Â鶹APP

Pierre Curie and Marie Curie. Photo by Smithsonian Institution.

Top 10 Remarkable Facts about Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. He and Marie discovered radium and polonium in their investigation of radioactivity. An exceptional physicist, he was one of the main founders of modern physics.

Many people are familiar with his wife Marie Curie’s accomplishments but might not know about his own work. Pierre Curie was born on May 15, 1859, in Â鶹APP, France, to Eugene Curie and Sophie-Claire Depouilly Curie. Curie received his early education from his father, a doctor. Here are the Top 10 Remarkable Fcats about Pierre Curie.

1. He married his lab assistant

The Curie Family; Marie, Pierre and daughter Irene, sit on an outdoor bench posing for a picture. Photo by © CORBIS.

Possibly the most important meeting in Curie’s life was with the woman who would become his wife and scientific partner, earning many accolades for herself and making countless discoveries, Marie Sklodowska. Pierre’s friend, physicist Jozef Wierusz-Kowalski, introduced them.

Marie became Pierre’s lab assistant and student. The first time Pierre proposed to Marie, she refused him, but she eventually agreed to marry him on July 26, 1895. Aside from sharing their lives, their union produced one of the most famous scientific pairings in history.

2. Together with his wife, they were the first to use the word radioactivity

Pierre and Marie Curie were the first to use the word “radioactivity,” and a unit used to measure radioactivity, the Curie, is named in honor of one or both of them (a topic of debate among historians).

Pierre and Marie also discovered the elements radium and polonium. Additionally, they were the first to discover nuclear energy from heat emitted by radium. They observed that radioactive particles might carry a positive, negative, or neutral charge.

3. He was given a Nobel prize in Physics

Pierre and Marie Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel for their research of radiation. Pierre and Marie Curie were awarded half of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radiation.

The other half of the prize went to Henri Becquerel, whose work had informed the Curies’ research. The Curies were also awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1903. In 1905, Pierre Curie was elected to the Academy of Sciences.

4. Pierre discovered the piezoelectric effect

Pierre Curie co-discovered the piezoelectric effect with his brother Jacques. The piezoelectric effect describes the creation of an electric field by compressed crystals. Pierre and Jacques found that crystals could deform when subjected to an electrical field, and they invented the Piezoelectric Quartz Electrometer to aid in their investigations.

5. He died in a street accident

Pierre and Marie Curie in 1900. Photo by Vitold Muratov.

Curie died on April 19, 1906, in a street accident in Â鶹APP, France. He was crossing a street in the rain, slipped, and fell under a horse-drawn cart. He died instantly from a skull fracture when a wheel ran over his head. Statements made by his father and lab assistant imply that Curie’s characteristic absent-minded preoccupation with his thoughts contributed to his death.

6. He is considered one of the founders of modern Physics

Pierre Curie is considered one of the founders of modern physics. The element curium, atomic number 96, is named in honor of Pierre and Marie Curie. Pierre Curie developed many scientific principles that are still relevant today.

For his doctoral research, he formulated a description of the relationship between temperature and magnetism that became known as Curie’s law, which uses a constant known as the Curie constant. He found there was a critical temperature above which ferromagnetic materials lose their behavior.

7. His children took up the mantle after him

Pierre’s working space. A laboratory in France where the experiments were carried out. Photo by Pierre Curie.

Pierre and Marie Curie had children that would become successful in their fields too. Pierre and Marie’s daughter Irene and son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie were physicists who studied radioactivity and also received Nobel prizes.

Their other daughter Eve wrote a biography about her mother. Pierre and Marie’s granddaughter Helene are a nuclear physics professor and grandson Pierre Joliot—named for Pierre Curie—is a biochemist.

8. Pierre had a Math degree at 16!

Curie received his early education from his father, a doctor. He earned a math degree at age 16 and had completed the requirements for a higher degree by age 18, earning the “licence ès sciences” (the equivalent of a master’s degree in the U.S.) at the Sorbonne in Â鶹APP. He could not immediately afford to pursue his doctorate, so he began working at the school as a lab instructor in 1878.

9. Pierre experienced radium burns during research

Both the Curies experienced radium burns, both accidentally and voluntarily, and were exposed to extensive doses of radiation while conducting their research. They experienced radiation sickness and Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia in 1934. Even now, all their papers from the 1890s, even her cookbooks, are too dangerous to touch.

Their laboratory books are kept in special lead boxes and people who want to see them have to wear protective clothing. Most of these items can be found at Bibliothèque nationale de France. Had Pierre Curie not been killed as he was, it is likely that he would have eventually died of the effects of radiation, as did his wife, their daughter Irène, and her husband Frédéric Joliot.

10. The Curie unit is named after him

Diploma of Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in december 1903 to Pierre and Marie Curie. Both shared this distinction with Henri Becquerel, whose name is mentioned on the document. Photo by Sofia Gisberg. .

The Curie is a unit of measurement used to describe the intensity of a sample of radioactive material and is named after Marie and Pierre Curie. He also discovered that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a critical temperature transition, above which the substances lost their ferromagnetic behavior.

This is now known as the Curie temperature. The Curie temperature is used to study plate tectonics, treat hypothermia, measure caffeine, and to understand extraterrestrial magnetic fields.