Marie Curie and her Tragic Life
MARIE CURIE AND HER TRAGIC LIFE
Hello friends welcome to the session. Today we will discuss about Marie Curie and her tragic life. So without late lets go the topic.
In 1927, 29 of the top physicists gathered at the prestigious Solvay Conference in Brussels, the only woman in attendance was Marie Curie, she had a lot of firsts, she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize.
Maria’s eldest sibling, her sister Zofia, caught typhus from one of the lodgers and died. A few years later when Maria was 10 her mother died of tuberculosis, the tragedies caused Maria to give up Catholicism the faith of her mom and become agnostic.
She earned a degree in physics and then another in mathematics, she planned on returning to Poland, but then Pierre Curie came into her life, he was 8 years older, a well-known physicist, and an outsider who was educated by his father in his teens, they were introduced by a mutual friend who knew marine needed lab space for research and Pierre headed a laboratory of the School of Industrial physics and chemistry.
Where engineers were trained, Murray would see if he had dedicated his life to his dream of science, he felt the need of a companion who could live his dream with him, and he hoped that companion would be her. But Marie turned down his marriage proposal.
Since her plan was to return to her native country, however she learned that it wouldn’t be possible to start a career in Poland, when she went back to visit her family during summer break in 1894, Krakow University denied her job as professor because she was a woman, Pierre convinced her to come back to Paris to pursue a PhD.
She realized through her experiments that radiation was a property of the element of uranium. Yet when she observed the mineral pitchblende which primarily contains uranium, she noticed it was far more radioactive than uranium could explain how could this be, it would only be possible if there were something else in the pitchblende. Pierre was so intrigued that he dropped his own work to join her in their search, they ground up 10s of pitch blind and discovered an element that was 400 times more radioactive than uranium, polonium, named after her country of birth, and then they discovered another element and I gave off 900 times more radiation than polonium: radium, the unglamorous work of extracting and isolating the elements took place in a leaky and drafty shack and your pals work as they didn’t have a dedicated lab space.
Their efforts paid off the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 went to Marie, Pierre and Bequerel for the research in radiation. French academics originally proposed that only Pierre and Becquerel had received the prize, leaving Marie out. A sign of the times, however a sympathetic member of the nominating committee, Swedish mathematician, Gosta Mittage-Leffler situation. He insisted that his wife, shared the honor, Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
She and her husband were too busy with their research to accept the award in person in Stockholm. Pierre was also sick, suffering from pain and fatigue. They had no idea at the time that radiation could be detrimental to their health. It is said that Marie would carry tubes of radium in their pockets. She was fascinated by what she described as faint fairy lights. Little did she know this was slowly killing her.
The glowing green radium captivated the public, it would be a key element in early cancer treatment, and would also find its way into everyday products toothpaste with the promise of benefiting teeth and facial creams in the belief that it would for muscles and smooth out wrinkles, the element was so popular that in the 1920s, a single gram of radium costs more than $100,000, well over a million today.
The Curies could have tried to patent radium and cash in big time, But they did it, Murray declared radium is a chemical element, a property of all humans. After their groundbreaking work, it was Pierre, who would be promoted as head of the physics department at the Sorbonne.
Yet he still didn’t have a proper lab Pierre complaint in the university relented, however, he would never get his dream of working in a new laboratory, because tragedy struck less than two years after the birth of their second daughter.
On a rainy day in April 1906 Pierre was walking across the Rue Dauphine when he was run over by horse and carriage, he died instantly. Pierre’s father implied that his son’s preoccupation with his own thoughts contributed to his death. Marie was offered his academic posts to the south but instead of accepting a widow’s pension, she became the first female professor in France, hundreds of people lined up outside the university hoping to attend her first lecture, the period following her husband’s death would be the most difficult of her life.
She was determined to use her research to save the lives of French soldiers, she had studied the work of German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, who had discovered X-rays, Curie that brought X-ray machines to the battlefield by inventing mobile units called “ Little curries “ to help surgeons locate and remove shrapnel and bullets from wounded soldiers.
She and her daughter Irene trained 150 women to drive these little cars and drove on herself. Despite the danger, Curie also oversaw 200 radiological rooms in field hospitals, it’s estimated that by the end of the war. Her efforts saved the lives of a million men but may have cost her own.
Despite her humanitarian efforts the French government never gave her any official recognition, whereas she was gaining increasing fame abroad, in 1921, US President Warren Harding invited her to the White House, and gave her a gift of a gram of radium, to aid in her research, the French government was apparently embarrassed by the fact that they gave her no distinctions, so before that trip to DC, they offered her the country’s most distinguished honor the Legion d’Honneur,-the Legion honor.
At last we want to thank you for give your valuable time to read our content. If you really enjoy this article and want to read more this type of article then please visit our website www.top10seriz.in
If you have any Suggestion for us then please mention in our comment section
Originally published at https://www.top10seriz.in.
