marie died of leukemia, Also like her husband she continued to experiment until she died exploring deeper and deeper into the world of science, continuing to change our scientific views.