07.11.1867, Warsow - Birthday of Marie Skłodowska Curie. She observed the radiation of uranium compounds and coined the word "radioactiv". She is one of only four persons (and the only female) who ever got more than one nobel prize and beside Linus Pauling the only one who got it in two different fields (physics and chemistry).
She was the first woman and the first female professor at the Sorbonne. During WW1 she developed a X-ray-car for examination near the front.
Marie Curie's research was about isolating Radium from Uranium ore. When this became possible on an Industrial scale, Uranium was a waste product, without any use, until….
Incidentally, November 7th is also the birthday of another great woman in nuclear science : Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968).
Meitner had a more difficult carrier than Curie, and is considered one of those great scientists who deserved a Nobel Prize, but never got one. She studied physics in Vienna, after a law that forbade the access of woman to universities had been abandoned in 1897.
As a woman, she had difficulties to find an academic position, and she earned livings by teaching French. She moved to Berlin, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where she would work together with Otto Hahn.
Another coincidence with Marie Curie : during the war, she interrupted her academic work, to do become an X-ray technician in the medical service of the Austrian army.
Her work with Hahn would result into the discovery of nuclear fission, with experiments on... Uranium. The possible impact of this discovery became clear, and Uranium quickly shifted from an Industrial waste material, to one of the most desired metals in the world. The world's largests stock of Uranium was piled up in the world's only Uranium factory, in Belgium, other stocks were in Belgian Congo. Following the discovery of nuclear fission, they were shipped to the US, for in case..., to keep them out of Hitler's hands. Its value had become so high, that it completely compensated for Belgium's financial war debts.
Meitner's life in Berlin became difficult after Hitler came to power, since she was of Jewish descent. Although she initially enjoyed some protection, she fled Germany in 1938 and went to live in Sweden. She kept contact with Hahn, however.
Meitner was a pacifist and refused to join the Manhattan project, although in the USA she was after the war framed as the '(Jewish) mother of the atomic bomb', the woman who snatched the secret of the bomb from Hitler. But it was only Hahn who got the Nobel Prize in 1945, for the discovery of nuclear fission.
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