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Who discovered radium in 1898?
Marie won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium, using techniques she invented for isolating radioactive isotopes. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes.
Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered radioactivity by studying the mineral pitchblende, which contains polonium and radium. They also shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on radiation phenomena.
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- Early life
- Move to Paris, Pierre Curie, and first Nobel Prize
Working with her husband, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium in 1898. In 1903 they won the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering radioactivity. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for isolating pure radium. Following work on X-rays during World War I, she studied radioactive substances and their medical applications.
What awards did Marie Curie win?
With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win the award in two different fields.
Why was Marie Curie important?
Marie Curie’s contributions to physics were immense, not only in her own work, as indicated by her two Nobel Prizes, but also through her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists. Her work paved the way for the discovery of the neutron and artificial radioactivity.
Marie Curie (born November 7, 1867, Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire—died July 4, 1934, near Sallanches, France) Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields.
From childhood she was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 she won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and, at the same time, took part clandestinely in t...
In 1891 Skłodowska went to Paris and, now using the name Marie, began to follow the lectures of Paul Appell, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. There she met physicists who were already well known—Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton. Skłodowska worked far into the night in her student-quarters garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann’s research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of that year that she met Pierre Curie.
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Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular the discovery of polonium (so called by Marie in honour of her native land) in the summer of 1898 and that of radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery (1896) of a new phenomenon (which she later called “radioactivity”), Marie Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did.
Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose activity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie then joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state—achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. On the results of this research, Marie Curie received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and, with Pierre, was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also in 1903 they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.
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Together they worked on the theory of ‘radioactivity’, a word that she created. In 1895 Marie and Pierre discovered that a metal called radium could kill cancer cells. She was the first...
Dec 1, 1996 · On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen at the University of Würzburg, discovered a new kind of radiation which he called X-rays. It could in time be identified as the short-wave, high frequency counterpart of Hertz’s waves.
The term radioactivity was actually coined by Marie Curie, who together with her husband Pierre, began investigating the phenomenon recently discovered by Becquerel. The Curies extracted uranium from ore and to their surprise, found that the leftover ore showed more activity than the pure uranium.
As often happens in science, radioactivity came close to being discovered nearly four decades earlier in 1857, when Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor, who was investigating photography under Michel Eugène Chevreul, observed that uranium salts emitted radiation that could darken photographic emulsions.
