We find ourselves back within the top 35 of the 100 Greatest Women on Coins series this go around. Following along with Ron Guth, the author of the Whitman Publishing series, we continue our blog series with a woman who won not one, but two, Nobel prizes for her historic work that changed everything in her respective fields.
#31 – Marie Curie
Born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in November 1867, Marie lost her sister and her mother before the age of 10 in Warsaw, Poland. Despite her loss and the struggles of her family’s financial hardships, she did extremely well in school. She even won a gold medal when she graduated in 1883. Due to women not being allowed to go to college back then, Marie would continue to learn by reading, hiring tutors, and attending Flying University, an underground institution. She would finally go on to attend the University of Paris in 1891 and earn a degree in physics in 1893 and an additional degree the following year. It was there that she would meet her husband, Pierre Curie, a fellow scientist. They would marry in 1895.
The couple would go on to great success together, discovering the radioactive element, polonium, in 1898. It was named after Marie’s home country (Poland). They would also continue on to discover radium. Earning her doctorate in 1903, Marie won the Nobel Prize in physics, sharing it with Pierre (her husband) and Henri Becquerel. She was almost excluded from the nomination before winning the award because she was a woman. If it were not for a committee member bringing it to the attention of Pierre, she would have never been named on the nomination. Additionally, Marie’s daughter, Irene, and her husband would also go on to win a Nobel Prize of their own for their discovery induced radioactivity.
Pierre passed away in 1906 while getting crushed by a wagon crossing the street. Marie Curie would later pass from aplastic anemia in 1934 as a result of not handling the radioactive material correctly throughout the duration of her career.
According to Guth, Marie was featured on coins from both Poland and France. She was depicted on the Polish 10-zlotych coin in 1967 to commemorative the 100th anniversary of her birth. Poland also issued a 100-zlotych coin in 1974 to honor her and her discovery of radium, following by a 1998 Polish 20-zlotych to commemorate the centennial of the discoveries she made. Collecting difficulty on these coins is considered easy as they are revealed to be rather inexpensive.