Pierre Curie died in an accident in 1906 while crossing a Parisian street in a rainstorm. He slipped and fell under a horse-drawn cart. The wheels ran over his head and he died instantly. He died famous. Curie had won the Nobel Prize together with his wife Marie and he was also a professor at the Sorbonne. After his tragic death, his position was passed on to Marie, who became the very first woman to ever teach there. Her first lecture began with the same sentence her husband had used to finish his last lecture.
To honour the work of the late Pierre Curie, the 1910 Radiology Congress decided to name the basic unit of radioactivity after the scientist. From then on, radioactivity has been measured in curie. The man who carried radioactivity into British science and invented the terms alpha and beta radiation, Ernest Rutherford describes how it happened: “It was suggested that the name Curie, in honour of the late Professor Curie, should be employed for a quantity of radium or of the emanation.” Curie’s name was further immortalised through Curie’s Law – which describes the impact of temperature on magnetism.
One year later, in 1911, Marie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discoveries of radium and polonium, thus becoming the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes. But this was not the end of the road for one of science’s most successful families. In 1935, the third Nobel Prize in the family went to the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, Irèene Joliot-Curie, for her work on artificial radioactivity. Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot paved the way for uranium fission and nuclear chain reaction.
Did you like the article? Then please like and share it on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter or add it in Google+.
