Maria Sklodowska from Poland, daughter of a school teacher, would grow up to defy gender norms, make headways in science and win 2 Nobel Prizes. This is the timeline of how her remarkable life played out…

1867 – Maria Sklodowska is born in Warsaw, Poland when it is part of Russia. Her mother is a school principal. Her father teaches science. She is the youngest of 5 children.

Childhood – Her father speaks 5 languages and she learns to speak them too. She is the smartest girl in class. At home however, her mother falls ill with tuberculosis and has to go away for a year to recuperate. Her father is fired from his job and starts a boarding school for boys in his home to provide for the family. A few years after, Maria’s sister, Zosia, dies of typhus and her mother dies too. Her father sends her away to a tough Russian school.

Age 15 – Maria graduates top of her class and is awarded a gold medal for being the school’s best student. Her father sends her to live with relatives in the countryside. She would spend a year relaxing there and interacting with Polish culture.

Age 17 – The family has only enough money to send one child to college at a time and her brother, Jozef, is in medical school. Maria starts going to a secret university for Polish women, started by a woman named Jadwiga Dawidowa, which has classes all over the city.

Age 18 – Her sister, Bronia, goes to the Sorbonne university in Paris which accepts women. Maria takes a job as a governess and goes to live with a rich family in the countryside. Maria falls in love with the oldest son of the family but her employers forbid their son to marry her because they think she is not good enough for him.

Age 20 – She works as a governess for another family and eventually returns home to study at the secret university again.

Age 24 – Her sister graduates and invites Maria to Paris to live with her new husband and her while Maria attends the Sorbonne. Maria arrives in Paris and begins to use the name Marie—French for Maria. 6 months after arriving, she moves out and rents a single room in an apartment that is closer to the Sorbonne, where she studies science. She improves her French and spends most of her time studying.

Age 26 – Marie graduates first in class, ahead of all the men, one of two women who graduated that year. She gets a scholarship to study another year and she picks math.

Age 27 – She graduates second in class. Her professor, Gabriel Lippmann, finds her a job in a lab at Sorbonne—she is hired to study magnetism and steel. Her friends introduce her to a Frenchman named Pierre Curie who had invented the electrometer she uses to measure electricity. They fall in love.

Age 28 – Pierre and Marie marry and go on a honeymoon bicycle trip that lasts all summer. When they get back home, they resume work.

Age 30 – They have a baby girl named Irene. Pierre’s father, whose wife had just died, moves in to take care of his granddaughter and Marie goes back to work. She sets up a lab with Pierre in a storage room at the school he taught and begins to study rays coming from different metals. While testing a rock called pitchblende, she discovers a new element which she names ‘Polonium’—after Poland, her homeland. She also invents the word ‘radioactivity’ for the rays metals give out.

Age 31 – Marie gives her report to Gabriel Lippmann, her former professor, who reads it out to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Being a woman, she is not allowed inside the Academy’s rooms. The scientists are not particularly impressed. They are not sure if she was right. Marie then gets to work trying to prove that polonium exists. In the process, she discovers another new metal which she names ‘radium’. She and Pierre ask the Sorbonne for a bigger, better laboratory and get instead a building with no heating that had been previously used by medical students to cut up dead bodies for experiments. For the next 3 years she works in that lab, writing reports about her research.

Age 35 – Marie has extracted pure radium. She writes a report about her discovery and uses it to get her PhD from the Sorbonne. They win a Nobel Prize for their discovery and become famous. Newspapers start writing about them, especially Marie—a female scientist! The Sorbonne gives Pierre a job as a professor. Because radium glows in the dark, people presume it would cure illnesses and start using it in daily life.

Age 37 – Marie and Pierre have another baby girl named Eve. With the prize money from the Nobel prize, they start enjoying life and take vacations.

Age 39 – Pierre dies from being hit and getting his skull crushed by a horse-drawn wagon. The Sorbonne gives Marie Pierre’s teaching job, making her the first woman to ever teach at the Sorbonne. Hundreds of people line up to see her at her first day as a professor. She would do this for the next few years.

Over the next few years – She moves her children to a house in the country not far from Paris so they would be able to play outside. In the meantime, she has an affair with a married man, Paul Langevin, from her circle of friends, who has 4 children.

Age 44 – She is nominated to be the first woman to be elected into the French Academy of Sciences but is not elected. In the meantime, her affair with Paul is picked up by the newspaper and a scandal breaks out. She wins another Nobel Prize but after the news reports, write again to her requesting she decline it. She refuses to decline it and receives her second Nobel Prize, presented by the king of Sweden. After that however, she goes into hiding for the next few years, leaving her children with a governess and using fake names to travel. When she goes back to work eventually, she forms a partnership with her daughter, Irene.

Age 47 – The Curie Institute is built for Marie’s research but World War I breaks out before it can open, Germans invade France. Marie invents a small X-ray machine that can be carried to injured soldiers. She and Irene drive these machines to battlefield hospitals.

Age 59 – Irene, graduated and now a scientist working with Marie, marries Marie’s lab employee, Frederic Joliot. Marie, growing older and sicker from all the radiation in radium, would spend her last years working on using radium to treat cancer.

Age 66 – Marie gets weaker. Her other daughter, Eve, takes her to the mountains in France to rest but it doesn’t help. She dies and is buried near Pierre in the small French village where he had grown up.

1995, 61 years after her death – France digs up Marie and Pierre’s caskets and moves them to the Pantheon where France’s most famous people are buried.

More life summaries available here.

Photographs: Public domain. Compiler: Sy
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