50 Fun Facts About Marie Curie

Marie Curie was the youngest of how many children born to teachers Bronisława and Władysław Skłodowski?

Her father taught maths and physics and, after Russian authorities banned lab classes, brought the equipment home to teach his children.

What was Curie's maiden name?

She used both surnames throughout her life and never lost her sense of Polish identity.

Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. In which two fields?

She remains the only person to win in two different sciences; Linus Pauling is the only other double laureate in two fields.

Which two elements did Marie and Pierre Curie discover in 1898?

They also coined the word 'radioactivity' in the course of the work.

Polonium was named in honour of what?

Poland would remain partitioned among Russia, Austria and Prussia for another twenty years.

Radium takes its name from the Latin word for what?

The Curies announced it on 26 December 1898, five months after polonium.

Whose discovery that uranium salts emitted penetrating rays set Curie on her thesis topic?

Becquerel shared the 1903 Physics Nobel with the Curies; Röntgen's X-rays a year earlier had been the other spur.

Which sensitive instrument, developed by Pierre Curie and his brother, did Marie use to measure uranium's activity?

Her key early finding was that activity depended only on the amount of uranium present, hinting it came from the atom itself.

Which uranium ore, four times as active as uranium itself, led Curie to suspect an unknown element?

Torbernite, also called chalcolite, was twice as active; the Curies eventually processed tonnes of ore.

From a tonne of ore, how much radium chloride did the Curies manage to isolate by 1902?

Radium is chemically close to barium, which made the differential crystallisation arduous; pure radium metal followed in 1910.

Where did the Curies carry out most of their radium research?

The former dissecting room was badly ventilated and not even waterproof, and they worked without protection.

Curie's early higher education in Warsaw came through which clandestine institution that admitted women?

She could not enrol at a regular university because she was a woman.

While working as a governess to fund her sister's studies, Curie fell in love with which future mathematician?

His parents rejected the penniless relative; as an old professor he would sit before her statue outside the Radium Institute she founded in her homeland.

Curie's cousin Józef Boguski, who ran the Warsaw lab where she first trained, had assisted which chemist?

The laboratory was at the Museum of Industry and Agriculture near the Old Town.

In which year did Marie leave Poland to study in Paris?

She rented a garret in the Latin Quarter, sometimes forgot to eat, and wore all her clothes at once to keep warm.

Curie's first commissioned scientific work in Paris investigated the magnetic properties of what?

The Society for the Encouragement of National Industry funded it, and her search for lab space led her to Pierre.

Marie and Pierre married in July 1895 in Sceaux. What did she wear instead of a bridal gown?

Neither wanted a religious service; their shared pastimes were long bicycle trips and travel.

Curie's 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared with Pierre and which other scientist?

The committee had meant to honour only the men until Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler tipped Pierre off.

Pierre Curie died in April 1906 how?

It happened on the Rue Dauphine; the University of Paris then gave Marie his chair, making her its first woman professor.

In 1906 Curie became the first woman to hold what post?

The Academy of Sciences rejected her by one or two votes in 1911, electing a wireless-telegraph inventor instead.

Curie's 1911 election bid to the French Academy of Sciences failed narrowly to which inventor?

Branly had helped Marconi develop wireless telegraphy; no woman was elected until her student Marguerite Perey in 1962.

Curie's affair with which physicist, a former student of Pierre's, caused a press scandal in 1911?

Tabloids painted her as a foreign home-wrecker; the Nobel committee chair tried to stop her attending the Chemistry ceremony.

Which Nobel committee chair tried to dissuade Curie from attending her 1911 ceremony over the scandal?

She replied that there was 'no relation between her scientific work and the facts of her private life'.

During the First World War Curie developed mobile X-ray units. What were they nicknamed?

She trained in radiology, anatomy and car mechanics, and about a million wounded soldiers were treated with her units.

Which teenage relative helped Curie run the wartime radiology units at first?

Irène was 17; she and her husband later won their own Nobel Prize.

What did the French National Bank refuse to accept from Curie when war broke out?

She bought war bonds with her Nobel money instead, expecting it would probably be lost.

Curie's 'radium emanation' needles used a gas later identified as what?

She used them to sterilise infected tissue, drawing on her own one-gram supply of radium.

Which US president presented Curie with a gram of radium at the White House in 1921?

Journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney had raised the money through a Marie Curie Radium Fund.

Which French decoration did Curie refuse, both in 1909 and again before her 1921 US trip?

The government was embarrassed she had no French distinction to wear abroad; she and Pierre often turned down medals.

How many further Nobel laureates did the Radium Institute produce under Curie's leadership?

Two of them were members of her own family; the lab ranked with the Cavendish, Vienna's Radium Institute and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.

From 1922 Curie sat on a League of Nations body alongside Einstein and Bergson. What was it called?

She served on it until 1934 and joined the International Atomic Weights Committee in 1930.

Who became the first director of the Warsaw Radium Institute when it opened in 1932?

Curie's second American tour, in 1929, raised the radium to equip it.

Curie died in July 1934 of which condition?

Radiation had damaged her bone marrow; a 1995 examination suggested wartime X-rays rather than radium were the likelier cause.

Where did Curie die, aged 66?

She had visited Poland for the last time only a few months earlier.

In 1995 Marie Curie became the first woman honoured on her own merits at which Paris monument?

The coffins were sealed in lead because of the radioactivity; Sophie Berthelot had preceded her only as a wife.

Because of their radioactivity, how must Curie's papers from the 1890s be handled?

Her cookbooks, too, are still highly radioactive; radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years.

Which synthetic element, atomic number 96, is named after the Curies?

The unit of radioactivity, the curie, and three minerals including sklodowskite also carry the family name.

Which of Curie's daughters wrote the biography Madame Curie in 1938?

Irène became a scientist; Ève, born in 1904, became a writer.

Which actress played Curie in the 2019 film Radioactive?

Greer Garson had the role in 1943 and Isabelle Huppert in 1997; Marjane Satrapi directed the 2019 film.

Which physicist supervised Curie's 1903 doctorate?

She had also worked in Lippmann's industrial laboratory after her first degree.

Between 1898 and 1902 the Curies published how many scientific papers?

One reported that radium destroyed tumour cells faster than healthy ones, a founding observation of radiotherapy.

Why did the Curies never profit from the radium industry that grew from their work?

Curie wanted the scientific community to research unhindered; Einstein said she was probably the only person fame could not corrupt.

Curie has been depicted on French 50 euro cent coins since which year?

The ECB has also selected her for a future 20 euro note if a 'European culture' theme is chosen.

Curie's mother died of which disease when Marie was ten, prompting her to abandon Catholicism?

Her eldest sister Zofia had died of typhus caught from a boarder less than three years earlier.

Curie's element polonium was never isolated by her. What is its half-life?

Its chemical resemblance to bismuth had made discovering it relatively easy compared with radium.

In 1880 Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques demonstrated which effect in compressed crystals?

The quartz electrometer they invented to study it became the tool Marie used for her celebrated radioactivity measurements.

On which Paris street was Pierre Curie killed by a horse-drawn cart in April 1906?

He slipped in the rain at the Quai de Conti and a wheel ran over his head; he and Marie were moved to the Panthéon crypt in 1995.

For which discovery did Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie win the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Marie and Irène remain the only mother-daughter Nobel pair; Pierre and Irène are the only father-daughter pair.

What government post did Irène Joliot-Curie take under the Popular Front in 1936?

She was one of the first three women to serve in a French government, and in 1945 became a commissioner of the new atomic energy commission.

What is thought to have caused the leukaemia that killed Irène Joliot-Curie in 1956?

A sealed capsule of polonium had exploded on her laboratory bench; her family asked for the religious and military parts of her state funeral to be dropped.