Marie Curie's wedding dress was dark blue, and she wore it in the lab
She studied at a secret university in Warsaw, bundled herself in every piece of clothing she owned to survive Paris winters, and married in a plain blue outfit that became her working clothes. Maria Sklodowska went on to become the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, then under Russian rule, Maria was the youngest of five children of two teachers. Her family had lost its wealth through support for Polish uprisings. When Russian officials stripped laboratory work from Polish schools, her father carried the equipment home and taught his children with it. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Maria was ten, a loss that, with her sister Zofia's death from typhus, turned her away from religion.
Universities would not admit women, so she and her sister Bronislawa joined the underground Flying University. The sisters struck a deal: Maria would work as a governess to fund Bronislawa's medical training in Paris, and later receive the same help. While a governess she fell for the family's son, Kazimierz Zorawski, whose parents refused the match; decades later, as an old professor, he would sit quietly before her statue in Warsaw. She reached Paris in late 1891, living in a garret, sometimes forgetting to eat, and took a physics degree in 1893.
A colleague introduced her to Pierre Curie because she needed lab space. Pierre offered to move to Poland if she wished, but after Krakow University turned her down for being a woman, she returned to Paris, and they married on 26 July 1895 without a religious ceremony. Inspired by Henri Becquerel's uranium rays, she used an electrometer built by Pierre and his brother and found the radiation depended only on the amount of uranium present. That pointed to something happening inside the atom itself.
The couple shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, and she coined the word radioactivity. Pierre died in a street accident in 1906; that year she became the University of Paris's first female professor. A second Nobel, in chemistry, came in 1911 for radium and polonium, the latter named for Poland. During World War I she built mobile X-ray units for field hospitals. She died in 1934, aged 66, of aplastic anaemia probably caused by radiation, and in 1995 became the first woman laid in the Pantheon on her own merits.
Source: Marie Curie
