Marie Curie is one of the genius women known to the world. She discovered and invented a lot of things that we can’t imagen our life without it nowadays. Let’s discover five genius facts about Marie Curie.
Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, spent many hours in the science lab investigating a material called pitchblende. While investigating it they found two new elements inside. These two elements were added to the periodic table. Polonium was one of the elements. Radium was the other element. She named it this because it gave off such strong rays. Marie and Pierre Curie also came up with the term “radioactivity” to describe other elements that let off strong rays.
In1903, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marie and Pierre Curie to recognise their work in radiation. Marie won another Nobel Prize in 1911, but this time in Chemistry for discovering the two elements, polonium and radium. This meant she was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes. This achievement led Marie to become very famous and she was high in demand with many scientists wanting to study radioactivity with her. Radioactivity is used today to help cure cancer.
At the beginning of World War, Marie realised that doctors could use X-rays to help figure out what was wrong with an injured soldier. There was one problem however. There weren’t enough X-ray machines for every hospital to have one. Marie saved many lives by coming up with the innovative idea that the X-ray machines could move from hospital to hospital in a truck. As Director of the Red Cross Radiological Service, she raised money, supplies and vehicles which could be converted to create mobile x-rays. Marie then trained people to run the machines. These trucks became known as “Petites Curies”, which translated to “little Curies”.
She named the element ‘polonium’ after her native country of Poland. Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 7th November 1867. During this time the people of Poland were going through a very hard time with a shortage of food and many people dying from hunger. By naming her element after Poland, she was shining a light on the treatment they were suffering.
Marie died on July 4, 1934. She died from overexposure to radiation. Her experiments and from her work with X-ray machines led her to be exposed to too much radiation. At the time, little was known about the effects of radiation on those that were exposed with it. Marie’s work allowed scientists to learn from. Today there are lots of safety measures to keep scientists from getting overexposed to the rays.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about Anne Frank as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic this person is, you can move on to learn about famous people like: Anne Acheson, Frank Pantridge, John Boyd Dunlop, Annie Maunder, James Martin, William Shakespeare, Anne Frank, Hatshepsut, Galileo Galilei, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Al-Biruni and Alexander Pope.
You can also move on to learn more about STEM like: Electricity, PH Scale, Lasers, Rainbows, Fireworks, Gases, Chemical Reactions, Acids and Bases, Electromagnetic Waves and States of Matter.
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