97 Fun Facts About Marie Curie

Which Paris research institute co-founded Curie's Radium Institute?

Pasteur Institute: its director Émile Roux launched the project, and a Pasteur lab studying radiation's effects on living things worked beside Curie's.

What was Curie's maiden name?

Skłodowska: she used both surnames, taught her daughters Polish and took them on visits to Poland.

Besides Marie Curie, who is the only person awarded Nobel Prizes in two different fields?

Linus Pauling: after his Chemistry prize, he won the Peace Prize for campaigning to stop nuclear weapons testing.

Marie Curie's son-in-law Henry Labouisse led which organisation when it won the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize?

UNICEF: the United Nations created it in 1946 to bring food and medicine to children and mothers hit by the Second World War.

Radium takes its name from the Latin word for what?

Ray: the name honoured the energy radium gives off as rays, and in 1910 Curie finally isolated it as a pure metal.

Why did Marie and Pierre Curie skip the 1903 Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm?

Too ill and busy to travel: they finally made the trip in June 1905, when Pierre gave his Nobel lecture.

Which sensitive instrument, developed by Pierre Curie and his brother, did Marie use to measure uranium's activity?

An electrometer: her measurements showed uranium's rays were a property of the atom itself, not of its chemistry.

Which uranium ore, four times as active as uranium itself, led Curie to suspect an unknown element?

Pitchblende: the new elements were so scarce in it that the Curies had tonnes of the ore shipped in from Joachimsthal in Bohemia.

Radium was hard for the Curies to isolate because it most closely resembles which element chemically?

Barium: their ore held both, so they separated radium by repeated crystallisation, reaching about a decigram of radium chloride by 1902.

Where did the Curies carry out most of their radium research?

A converted shed next to ESPCI: the visiting chemist Wilhelm Ostwald called it a cross between a stable and a potato shed.

Curie's early higher education in Warsaw came through which clandestine institution that admitted women?

The Flying University: an underground network teaching in Polish, it defied the Russian Empire's control over Warsaw's schooling.

While working as a governess to fund her sister's studies, Curie fell in love with which future mathematician?

Kazimierz Żorawski: his parents refused to let him marry her because her family was poor.

Curie's cousin Józef Boguski, who ran the Warsaw lab where she first trained, had assisted which chemist?

Dmitri Mendeleev: he left gaps in his periodic table and correctly predicted what missing elements such as gallium would be like.

Curie's first commissioned scientific work in Paris investigated the magnetic properties of what?

Various steels: needing a larger lab for the project, she was introduced to Pierre Curie, who a friend thought might have space.

Which pastime did newlyweds Marie and Pierre Curie take up to relax together?

Cycling: they spent money received as a wedding present on a bicycle each, and long rides became their way to relax.

Curie's 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared with Pierre and which other scientist?

Henri Becquerel: the French Academy's nomination named only him and Pierre, until a committee member tipped Pierre off and he insisted Marie be included.

How did Pierre Curie die in April 1906?

Struck by a horse-drawn vehicle in the rain: his sudden death left Marie to raise their two young daughters.

In 1906 Curie became the first woman to hold what post?

Professor at the University of Paris: she took over Pierre's chair after his death, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne.

Curie's 1911 election bid to the French Academy of Sciences failed narrowly to which inventor?

Édouard Branly: his coherer, an early detector of radio waves, was developed further by Guglielmo Marconi for wireless telegraphy.

Curie's affair with which physicist, a former student of Pierre's, caused a press scandal in 1911?

Paul Langevin: letters stolen from his flat were leaked to the press, which cast Curie as a foreign home-wrecker.

Which Swedish Nobel committee member urged Curie to stay away from her 1911 prize ceremony?

Svante Arrhenius: she replied that her scientific work had no relation to her private life, and went to Stockholm anyway.

What were the mobile X-ray units Marie developed for First World War field hospitals nicknamed?

Petites Curies: she fitted vans with X-ray equipment and generators, and trained young women to work as X-ray aides.

In July 1916, what did Marie Curie obtain so she could take her X-ray work to the front herself?

A driving licence: she then drove one of the X-ray vans herself and went regularly to the front to take radiographs.

What did the French National Bank refuse to accept from Curie when war broke out?

Her gold Nobel medals: when the bank turned them down, she put her Nobel Prize money into war bonds instead.

Curie's 'radium emanation' needles used a gas later identified as what?

She used them to sterilise infected tissue, drawing on her own one-gram supply of radium.

Which US president presented Curie with a gram of radium at the White House in 1921?

Warren G. Harding: journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney had raised the money, and he presented the gram on behalf of the women of America.

Which French decoration did Marie Curie refuse, as Pierre had done before her?

The Legion of Honour: Pierre had turned it down saying he saw no need to be decorated, and Marie refused it in 1909.

After Pierre's death in 1906, what did Marie Curie refuse to accept?

A pension: she answered that she was perfectly able to support herself.

From 1922 Curie sat on a League of Nations body alongside Einstein and Bergson. What was it called?

She served on it until 1934 and joined the International Atomic Weights Committee in 1930.

Who became the first director of the Warsaw Radium Institute when it opened in 1932?

Curie's sister Bronisława: Marie's second American tour, in 1929, raised the radium that equipped the institute.

Curie died in July 1934 of which condition?

Aplastic anaemia: radiation from her research and wartime X-ray work had likely damaged her bone marrow.

Where did Curie die, aged 66?

A sanatorium in Haute-Savoie: she lived to see Irène and Frédéric discover artificial radioactivity, but not the Nobel Prize it won them.

In 1995 Marie Curie became the first woman entombed on her own merits in which Paris monument?

The Panthéon: her remains and Pierre's were moved there from the Curie family vault in Sceaux.

Curium, the element named after the Curies, has served as the alpha-particle source aboard which spacecraft?

NASA's Mars rovers: their X-ray spectrometers fire curium's alpha particles at rocks to work out what the rocks are made of.

Which of Curie's daughters wrote the biography Madame Curie?

Ève: published in 1937, the book became a bestseller in many countries and was filmed by MGM in 1943.

Which actress played Curie in the 2019 film Radioactive?

Rosamund Pike: the pandemic cancelled the film's cinema openings in Britain and the US, so it was released online in 2020.

Which former professor of Curie's presented her April 1898 radiation findings to the French Academy of Sciences?

Gabriel Lippmann: she could not present the work herself because she was not a member of the Academy.

Where did Pierre Curie strap radium for ten hours?

His arm: the burn-like wound it left suggested radium could attack cancerous tissue as it had attacked healthy tissue.

Why did the Curies earn little from the radium industry their work launched?

They deliberately did not patent it: they argued pure research must stay free of industry's profit motive so others could study radium.

On France's 2024 euro coins, Curie joined Simone Veil and which other woman?

Josephine Baker: the three women took over coins long given to the Sower, who still appears beside them.

Curie's mother died of which disease when Marie was ten?

Tuberculosis: that loss, with her eldest sibling Zofia's death from typhus, led Maria to give up Catholicism.

Which element did Curie find gives off rays like uranium, only for Gerhard Schmidt to report it first?

Thorium: finding a second element that gave off these rays showed they did not belong to uranium alone.

In 1880 Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques demonstrated which effect in compressed crystals?

Piezoelectricity: quartz clocks rely on it, using a vibrating quartz crystal to keep regular time.

Pierre Curie's 1905 Nobel lecture warned that radium could become very dangerous in the hands of whom?

Criminals: yet like Alfred Nobel with his explosives, he believed humanity would draw more good than harm from new discoveries.

Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie saw signs of which particle in 1932 but misread them?

The neutron: James Chadwick identified it weeks later and won the 1935 Physics Nobel, the year they won Chemistry for artificial radioactivity.

What post did Irène Joliot-Curie accept in Léon Blum's Popular Front government in 1936?

Undersecretary for Research: she later resigned the post to get back to her scientific research.

What is thought to have caused the leukaemia that killed Irène Joliot-Curie in 1956?

Radiation from polonium-210: she had studied polonium's alpha rays since her thesis, and her X-ray exposure is also thought to have played a part.

Polonium, the first element Marie Curie discovered, was used in 2006 to poison which former Russian agent in London?

Alexander Litvinenko, who had defected to Britain, died about three weeks after he was hospitalised; it remains the only confirmed case of the element being used as a murder weapon.

Marie Curie married in 1895 in a dark blue ensemble that went on to serve her for years as what?

Her laboratory outfit for many years was the dark blue one she chose instead of a bridal gown, at a town-hall wedding where neither she nor Pierre wanted a religious service.

Marie Curie kept tubes of radioactive material in her desk drawer and remarked on which property of them?

Their faint light in the dark caught her eye, and she also carried tubes around in her pocket, because the damaging effects of such exposure were not yet known.

When Russian officials ended laboratory lessons in Warsaw schools, what did Marie Curie's father do with the equipment?

Took it home and showed his children how to use it; he taught maths and physics himself and was later sacked by his Russian supervisors for pro-Polish sentiments.

Which star of The Queen's Gambit played Marie Curie's grown-up daughter Irène in the 2019 film Radioactive?

Anya Taylor-Joy shot the role in Hungary in 2018, two years before The Queen's Gambit; the film was adapted from a graphic novel by the American artist Lauren Redniss.

The second married couple to share a Nobel Prize, in 1935, were related to Marie Curie in what way?

Daughter and her husband: Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie were honoured for making ordinary elements radioactive in the laboratory, a year after Marie's death.

The Curie Institute that Marie Curie founded in Paris now runs a hospital specialising in treating which disease?

Cancer was the target from the start: the world's first studies of treating tumours with radioactive isotopes were carried out under her direction.

A musical about Marie Curie that played London's Charing Cross Theatre in 2024 was first staged in which country?

South Korea premiered the show in 2018, and it was staged in Asia and Europe before an English version with new arrangements reached London.

Which flower is the emblem of Marie Curie, the British charity that cares for people with terminal illnesses?

A daffodil has been the charity's emblem since 1986, chosen as a bright symbol of resilience, and supporters wear one each March during its Great Daffodil Appeal.

The 'Radium Girls', American factory workers poisoned by the element Marie Curie discovered, had been painting what?

Watch dials were coated with glowing radium paint, and the women were told to point their brushes on their lips, swallowing a little of the metal each time.

Marie Curie's eldest sister, Zofia, died of which disease caught from a boarder lodging in the family home?

Typhus killed Zofia less than three years before their mother also died, a double loss that led the young Marie to give up her Catholic faith and become agnostic.

By which pet name was the young Marie Curie known to her family in Warsaw?

Mania was the youngest of five; her sisters Zofia and Helena were Zosia and Hela, and she only became Marie after moving to France.

A year after her 1893 physics degree, Marie Curie earned a second degree at the Sorbonne in which subject?

Mathematics came with the help of a fellowship, while she lived in a Latin Quarter garret and tutored in the evenings to pay her way.

What did Marie Curie do in 1897 with the scholarship money that had supported her as a student four years earlier?

Paid it back is what she did, as soon as she began earning her keep; she later gave much of her first Nobel award to friends, family, students and research associates.

How did the student Marie Curie keep warm through cold winters in her garret in the Latin Quarter of Paris?

Wore all her clothes at once, the story goes, and she studied so hard in that garret that she sometimes forgot to eat.

The Warsaw museum devoted to Marie Curie's life and work occupies which building on Freta Street?

Her birthplace, an 18th-century tenement, became a museum in 1967, a century after she was born there; German forces had demolished it in 1944 and it was rebuilt after the war.

Which Nobel-winning author of Quo Vadis led a delegation urging Marie Curie to move her research back to her homeland?

Henryk Sienkiewicz headed the group of Polish men of learning who made the appeal, but she stayed in Paris, where her Radium Institute was about to be built.

Which English physicist and suffragette was the friend with whom Marie Curie stayed in England during 1912?

Hertha Ayrton, an engineer and inventor, persuaded the petition-shy Curie to sign a protest against the imprisonment of suffragists.

To persuade Marie to marry him, Pierre Curie offered to move to her homeland even if it meant working as what?

A language teacher, giving French lessons, was all he expected to be there; in the end a letter from him brought her back to Paris to study for a doctorate.

Marie Curie was first introduced to Pierre in 1894 because she was hunting in Paris for what?

Laboratory space was what her first research commission required, and a physicist friend thought Pierre could help; he had no large laboratory himself but found her room to begin.

After sharing the 1903 Physics prize, Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize alone in 1911 in which field?

Chemistry made her the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and she remains the only one honoured in two different sciences.

Polonium was the only substance in the Curies' ore that behaved like which metal, making it the easier element to find?

Bismuth was polonium's lookalike, which made the discovery relatively easy; isolating it was another matter, and Curie never managed it, as the element has a half-life of only 138 days.

Whose 1895 discovery of X-rays helped steer Marie Curie towards studying uranium for her doctoral thesis?

Wilhelm Röntgen called them X because they were an unknown, and in 1901 the find made him the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, two years before Curie shared it.

Radium, which Marie Curie isolated as a metal in 1910, belongs to which family of the periodic table alongside calcium?

Alkaline earth metals make up group 2 of the table, and radium is both the heaviest member and the only radioactive one.

Heated above the Curie temperature, a threshold named after Pierre Curie, a piece of iron loses which property?

Its magnetism vanishes at that point, an effect Pierre studied for his 1895 doctorate, the thesis Marie had insisted he finally write up before their wedding.

Marguerite Perey, hired at 19 as a technician to Marie Curie, went on to discover which element in 1939?

Francium, named after her home country, was her great find; in 1962 Perey became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences, a place her mentor had been refused.

Curium, the element named after Marie and Pierre Curie, was first made in 1944 by which American scientist's team?

Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues made it at Berkeley by firing alpha particles at plutonium, and he later had an element, seaborgium, named after him while he was still alive.

The ore waste the Curies processed for radium came from mines at Jáchymov, in what is now which country?

Czechia was then part of Austria-Hungary, and Jáchymov had already made history: its silver coins, called Joachimsthalers, gave the dollar its name.

At which invitation-only Brussels meeting, first held in 1911, did Marie Curie join Einstein, Rutherford and Poincaré?

The Solvay Conference took its name from the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay, and at the famous 1927 gathering Curie was the only attendee with Nobel Prizes in two sciences.

Pierre Curie and his student Albert Laborde showed that radium, all by itself, continuously gives off what?

Heat poured out of the radium sample with no outside supply of energy, a finding that has been called the first discovery of atomic energy.

During the First World War, Marie Curie became director of the radiology service of which humanitarian organisation?

The Red Cross post let her set up France's first military radiology centre by late 1914, after a quick study of anatomy and car mechanics.

What did Marie Curie buy with the Nobel Prize money she had left untouched in Stockholm until 1914?

War bonds took the money, which had been sitting in Swedish crowns; she said she had no illusions and expected that it would probably be lost.

Which US president handed Marie Curie $50,000 in 1929 to buy radium for a laboratory in Warsaw?

Herbert Hoover presented the gift, donated by American friends of science, during her second tour of the country; it bought radium for the institute in her native city.

Marie Curie crossed the Atlantic for her 1921 American tour aboard which sister ship of the Titanic?

RMS Olympic carried Curie and both her daughters to New York, where the journalists waiting on the dock included twenty-six photographers.

Marie Meloney, who organised Marie Curie's 1921 American tour and the fund for her radium, worked as what?

A magazine editor at The Delineator, Meloney won a rare interview with Curie in 1920, then ran a nationwide campaign to pay for the gram, which cost $100,000.

Marie Curie's younger daughter, the one member of the family who did not become a scientist, first performed as what?

A concert pianist from 1925, she later became a war correspondent whose reports from Africa, the Soviet Union and Asia were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

In which town just outside Paris did Marie and Pierre Curie marry in 1895 and lie buried until 1995?

Sceaux is also where she later lived with her daughters, in a house with gymnastics equipment in the garden; a lycée in the town now carries her name.

What was 'The Cooperative', which the widowed Marie Curie formed with other eminent scholars in Paris?

A school for their children: about ten pupils were taught in turn at the academics' own homes, with lessons ranging from science to sculpture and Chinese.

Between 1989 and 1996, Marie Curie's portrait appeared on a 20,000-unit banknote in which currency?

The złoty note was designed by Andrzej Heidrich, and France later put Marie and Pierre together on a 500-franc note.

What kind of facility near Warsaw, commissioned in 1974, is named 'Maria' as a tribute to Marie Curie?

A nuclear reactor built for research, Maria started up in December 1974 at the Świerk site in Otwock, four and a half years after construction began.

Which star of Mrs. Miniver played the title role in the 1943 Hollywood film Madame Curie?

Greer Garson earned one of her five consecutive Oscar nominations for the part, in the third of her eight screen pairings with Walter Pidgeon, who played Pierre.

Eusapia Palladino, whose 1905 Paris sessions Pierre and Marie Curie investigated, was famous across Europe as what?

A spiritualist medium from Italy, she was treated by Pierre as a scientific experiment: he monitored her séances and took detailed notes.

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize; which Austrian peace campaigner became the second in 1905?

Bertha von Suttner, the author of a celebrated pacifist novel, had briefly been Alfred Nobel's secretary and is believed to have influenced his decision to fund a peace prize.

After Marie Curie was widowed in 1906, which relative helped her bring up her two daughters until 1910?

Pierre's father, Dr Eugène Curie, had moved in with the family when his wife died, and he looked after the girls while Marie went out to work.

Marie Curie's institute was one of four leading radioactivity labs; which Cambridge one was run by Ernest Rutherford?

The Cavendish Laboratory shared that rank with Stefan Meyer's radium institute in Vienna and the German institute of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner.

Which Swedish mathematician warned Pierre Curie that Marie had been left off the 1903 Nobel nomination?

Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a committee member and advocate for women scientists, tipped Pierre off, and after Pierre complained Marie's name was added.

Which colleague, the discoverer of actinium, worked with Marie Curie in 1910 to isolate radium as a pure metal?

André-Louis Debierne and Curie ran a current through a radium salt solution with a mercury cathode, then heated the resulting amalgam in hydrogen to drive the mercury off.

In 2018 Marie Curie was posthumously awarded which decoration, the highest that her homeland can bestow?

Order of the White Eagle insignia were first handed out in 1705, making it one of the oldest state decorations still in use; Curie's came 84 years after her death.

Which Polish city is home to a university, founded in 1944, that carries Marie Curie's name?

Lublin had been freed from German occupation by Soviet troops only three months before the university opened in October 1944, while the war was still being fought.

How was Pierre Curie, the son of a Paris general practitioner, educated before he entered university?

He was homeschooled, yet he had a physics degree by 1878, while still in his teens, and stayed on at the university as a laboratory demonstrator.