47 Fun Facts About Marie Curie

Which Paris research institute co-founded Curie's Radium Institute?

Pasteur Institute: its director Émile Roux launched the project, and a Pasteur lab studying radiation's effects on living things worked beside Curie's.

What was Curie's maiden name?

Skłodowska: she used both surnames, taught her daughters Polish and took them on visits to Poland.

Besides Marie Curie, who is the only person awarded Nobel Prizes in two different fields?

Linus Pauling: after his Chemistry prize, he won the Peace Prize for campaigning to stop nuclear weapons testing.

Marie Curie's son-in-law Henry Labouisse led which organisation when it won the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize?

UNICEF: the United Nations created it in 1946 to bring food and medicine to children and mothers hit by the Second World War.

Radium takes its name from the Latin word for what?

Ray: the name honoured the energy radium gives off as rays, and in 1910 Curie finally isolated it as a pure metal.

Why did Marie and Pierre Curie skip the 1903 Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm?

Too ill and busy to travel: they finally made the trip in June 1905, when Pierre gave his Nobel lecture.

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

An electrometer: her measurements showed uranium's rays were a property of the atom itself, not of its chemistry.

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

Pitchblende: the new elements were so scarce in it that the Curies had tonnes of the ore shipped in from Joachimsthal in Bohemia.

Radium was hard for the Curies to isolate because it most closely resembles which element chemically?

Barium: their ore held both, so they separated radium by repeated crystallisation, reaching about a decigram of radium chloride by 1902.

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

A converted shed next to ESPCI: the visiting chemist Wilhelm Ostwald called it a cross between a stable and a potato shed.

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

The Flying University: an underground network teaching in Polish, it defied the Russian Empire's control over Warsaw's schooling.

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

Kazimierz Żorawski: his parents refused to let him marry her because her family was poor.

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

Dmitri Mendeleev: he left gaps in his periodic table and correctly predicted what missing elements such as gallium would be like.

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

Various steels: needing a larger lab for the project, she was introduced to Pierre Curie, who a friend thought might have space.

Which pastime did newlyweds Marie and Pierre Curie take up to relax together?

Cycling: they spent money received as a wedding present on a bicycle each, and long rides became their way to relax.

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

Henri Becquerel: the French Academy's nomination named only him and Pierre, until a committee member tipped Pierre off and he insisted Marie be included.

How did Pierre Curie die in April 1906?

Struck by a horse-drawn vehicle in the rain: his sudden death left Marie to raise their two young daughters.

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

Professor at the University of Paris: she took over Pierre's chair after his death, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne.

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

Édouard Branly: his coherer, an early detector of radio waves, was developed further by Guglielmo Marconi for wireless telegraphy.

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

Paul Langevin: letters stolen from his flat were leaked to the press, which cast Curie as a foreign home-wrecker.

Which Swedish Nobel committee member urged Curie to stay away from her 1911 prize ceremony?

Svante Arrhenius: she replied that her scientific work had no relation to her private life, and went to Stockholm anyway.

What were the mobile X-ray units Marie developed for First World War field hospitals nicknamed?

Petites Curies: she fitted vans with X-ray equipment and generators, and trained young women to work as X-ray aides.

In July 1916, what did Marie Curie obtain so she could take her X-ray work to the front herself?

A driving licence: she then drove one of the X-ray vans herself and went regularly to the front to take radiographs.

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

Her gold Nobel medals: when the bank turned them down, she put her Nobel Prize money into war bonds instead.

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?

Warren G. Harding: journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney had raised the money, and he presented the gram on behalf of the women of America.

Which French decoration did Marie Curie refuse, as Pierre had done before her?

The Legion of Honour: Pierre had turned it down saying he saw no need to be decorated, and Marie refused it in 1909.

After Pierre's death in 1906, what did Marie Curie refuse to accept?

A pension: she answered that she was perfectly able to support herself.

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 sister Bronisława: Marie's second American tour, in 1929, raised the radium that equipped the institute.

Curie died in July 1934 of which condition?

Aplastic anaemia: radiation from her research and wartime X-ray work had likely damaged her bone marrow.

Where did Curie die, aged 66?

A sanatorium in Haute-Savoie: she lived to see Irène and Frédéric discover artificial radioactivity, but not the Nobel Prize it won them.

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

The Panthéon: her remains and Pierre's were moved there from the Curie family vault in Sceaux.

Curium, the element named after the Curies, has served as the alpha-particle source aboard which spacecraft?

NASA's Mars rovers: their X-ray spectrometers fire curium's alpha particles at rocks to work out what the rocks are made of.

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

Ève: published in 1937, the book became a bestseller in many countries and was filmed by MGM in 1943.

Which actress played Curie in the 2019 film Radioactive?

Rosamund Pike: the pandemic cancelled the film's cinema openings in Britain and the US, so it was released online in 2020.

Which former professor of Curie's presented her April 1898 radiation findings to the French Academy of Sciences?

Gabriel Lippmann: she could not present the work herself because she was not a member of the Academy.

Where did Pierre Curie strap radium for ten hours?

His arm: the burn-like wound it left suggested radium could attack cancerous tissue as it had attacked healthy tissue.

Why did the Curies earn little from the radium industry their work launched?

They deliberately did not patent it: they argued pure research must stay free of industry's profit motive so others could study radium.

On France's 2024 euro coins, Curie joined Simone Veil and which other woman?

Josephine Baker: the three women took over coins long given to the Sower, who still appears beside them.

Curie's mother died of which disease when Marie was ten?

Tuberculosis: that loss, with her eldest sibling Zofia's death from typhus, led Maria to give up Catholicism.

Which element did Curie find gives off rays like uranium, only for Gerhard Schmidt to report it first?

Thorium: finding a second element that gave off these rays showed they did not belong to uranium alone.

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

Piezoelectricity: quartz clocks rely on it, using a vibrating quartz crystal to keep regular time.

Pierre Curie's 1905 Nobel lecture warned that radium could become very dangerous in the hands of whom?

Criminals: yet like Alfred Nobel with his explosives, he believed humanity would draw more good than harm from new discoveries.

Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie saw signs of which particle in 1932 but misread them?

The neutron: James Chadwick identified it weeks later and won the 1935 Physics Nobel, the year they won Chemistry for artificial radioactivity.

What post did Irène Joliot-Curie accept in Léon Blum's Popular Front government in 1936?

Undersecretary for Research: she later resigned the post to get back to her scientific research.

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

Radiation from polonium-210: she had studied polonium's alpha rays since her thesis, and her X-ray exposure is also thought to have played a part.