Stamps dedicated to Marie and Pierre Curie

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BRANDS DEDICATED
MARIE AND PIERRE CURIE

Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934) was born in Warsaw. In 1833 she graduated from high school with a gold medal, but could not receive higher education in Poland. With great difficulty, she managed to enter the University of Paris in 1891.

Since 1895, Maria Sklodowska worked in the laboratory of the famous French physicist and chemist Pierre Curie (1859-1906), whose wife she became. In 1897, M. Curie began studying the radiation of uranium salts discovered by the French scientist Henri Becquerel. Interested in his wife’s work, Pierre Curie soon took part in it. Maria and Pierre’s joint research led in 1898 to the discovery of polonium (named after Maria’s homeland of Poland) and radium.

The Curies were the first to establish that radioactive rays caused changes in the cells of living organisms.

After the death of her husband, in 1906, Marie Curie took the position of professor and head of the department at the University of Paris, where she was the first woman professor, and for the first time began giving lectures on radioactivity.

For her work, which played a huge role in the creation of modern physics, Marie Curie was elected a member of the academies of sciences in many countries. In 1907, she was elected a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and in 1926, an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1903, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie; in 1911 she was awarded this prize a second time.

The first stamp with a portrait of Marie Curie was issued in 1935 in Turkey. In 1938, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the discovery of outstanding stamps in France, French columns (21 countries), Afghanistan and Cuba with the image of Marie and Pierre Curie examining a test tube with open immi radium (figure all stamps are the same; the photo shows the French stamp).

A stamp with a portrait of Marie and Pierre Curie was issued by the Principality of Monaco in 1938. Marie Curie’s portrait is also featured on a Suriname stamp (issued 1950). Many stamps dedicated to Marie Curie were issued in her homeland, Poland. The first of these stamps with a portrait of Marie Curie

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(1947) you see in the photo (the blue stamp was also included in the block dedicated to outstanding activities of Polish culture). Stamps with a portrait of Marie Curie were also issued in Poland in 1951, 1963 and 1967 (the last two stamps are shown in the photo). In addition, in Poland, in 1955 and 1967, stamps were issued depicting the monument to Marie Curie in Warsaw and a stamp commemorating her Nobel Prize in 1903 and 1911.

The photo also shows stamps with portraits of Marie Curie, issued in France and the GDR for the 100th anniversary of her birth.

Stamps dedicated to Marie and Pierre Curie were issued in Paname and were issued in Afghanistan in 1963. In 1956, on the 50th anniversary of the death of Pierre Curie, stamps with his portrait were issued in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. The photo also shows a Swedish stamp issued in 1963 and dedicated to the 1903 Nobel Prize winners Pierre and Marie Curie and Henri Beckerloh.

A. V. Almyks

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