When she saw the image she said, “I have seen my own death!” Which is a funny thing to say. He took the first ever x-ray, which is of his wife’s hand and is a very cool picture. There were rays coming off things, he didn’t know what the rays were so he called them ‘x-rays’. Around this time a physicist named Wilhelm Rontgen saw that things in his lab were glowing. Two years later they made a daughter and named it Iréne. They got married on the 26 th of July in 1895. Then he said he’d move to Poland and she said, “All right, fine, I’ll stay in Paris!” He begged her to stay but she was uncertain. But she wanted to move back to Poland to be with friends and family. So, Pierre and Marie were a great team, neither one was riding the other’s coattails. Piezoelectricity is hugely important and is involved in loads of things you do everyday, including regulating time in your Quartz watch. He worked out piezoelectricity and named it, then found it necessary to invent the Curie Scale, so he did that, and the temperature linked between heat and magnetism is called the Curie Point. Pierre Curie was also working on magnetic properties, but mainly with crystals and he was already quite brilliant, despite his terrifying crew cut. Now, the Legend of this month is Marie Curie, but I must not forget about her esteemed husband, Pierre Curie (he had the name first, Marie’s birth surname was Sklodowska… so I’ll push on with ‘Curie’). She completed degrees in Mathematics and Physics by 1893 and was hired by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to study the magnetic properties of steel. She was one of 23 women in a student body of 1,800. In 1891 she enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne. That’s the first eighteen years of this tribute done. The parents found out about the relationship and were having none of it because he was rich and she was poor, so her lover said it was over and she legged it to Paris. She fell in love with the son of the family who had come home from university. She took up a job as governess to save money. But she had her heart set on freedom of education in the Sorbonne in Paris. She took some education at the “Flying University” which was a clandestine, underground, Russian defying college for women. Her family had lost everything for trying to be Polish in the Russian Empire. Like a lot of geniuses or people of repute, her childhood wasn’t all roses. Dynamite gave him access to a huge fortune with which he established the Nobel Prize, two of which Mme. Marie Curie was born in Poland the year that Alfred Nobel patented dynamite, 1867. And yes, it is a big honour to be a HeadStuff Legend of the Month. Turns out she’s way more legendary and deserving of this honour than I thought. I decided I better read a book about her. When I first decided that Marie Curie would be the next Legend of the Month I only knew the standard stuff about her, that she was brilliant, won two Nobel prizes in different sciences, that for a while she was the first and only woman to do nearly everything and that she spent a lot of time with radioactive things. Well, it has not been easy.” – Marie Curie. “I have been frequently questioned, especially by women, how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career.
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