Around the time Marie was born, Bronisława began to exhibit signs of tuberculosis. The foreboding shadow of her illness haunted the family. When Marie was four years old, Bronisława began taking “rest cures” in the mountains or in other locales with a mild climate, in hopes of recovering her health. For two years, Bronisława spent most of her time away from home, taking her oldest daughter, Zofia (who was ten years old when the trips began), to help care for her. When Bronisława finally returned home, six-year-old Marie rushed to embrace her, but Bronisława, wanting to protect the child, forbade it. Marie would later note that she remembered her mother raising her palm up sharply and warning her to stay away in order to avoid infection. There would be no warm embraces between mother and child. Instead, Marie would crouch at her mother’s feet and gaze at her with intense adoration, while her mother would carefully and lightly touch the child’s forehead. It was the only physical gesture of affection she would receive.3
Throughout Marie’s childhood, her parents fought to keep the spirit of Polish nationalism alive in their children. When Marie was nine years old and her mother was too sick with tuberculosis to educate her children at home, Marie and her sister Hela were sent to a school run by Madame Jadwiga Sikorska, a kind and intelligent woman who was also a Polish patriot. Sikorska operated a double schedule: one taught the official Russian curriculum, and the other taught a secret curriculum of Polish language, history, and geography.4 “Home economics” on the official schedule actually meant Polish history, for example. The school was subject to regular inspections, so all of the students had to be alert to the sound of a bell that meant they needed to quickly hide their Polish work, and both teachers and students would then switch to speaking Russian.5
Marie’s exceptional intelligence was apparent very early. Though the youngest and smallest of her class, she was also the brightest and had the best command of Russian. Thus, she was often the student called upon to recite something in Russian when the dreaded inspector visited the school. She was also often asked to help her classmates with their math and other subjects. Although all of the Skłodowska children were very bright, Marie was easily the brightest.
In a cruel twist of fate, while Bronisława continued to weaken from tuberculosis, Zofia and another of Marie’s sisters, Bronia, contracted typhus. Bronia recovered, but Zofia, now fourteen years old, died. As described by Marie’s sister Helena, the death “literally crushed our mother; she could never accept the loss of her oldest child.”6 Bronisława lived for two more years and then succumbed to her tuberculosis. The ten-year-old Marie was devastated by the death of her mother and sister, and the grief would leave a deep and permanent impression on her nature. As noted in Chapter 1, she began to suffer from recurring bouts of deep depression—a pattern she retained throughout her life. Immediately after the deaths, Marie began to hide away and cry, but she would always attempt to conceal her emotions from her family and classmates. She focused obsessively on her schoolwork to push away her feelings. She rarely spoke, but she remained at the top of her class.
Despite Marie’s efforts to hide her feelings, Sikorska noticed her suffering and emotional fragility. She suggested to Marie’s father that perhaps his daughter should take a year off from school—she was, after all, already a grade ahead of her age. Instead, her father enrolled her in the much stricter and less nurturing Russian gymnasium. The Russian gymnasiums were more selective schools for academically talented children and were the only path to higher education. For the Skłodowskas, education always came first. Although Marie hated her teachers at the gymnasium and hated the curriculum that demonized Poland, she graduated first in her class at the age of fifteen and received a gold medal for being the best student of 1883.
Her education for the time being completed and thus no longer able to hide from her feelings in her schoolwork, Marie suffered a complete nervous collapse. Sinking into despair, she hid away in her darkened room. She did not speak, and she hardly ate. Władysław now seemed to finally recognize the depth of his daughter’s suffering and sent her to stay with relatives in the country. At first the broken Marie could only rest, but she gradually began to recover. Surrounded by nature and the playful warmth of family members, her spirits began to lift.
Marie returned to Warsaw in the fall of 1883, mostly recovered. Her father, who like many Polish educators had been demoted and had his salary reduced, fretted over how his children would secure a future when he had no money to send them to college. In the meantime, he continued his intense effort to further their education at home. A man of wide intellectual interests and expertise, he kept up with developments in chemistry and physics and continued his extensive reading in literature and poetry. He could speak five languages and would read aloud to the children every Saturday evening, often simultaneously translating from the text’s native language. As Marie’s daughter Eve would later write about her mother, “Thanks to her father she lived in an intellectual atmosphere of rare quality known to few girls of her age.”7
Despite the importance that Polish positivism placed on education as the key to patriotism and the nation’s eventual success in reemerging as an independent country, Polish universities were not open to women. Because Marie and her sisters had little money to travel elsewhere to pursue their educational ambitions, Marie, as noted in Chapter 1, began to focus on self-education, reading science, politics, literature, and poetry, while she developed a plan for furthering her educational career. She became involved in the “Flying University,” a clandestine academy started by Jadwiga Szczasinska-Dawidow in 1882 that delivered a university curriculum to Polish women who met secretly in supportive institutions around Warsaw. Marie described their ideals in a letter written forty years later: “We cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individual. Towards this end, each of us must work toward his own highest development, accepting at the same time his share of responsibility in the general life of humanity—our particular duty being to help those to whom we feel we can be most useful.”8 Education and patriotic fervor were thus tightly interwoven.
Marie used her earnings as a governess in Szczuki to support her sister Bronia, who would go to study in Paris at the Sorbonne. Then, when Bronia’s studies were complete, she would support Marie’s education in turn. While a governess, Marie sought other ways to support the cause of Polish positivism, which considered Polish peasants to be an untapped resource that could be empowered through education. Embracing these ideals with her typical intensity, Marie created and taught a class to ten Polish peasant children during the hours that she was free from her governess duties. This kind of project was forbidden by the government—and dangerous—but by this point in her life Curie already fully embraced education as a form of nationalistic resistance to Russian oppression.
When Bronia had completed her studies in Paris (one of only three women out of a student body of one thousand to graduate from the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Medicine), it was finally time for Marie to take her place in Paris. Initially she hesitated. Although she had an intense desire for education, depression and fear of a new environment proved difficult for her to overcome. Furthermore, she felt a sense of duty to her father, who was now living alone in Warsaw, so she decided to return and join him there. Fortunately, her cousin Józef Boguski was serving as the director of the Museum of Industry and Agriculture, a private, positivist-influenced institution in Warsaw. This gave Curie access to a chemistry laboratory, much to her delight. A brief taste of running experiments in the lab quickly reaffirmed her ambition of being a scientist. As later described by Eve, “When she took the test tubes of the Museum of Agriculture and Industry into her fine, clever hands, Manya [the family nickname for Marie] returned, as if by magic, to the absorbing memories of her childhood, to her father’s physics apparatus, motionless in its glass case, with which, in the old days, she had always wanted to play. She had taken up the thread of her life again.”9 In November 1891, twenty-three-year-old Marie finally boarded a train
bound for Paris to begin her studies at the Sorbonne.
Curie arrived in Paris with her clothes, a feather mattress, a little food and water, and a stool. She had almost no money and for twenty-five francs per month rented an unheated room where it could become so cold in the winter that the water in the washbasin would freeze. However, the apartment was close to the Sorbonne, and her solitary life afforded her time to focus intensely on her studies. She later referred to these years of “deprivation” as “one of the best memories of my life.”10
At the Sorbonne, education was basically free—there were only small fees for qualifying tests and diplomas. Students could attend classes as frequently as they desired and could take exams if and when they chose. In many ways the Sorbonne perfectly empowered and reaffirmed Curie’s habit of independent work. As she wrote, “The student who comes to France should not expect to find direction towards a utilitarian goal right at the start. The French system consists essentially of awakening the student’s confidence in his own abilities and fostering the habit of using them… the goal of the teachers is to create large possibilities for free work rather than to form disciples. Required exercises and scholarly discipline don’t play an essential role.”11
Curie was one of only twenty-three women of the two thousand students in the School of Sciences at the Sorbonne, but she seemed unconcerned or unaware of the disadvantages of her gender. Obsessed with her studies, she worked to such a degree of fatigue and malnutrition that she once fainted in the library. She passed her examination for a master’s degree in physics in 1893, ranking first in her class, and then in the following year received a master’s degree in mathematics, ranking second in her class. Her tenacity and talent paid off as one of her professors, Gabriel Lippman, arranged for Marie to receive a stipend to study the magnetic properties of steel.
Marie’s progress was hampered by a lack of sophisticated equipment; thus, a friend arranged to introduce her to Pierre Curie, a thirty-four-year-old physicist who had invented a number of instruments that might help her. By the time Pierre met Marie, he was already an accomplished scientist. Dyslexic as a child but with a profound capacity to visualize mathematical concepts, he had been homeschooled by his parents. By the age of sixteen he had achieved his science baccalaureate; unable to choose between physics and chemistry, he proceeded to study both. He studied physics at the Sorbonne and chemistry at the School of Pharmacy in Paris. Upon graduation he became an assistant to a professor at the Sorbonne and later formulated a general principle of symmetry related to magnetism. He and his brother then went on to create a state-of-the-art quadrant electrometer. As discussed further in the next chapter, this electrometer and Pierre’s tutelage in its use would turn out to be very important to Marie’s later discoveries.
Pierre had been generally indifferent to women, but after meeting the brilliant Marie, he was captivated and began to pursue her intensely. After a few years of persistent courtship, Marie agreed to marry Pierre, and they soon had a daughter, Irène. Although Marie initially tackled domestic life and parenthood with her characteristic diligence, she soon began to pine again for scientific work. Thus, in 1897 Pierre and Marie hired nurses to care for Irène. Pierre’s father also moved in with them to provide care for the girl so that both Marie and Pierre could go back to their work full time.
In 1895 the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had discovered that some type of mysterious ray could pass through various substances and create a fluorescent image on a piece of cardboard painted with barium platinocyanide. Using the mathematical meaning of “X” as unknown, he called them “X rays.”12 In the following year French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts also emitted radiation and could leave an image on a photographic plate.13 Although most of the public focused on X-rays because they were easy to produce and yielded dramatic results, Marie decided to study the “Becquerel rays,” which were relatively neglected because the rays were weaker and required uranium, which was almost impossible to obtain. Becquerel himself had used Pierre’s electrometer to attempt to measure the energetic rays that he had inadvertently discovered, but he was unable to master the delicate and complicated instrument. Marie, on the other hand, had the advantage of being with Pierre, who worked intensely to modify the machine to improve its sensitivity for detecting currents. He added a piezoelectric quartz (another of his discoveries), which improved the measurement of low-intensity electrical currents. Finally, he spent twenty days training Marie in how to use the extremely difficult device to measure Becquerel rays.
Marie used Pierre’s electrometer to measure the electric charge from pulverized uranium through a process that required exceptional persistence, focus, and dexterity. She soon noticed that other substances produced similar energetic rays and began to test a range of compounds. One of the compounds, pitchblende (a heavy black ore from which uranium has been extracted), produced rays four times as strong as pure uranium. The strength of the rays made her realize that there was a hitherto unknown element present in the pitchblende. With intense persistence and insatiable curiosity, she conducted experiment after experiment to attempt to identify what unknown element was generating the rays. It was during this process that she wrote a paper, the “Theory of Radioactivity,” positing that measuring radioactivity could be used to discover new elements—a finding that would pave the way for atomic science.
With Pierre helping to secure laboratory space and supplies of pitchblende, Marie worked tirelessly, distilling and fractionating the substances over the course of four years. Ultimately, she isolated one substance that was four hundred times as strong as uranium (which she named “polonium” after her beloved homeland). However, upon successfully identifying polonium, she immediately began attempting to identify yet another radioactive substance in the pitchblende, which turned out to be ten million times more radioactive than uranium (which she named “radium,” a name derived from the Latin for “ray”). In June 1903 she defended her work in a doctoral thesis titled Recherches sur les substances radioactives (translated as Research on Radioactive Substances), becoming the first woman in France to achieve this level of education. In the same year, a group of scientists (including Curie’s former professor Gabriel Lippmann) nominated Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of radioactivity, even though it was well-known that the discovery was primarily a result of Marie’s efforts. It was, after all, extremely unconventional for a woman in Europe to receive an education beyond the age of fourteen and virtually unthinkable for her to play serious roles in science or business. However, Pierre made it clear that the achievement was largely Marie’s and that he would not accept the award if Marie was not included.14 The committee relented and awarded half of the prize money to Becquerel “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity” and jointly awarding the other half to Pierre Curie and Marie Curie “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.”15 Curie thus became the first woman Nobel laureate and would continue to be the only woman to receive the award until thirty-two years later, when her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie received it in 1935. The discovery of radium would turn out to be her most remembered accomplishment, but scientists note that her greatest achievements were actually the discovery of radioactivity as an atomic property, her methods for isolating radioactive isotopes, and her discovery of a range of uses for those isotopes.
Throughout all their work isolating polonium and radium, the Curies never realized that the radioactivity was affecting their health. Pierre Curie had severe unexplained bone pain and weakness, and Marie Curie lost a lot of weight and had symptoms resembling tuberculosis. There were also bright moments—newfound fame had brought the Curies better positions and more resources. The couple also had a second daughter, Eve. Then tragedy struck: on a rainy night in 1906, Pierre was hit
by a horse-drawn carriage and died. Pierre’s death was a devastating blow to Marie. As Eve would later write about her mother, “From the moment when those three words, ‘Pierre is dead,’ reached her consciousness, a cape of solitude and secrecy fell upon her shoulders forever. Madame Curie, on that day in April, became not only a widow, but at the same time a pitiful and incurably lonely woman.”16
She returned to the laboratory the day after Pierre’s funeral. Over the next ten months, she completed a six-hundred-page book on radioactivity and gravity that Pierre had begun. She isolated herself in the laboratory, driving herself relentlessly, often until two or three in the morning.17 She avoided social contact. She even became emotionally isolated from her children, who fortunately had a close and warm bond with their jovial and affectionate grandfather, who continued to raise them. One of Eve’s earliest memories was of her mother falling to the floor, fainting from exhaustion. In periods when the exhaustion became too acute to overcome, she retreated to her bed and allowed no one to see her.
Without Pierre at her side, she was even more vulnerable to the sexism of the time. Not only was it unusual in the early twentieth century for women to be highly educated; it was also considered somewhat distasteful for them to have professional positions. Thus, even though Marie was a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, many other scientists did not give her the respect she would have been given as a man. She was excluded from the Academy of Sciences, which permitted no women; her papers had to be read by others in her stead. Lord Kelvin, who had been an admirer of Pierre Curie’s work and a supporter of the Curies in the earlier years, was now at odds with Marie over the age of the Earth and attacked her in the press. Kelvin had used thermal gradients to calculate the age of the Earth and concluded that it had to be somewhere between 20 million and 100 million years. He had assumed the Earth began as a molten object, and he based his calculations on the time it would take for the surface to cool to its current temperature. However, this was incompatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution, which suggested that the Earth had to be much older. The disagreement sparked an intense debate among scientists about the age of the Earth and the assumptions upon which calculations should be based. Kelvin stuck to his original arguments, and as late as 1897 even declared that the Earth’s age was probably much closer to the lower end of his estimate: 20 million years. Marie Curie’s discovery of radium pointed to the flaw in Kelvin’s logic: radioactivity meant that the Earth’s heat was being continuously replenished. Furthermore, radioactivity itself provided a means of calculating the age of rocks because it decayed at a known rate, and her calculations indicated that the Earth was at least twice as old as Kelvin’s calculations. In an unusually aggressive move that would normally be considered beneath the dignity of a great scientist, Kelvin wrote a letter to the London Times in 1906 in which he charged that radium was not an element at all, but rather a compound of helium. It was surprising that he had gone to the public press; the more typical action of a scientist would have been to publish a study in a scientific journal. It appeared that Kelvin wanted to publicly humiliate Curie and undermine the legitimacy of the science of radioactivity. In her typical fashion, she did not engage in the debate in the press; instead, she went back to the lab and spent three years proving radium’s atomic weight with extreme precision, dispelling all doubts about her methods and discoveries.18
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