“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” – Marie Curie

Marie Curie Biography

Maria Sklodowska Curie was born in Warsaw, which was then known as the Russian partition of Poland, on 7 November 1867. Maria was the youngest of five children born to teachers Bronislawa and Wladyslawa Sklodowski. Her elder siblings were three sisters Zofia, Helena and Bronislawa and a brother called Jozef. In the past, the family had been pretty well off, but they had lost their fortune and property through involvement with national uprisings aimed at restoring Polish independence. Consequently, Maria and her family were condemned to a life of struggle. Maria’s grandfather had been a teacher and his son, Maria’s father, followed in his footsteps and taught physics and mathematics. When the Russian authorities banned laboratory instruction in Polish schools, Wladislaw brought the lab equipment home and taught his children how to use it.

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In 1875 disaster struck the family when Maria’s elder sister Zofia contracted typhus from one of the family’s lodgers and died. Less than three years later, in May of 1878 when Maria was only ten years old, her mother died from tuberculosis. After her mother’s death, Maria attended the boarding school of J. Sikorska before moving on to the gymnasium for girls from which she graduated with a gold medal in 1883. Because she was female, Maria couldn’t attend any higher education institutions so she and her sister Bronislawa became involved with the Flying University, a clandestine Polish patriotic place of higher learning, which did accept women.

Shortly afterwards, Bronislawa left to study in Paris and Maria took a job as a governess, first as a home tutor and then for two years with a family who were relatives of her father. In 1890, Bronislawa invited Maria to join her and her new husband in Paris, but it would take 18 months of saving sufficient funds before Maria could take up the offer. During this time, she continued to educate herself through reading books and exchanging letters. In 1889, she returned home to Warsaw and to her father and shortly after began her scientific training in a chemical laboratory at the Museum of Industry and Agriculture, which was run by her cousin Jozef Boguski who had been an assistant to Dmitri Mendeleev in St. Petersburg.

In 1891 Maria joined her sister in Paris and it was from this point forwards that she would become known as Marie. She rented a garret in the Latin Quarter of Paris and struggled to make ends meet. She studied mathematics, physics and chemistry during the day at the University of Paris and earned her keep in the evening through tutoring work. In 1893 she was awarded her degree in physics and earned a second degree in 1894.

After graduating, Marie began her scientific career investigating the magnetic properties of different steels. It was during this time that she met Pierre Curie. Their mutual love of science brought them ever closer and Pierre proposed marriage. However, Marie had wanted to go back to Poland and continue her work and studies there. She did return to Warsaw in 1894 but was denied a place at Krakow University because she was a woman. A letter from Pierre persuaded her to return to Paris and the pair were married on 26 July 1895. The dark blue outfit Marie wore in lieu of a wedding gown (neither had wanted a religious ceremony) served her for years as a laboratory outfit.

Following the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895 and the discovery of the properties of uranium by Henri Becquerel in 1896, Marie decided to research uranium more closely for a thesis she was putting together. Using an electrometer, which had been invented by Pierre and his brother fifteen years earlier,