Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Industrial Age

Polonium and Radium — Marie Curie

1898 AD · Transmission: Silenced
ChemistryInventionSlavic

Marie Skłodowska-Curie, born in Warsaw (Poland under Russian rule), discovers together with Pierre Curie polonium (July 1898, named in honor of Poland) and radium (December 1898), isolating both elements from pitchblende through years of manual processing of tons of ore. She coins the term "radioactivity" to describe the spontaneous emission of radiation by certain elements — a property initially discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896. She receives the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 (shared with Pierre Curie and Becquerel) and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, becoming the only person to receive the Nobel Prize in two different disciplines. The French Academy of Sciences denied her membership in 1911 because she was a woman and a foreigner, the same year as her second Nobel Prize. Curie's radioactivity is the foundation of nuclear medicine, oncological radiotherapy, and radiometric dating.

InstitutionÉcole Normale Supérieure / EPHE / Radium Institute, Paris
Historical regionPoland (Warsaw, under Russian rule) / France (Paris)
Primary sourceCurie, P.; Curie, M.S.; Bémont, G. — "Sur une nouvelle substance fortement radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende" (Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, 26 December 1898)
Secondary sourceNobel Prize — Physics 1903; Nobel Prize — Chemistry 1911; Britannica — Marie Curie
Original languageFrench
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