"I was struck by his clear gaze and his attitude of abandon."
A sincere friendship based on study and scientific research was born between the two of them right away. Pierre found in Marie a woman who, like him, was passionate only about science. When he proposed marriage, Pierre wrote to her:
"It would be wonderful to spend our existence together, hypnotized by our dreams."
And so they did. In 1895 they married and two years later their first daughter, Irène, was born.
When she had to choose a topic for her doctoral thesis, she was struck by two very recent discoveries: X-rays and the rays emitted by uranium minerals, called "uranic". She decided to study the latter together with her husband Pierre, who was captured by Marie's enthusiasm. They then began to measure the radiation of uranium using a piezoelectric electrometer, invented by Pierre in collaboration with his brother. It was Marie who proposed the term radioactivity to indicate the ability of uranium to produce radiation. Through various experiments she had noticed that, taking some samples of uranium minerals, including pitchblende, the radioactivity was greater than in samples of pure uranium. This meant that these minerals contained elements that were not traceable in normal chemical analysis and were very radioactive.
In 1898, after having examined large quantities of pitchblende in great detail, they managed to isolate a small quantity of a new element that had chemical characteristics similar to bismuth but (about) 330 times more radioactive. They renamed it polonium, as a tribute to Maria's homeland.
Later, a second element called radium (from the Latin radium, ray) was also discovered. To give an idea of the amount of work, just think that it took them three years to isolate a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride. However, the Curies did not patent the radium extraction process, convinced that scientists should not derive economic benefits from their work and, above all, because they believed that radium could not have practical applications (today, however, radium chloride is used in medicine for the treatment of some types of cancer). Despite their sensational discoveries, neither had any official position nor adequate salaries to support their family or funds for their research. Only thanks to the intervention of Henry Poincaré, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the time, Pierre managed to obtain a chair at the Sorbonne.
In 1903, the definitive consecration came: Pierre and Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for Physics, established only two years earlier, for "their joint research on radioactive phenomena". Marie was the first woman ever to win this recognition and remained the only one in a scientific discipline until 1935, when it was awarded to their daughter Irène. At the height of her fame, in 1905, Marie gave birth to her second child, Ève. Unfortunately, on April 19, 1906, Pierre was hit by a horse-drawn carriage while crossing the street and killed instantly. Marie returned to work only three days after the incident, categorically refusing a pension that the French state made available to her. However, she did not refuse the offer to take Pierre's place at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to teach at the prestigious Parisian university. She sought to honor the memory of her late husband by creating a research laboratory that took shape in 1909 under the name of the Institut du Radium (now the Institut Curie). In 1911, Marie made history by winning her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry for "her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of radium and polonium," making her the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, the first person to be awarded twice, and the only person to win the prize in two different scientific fields.
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