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Welcome to History's Not Boring by Codopoly.com. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. Before we start, we have a massive shout out to Tilly, who is nine years old and listening all the way from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. Tilly loves the show, and she actually asked us to cover today's amazing scientist.

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Thank you, Tilly. And don't worry, your other amazing idea about Pirates and Blackbeard is totally on our list to do soon.

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We also want to send a big belated happy ninth birthday to Max in Sydney, Australia. Your birthday was on the 16th, so this incredible episode is for you too, Max.

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Happy birthday, Max! So, Mira, what kind of scientist did Tilly ask us to talk about?

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Imagine a girl who was banned from going to school, who grew up to discover a brand new rock that literally glowed in the dark and ended up saving over a million soldiers' lives in a world war.

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Wait, real glowing rocks? Like magic? And a million soldiers!

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Not magic, Finn! Science! Today we are talking about the incredible, unstoppable Marie Curie. Let's travel back to the year 1867, to Warsaw, Poland, where a baby girl named Maria Sklodowska was just born.

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Wait, Maria?

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I thought her name was Marie. Good catch. Maria was her Polish name, but her childhood wasn't easy. Back then, Poland was controlled by the Russian Empire, and the authorities made incredibly strict rules about what people could learn.

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What kind of rules?

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Girls were completely banned from going to university. Period. If you were a girl in Poland, the law said your education was over.

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That is completely unfair. She must have been so mad.

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She was. But Maria was brilliant and loved science. So she joined something called the Flying University. It was a secret, hidden night school that taught Polish culture and science. Why was it called flying? Because it was illegal. They had to constantly fly or move from building to building so the secret police wouldn't catch them. If they were caught, they could be sent to freezing prisons far away. Whoa she was risking her life just to study. Exactly. But Maria wanted a real science degree. So she made a deal with her sister. Maria worked as a governess to pay for her sister's school in France. Then, her sister helped pay for Maria to go. That's a great sister team. In 1891, at age 24, Maria moved to Paris, France, and changed her name to the French version, Marie. She finally got into the famous Sorbonne University.

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Yes, finally she can study in a real lab.

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True, but she had almost zero money. She lived in a tiny attic room on the sixth floor. In the winter, it was so freezing that the water in her wash basin would turn to solid ice overnight. No way! How did she survive the cold? She would pile every single piece of clothing she owned on top of her blankets just to sleep. And she was studying so hard, she survived mostly on bread, butter, and tea. Once, she literally fainted in the library from hunger. Fainted? Did someone help her? Yes. Her brother-in-law was a doctor. He came, fed her a proper meal, and she went right back to studying. She ended up finishing first in her physics class. She was completely unstoppable. And then, in 1894, she met Pierre Curie. He was a brilliant French scientist. They fell in love, and Pierre even wrote her love letters filled with math and science equations. They got married the next year. Together, they started investigating a strange black rock called pitch blend. Another scientist noticed it gave off an invisible energy, but nobody knew why. Invisible energy? What did Marie do? Marie actually invented a brand new word for it: radioactivity. She suspected there was an entirely undiscovered element hiding inside the black dirt. So they just broke the rock open? It wasn't that easy. The element was so tiny, they needed massive amounts of dirt to find it. They bought four tons of pitch blend. That's 8,000 pounds. The weight of an adult African elephant.

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Where did they even put an elephant-sized pile of dirt?

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In a leaky, freezing old wooden shed with a dirt floor. For three years, Marie boiled the dirt in giant pots. She had to stir the boiling toxic sludge with a heavy iron rod that was almost as tall as she was.

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That sounds exhausting. Did they find anything?

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Yes. In 1898, they discovered two brand new elements. The first she named Polonium to honour her home country of Poland. And the second was radium. Radium? Is that the glowing one? Yes. Radium gave off a beautiful pale blue-green glow. At night, Marie and Pierre would go into their dark shed, and the tubes of pure radium would glow on the tables like magical fairy lights.

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Glowing fairy light rocks? That is the coolest scientific discovery ever.

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The world thought so too. In 1903, the Nobel Prize Committee decided to give their highest award to Pierre. But wait, they tried to leave Marie out just because she was a woman. What? But she's the one who stirred the boiling dirt with the giant iron rod. Exactly! Pierre was furious. He wrote a letter saying he would refuse the prize unless Marie got it too. So, in 1903, Marie Curie became the very first woman in history to win a Nobel Prize.

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Take that Nobel Committee. They must have been so happy.

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They were, but tragedy struck. Just three years later, in 1906, Pierre was walking in the rain in Paris. He slipped and was hit by a heavy horse-drawn wagon. He didn't survive.

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Oh no, poor Marie. That is so heartbreaking.

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It was devastating, but Marie knew Pierre would want her to keep exploring. She took over his teaching job, becoming the first female professor at the Sorbonne. And in 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize. Two Nobel Prizes? Has anyone else ever done that? She is the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry. But her biggest challenge was still coming. In 1914, World War I broke out.

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Did she have to escape Paris?

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No, she stayed to help. She realized wounded soldiers desperately needed x-rays to find bullets so doctors could save them. But hospitals with huge X-ray machines were far from the battles. So how did she get X-rays to the soldiers? She invented mobile X-ray vans. She put heavy, delicate X-ray machines in the back of trucks. The soldiers nicknamed them the Petite Curie, which means little curies.

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Little Curies? Did she build a lot of them?

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She built 20 of these vans, and Marie didn't just sit back. She learned how to drive a car, learned how to fix engines, and drove right out to the muddy, dangerous front lines herself.

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Wow.

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Wasn't she terrified of the war? She was incredibly brave. Alongside her teenage daughter Irene, she treated wounded troops. Because of her little curies and the 200 hospital X-ray rooms she built, over one million soldiers were treated.

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One million soldiers? That's more than the population of a whole city. She's a total superhero.

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She truly was. But sadly, back then, nobody realised that radioactivity and x-rays were dangerous to the human body. Being around all that radiation for decades made Marie very sick. And she died in 1934 at age 66.

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That is so sad. She gave everything to science and helping people.

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Yes, she did. And her legacy is mind-blowing. In fact, her original notebooks from over 100 years ago are still incredibly radioactive today. Wait, are they dangerous? Where are they kept? They are kept at the National Library in France, locked inside heavy boxes lined with solid lead. If a historian wants to read Marie's actual handwriting, they have to sign a waiver and wear a special protective suit.

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Ha!

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That's wild!

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Her notebooks have to wear armour because they're so powerful. Alright, Finn, time for the quiz. Are you ready? Okay, I'm ready. Let's do this.

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First question. What was the secret underground school Maria went to in Poland called? Next one. Marie coined a brand new word for the invisible energy they found. What was that word? Question three. What did Marie name the first element she discovered to honour her home country? Here's number four. What colour did radium glow in the dark? Last question. What did the soldiers call the mobile X-ray vans Marie drove to the front lines? Great job! Let's see how you did. The first answer is the flying university. For question two, the word she invented was radioactivity. Number three, the answer is polonium, named after Poland. Question four. Radium glowed a beautiful pale blue green. And the final answer is they were nicknamed the Petite Curies or Little Curies.

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Wow, Mary Curie really was a superhero. Stirring elephant-sized piles of boiling dirt and driving into war zones to save a million people.

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She proved that even if someone tells you that you aren't allowed to learn, you can still grow up to change the entire world.

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If you guys love learning about glowing rocks and the incredible Marie Curie today, please leave us a five-star review.

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Yes! Just scroll down on your podcast app and tap those five stars right now. It helps us out so much and lets us keep making these stories for you. Oh, and don't forget to check out our site, kidopoly.com. That's right. Head over to our site kidopoly.com for tons of awesome learning games and fun activities to explore after you listen.

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And if you want a shout out on the show, or just want to say hi like Tilly and Max did, email us at hello at kidopoly.com.

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We love hearing from you. See you next time on History is not boring. Bye everyone. Bye!