Marie Curie Read Online Free Page A

because Marie needed a bigger lab space of her own that mutual friends thought to introduce them.
    Her very first impression was of a “dreamer absorbed in his reflections.” Also, “he seemed to me very young.” But in fact he was thirty-five, nine years older than Marie.
    He was intense, shy, so quiet as a schoolboy that teachers dismissed him, saying he had a “slow mind.” His handwriting was terrible and he couldn’t spell. (Today Pierre Curie would likely be diagnosed with a learning disability, perhaps dyslexia.) So he was educated at home by tutors. His father and grandfather, both doctors, taught him how observations could be made about things invisible to the naked eye. At sixteen, he went into physics at the Sorbonne, then into chemistry at the School of Pharmacy, publishing his first article at twenty-one. With his brother Jacques, a professor of chemistry, he was making exciting discoveries about quartz crystals, which would later have applications for cell phones, Tv tubes, quartz watches, and microphones. Pierre and Jacques also invented an early version of an electrometer, an instrument that measured electric charges. Other physicists considered it quite cool and were using it.
    Brilliant indeed, but Pierre was also known as an eccentric. He was humble to a fault, absentminded. Thanks to his homeschooling, he was not part of the establishment, and he preferred it this way. The school where he worked was not as prestigious as the Sorbonne, but it allowed him to pursue research in whatever he pleased, which was all he wanted of life. His one romance had ended unhappily (when the woman died); he still lived with his parents, under the assumption that a wife would only hinder his work.
    “Women of genius are rare,” he stated. That was before he met Marie.
    “We began a conversation,” she wrote later, “which soon became friendly.” Friendly talk about science. Pierre was completing his doctorate on the effect of heat on magnetic properties. He was one of the country’s experts on the laws of magnetism, and—what a coincidence—that happened to be Marie’s area of research as well. Perhaps they spoke about the problem he was currently working on—that at a certain temperature, a substance such as iron or nickel will lose its magnetism. This temperature point is still known as the Curie point in his honor.
    His first gift to her was not chocolate or flowers. It was an autographed copy of his latest article, “On Symmetry in Physical Phenomena: Symmetry of an Electric Field and of a Magnetic Field.” She was smitten.
    He, in turn, was impressed with her independence and her intelligence—she was even better at math than he was. She asked him to her attic room with no chaperone present , a shocking invitation. As there was no furniture, she simply pulled out a trunk for him to sit on, and he was charmed.
    Idealists both, they wanted to devote their lives to science, though Marie still intended to return to Poland to serve her country. Each so independent, it took some dancing around and negotiating and a few misunderstandings before they realized that what drew them to each other was as important as their commitment to science. In one letter, he wrote that it would be “a fine thing” if they were together, “hypnotized by our dreams: your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”
    How could she resist?
    They married in July 1895, in a civil ceremony, with a reception in the garden of his parents’ home in the suburb of Sceaux. For wedding presents, they gave each other new modern bicycles, and their honeymoon was spent biking through scenic parts of France.
    To begin married life, they settled into a small apartment on the Left Bank, filled with light and overlooking a garden. Their secondhand furniture included a dining-room table that doubled as a desk. Pierre supported them while Marie studied for her teaching certificate, took more physics classes, and did