Notes

Science is always moving forward and finding out things that impacts human lives. Isaac Newton said once that,"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." By that he was talking about the people before him that went through tough times working hard to investigate, experiment, and discover things for the future generation to have something to work from. One of those "giants"of the future was Marie Curie. Maria Sklodowska was born 7th November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland which was then part of the Russian Empire. She was born into a family where both of the parents were strict teachers. So from young age she showed interest for science as her dad was a physicist.Later she finished school with a gold medal but since in Poland at this time girls weren't allowed to pursue higher education she had to work as a governess to earn enough money to move to Paris.Once she left Warsaw for Paris, she continued her long studies of mathematics, physics, and chemistry at the University of Paris. Even there beside going to the University, she dedicated her every free minute to studying like she did before. This perseverance and dedication of Marie Curie is what impacted her era and the times beyond with her scientific discoveries.
Marie Curie was a hardworking scientist that influenced her time period by showing that she did not stop her education because of unreasoned bias At her times Poland did not allow women continue education in universities, however not pursuing education was not an option for her. So she soon joined a surreptitious institution called Flying University. This Flying University gave an opportunity to Polish students to continue education on the Polish language and accepted girls too. But later she moved to Paris and went to continue her education in the University of Paris. In the year she was born, in France it was allowed for the first time for women to attend Universities, especially the famous University of Paris. But in the 19th century there was a little amount of girls attending this university. Additionly to that when Marie enrolled in this course it turned out that she was the only girl there. There was attention coming to her from the surrounding her young men but she would decline any dates to go and work thoroughly in her little room that she was renting where she did all her work on a batten desk not minding the surroundings. That demonstrated in her era that even at tough times for girls, if one is hardworking and determined one can reach anything despite what others think.
Another example of being a girl scientist is when she married Pierre Curie and the newly wedded pair got a small laboratory room in the university where they practiced magnetism. Soon she began preparing a theme for her doctoral thesis, passed the exam, and became the first women who got the right to teach in an university. Then she and her husband began extracting barium chloride which took 3 long years at the end of which they extracted 0,1 gram of barium chloride. They presented the proof of it to the academy of science from which the news spread across the world about a newly discovered element. Then in November of 1903, the couple was informed that the Swedish committee of the Nobel Prize decided to issue them and Henri Becquerel the Nobel prize of physics for the year 1903. This created a disturbance between the public because they believed that Marie wasn't supposed to win because she was just the helper. But little did they know that in the laboratory that they worked together her as the chemist and him as the physicist complementing each other perfectly, and additionally to that her husband said in his speech at the Nobel ceremony that what his wife putted in to this discovery as far bigger from his effort. Show how this influenced her time.
Restate Thesis. She also influenced her time by continuing her and her husbands works after his death. It was a tragedy how he died, a mere accident. She never showed any emotions at the funeral because she let them out in her diary. Not even a month passed and she was offered to lecture students at the University of Paris instead of her husband. At first she hesitated but soon accepted. The emergence of a woman in professorship was an unprecedented change in the history of science in France. When she first lectured in Sorbonne, students were looking more at the lecturing woman rather than listening to what she was lecturing about. The only soothing for her angst was what her friends did is to show her that science and her kids still needed her. Soon she began training her kids and later expanded her laboratory from the financial help she got from Andrew Carnegie. How good this time doesn’t seem soon William Thomson, a famous engineer said that the Curies did not discover radium and that it is just the compound that is formed from Helium and Lead. Wanting to prove him wrong and prove that radium is an independent element she began working on extracting pure Radium not it saline. In order to do that one must be a master at this skill and waste lot of time on this process, so Marie Curie was up for the challenge. She feared that she will not spend any time with her kids but also felt like she owed it to her dead husband. In 1910 she was finally successful in extracting pure metallic radium and extracting just enough to present as a sample on the international science conference in Brussels. After that in honor of her the measuring unit of the level of radiation emitted was named "Curie". After the presentation of the pureness of the element, even William Thomson accepted that it wasn't a compound. Show how affects her era. after those agonizing years extracting radium, a lot of French scientists thought that it was necessary to elect her to be part of the academy of science, and thought it strange that after so many accomplishments she wasn't there. Nevertheless the bias against women— being stronger back then than now—was a strong obstacle against her. Because of this her nomination was declined on the day of the elections. However a year later she got notified by a letter from Stockholm that she was going to be awarded a Nobel prize for various Chemistry accomplishments. She became the 1st scientist in the world to be awarded twice for this great price. Show how this affects her era.
Restate Thesis. An accomplishment of hers that still influences us is the discovery of a new element named Polonium. Polonium was found by Marie and her husband Pierre Curie in the year 1898, it was also named after Poland Marie Curie's motherland. By naming the element after her homeland she wished to attract attention to the issue of Poland now not being an independent country but rather being partitioned and given to the Russian, Prussian, and the Austro-Hungarian empires.It was said that Polonium might be the very first element given a name to bring awareness to a political issue. This element was the first to be discovered from the Curies during their analysis of the reason of pitchblende radioactivity. After they have extracted uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements, they discovered that pitchblende was more radioactive than both those elements combined. Curies intrigued by this result continued their research on finding out more radioactive elements. After conducting long research they first sundered Polonium from pitchblende in the month of July in 1898. There are various uses to this highly reactive element, and as time goes there is more and more. During WWII, United States used Polonium as part of the Fat Man bomb designed to be dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Polonium is also majorly used as a heating resource. For instance, The Soviet Union used Polonium as a heat source for Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 to keep the interior and internal parts warm during the cold lunar nights. Also sometimes small amounts of Polonium, since it is dangerously radioactive are used in laboratories and for teaching motives to this day.
Another achievement of theirs that affects humanity to this day still is what they discovered five months later, also a new element, Radium. Marie and Pierre discovered radium when they were examining an uraninite sample on the 21st December of 1898. They were studying the mineral in the early months of 1898, when they removed uranium from it they found that the leftover material was yet radioactive. They separated the material and discovered Polonium. Then they parted a radioactive blend which they found consisted of compounds of barium and an unknown radioactive compound which gave off weird carmine spectral lines which were never recorded before. They saw that the unknown compound was very much alike to the barium compound, however they noticed that the unknown compound was more insoluble than the barium compound. This encouraged the Curies to do some more work and separate a totally new element. The 26th December 1898, they reported their discovery to the Academy of Science in France.The name of the element comes from the French word "radium", which comes from the Latin word radius, or ray, and was named radium for the emitted energy in the configuration of rays. Nowadays, humans found many uses to this radioactive element. Radium is sometimes used for a luminescent effect in dials, switches, watches, clocks, paint, or nuclear panels. Luminescent paint is made of radium, tritium, and promethium. The properties of radium make it so that anything sprayed or containing that paint illuminates in darkness. Some uses of radium in luminescent paint are in contemporary art or for example in the sets of movies for a glowing effect at night.Also before the 1970's radium was used as a food adfitive and for various medical uses as for treatment of cancer, but was banned because both uses caused serious side effects as anemia, bone cancer, and genetic mutations. Currently in medicine there are uses of small amounts of radium in cancer treatment of bone metastasis. Today people still use radium as a radiation source in X-Ray imaging or in other words industrial radiography.

Restate Thesis.Although Marie Curie did not discover radioactivity, she was the one who coined it's term. Originally, Radioactivity was discovered in the process of several years starting with the detection of X-Rays by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in the year of 1895. He was working in a lab when he saw a strange glow coming off from a close-by table. When he observed it further he found out that it was coming from a covered in black paper tube that he was previously using for a research about Cathode rays.He then came to the result that light might have been caused by rays. These rays were later named x-rays and the discovery of them opened a door towards the discovery of radioactivity. Later Henri Becquerel further advanced the study of x-rays by conducting a similar experiment with black paper and special salts surrounding photographic plates. He observed what happened to the plates and saw that despite lacking an external light source the salts left fluorescent marks on the plates, which was the discovery of radioactivity. Later, Marie Curie invented the term radioactivity. She used a mechanism that was devised by her husband and his brother fifteen years ago, called electrometer used for measuring the electrical charge. Using this instrument she was able to figure out that the air was electrified around Uranium since it did that itself. Going deeper into this research she noted that the uranium's compound activity solely depended on the quantity of uranium existent. Also she found out that radioactivity came from the atom, not because of the contact between the molecules.While investigating this new phenomenon she found that thorium was radioactive too. So she was the one who further widened humanity's knowledge and understanding of radioactivity. Radioactivity is actively used in current time in smoke detectors, nuclear power plants, Gamma ray sterilization and Analysis, tracers, and nuclear weapon.