I want my motherfucking spaceship.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 20, 1902--
We’ve all read profound, insightful quotations with the attribution “Anonymous.” You know that’s because a woman probably said it, right? Insecure penis-possessors couldn’t handle something smart being said or done by a woman; throughout history they either ignored their work, stole it, or made them invisible. If the penisers weren’t such sexist ass wagons always putting women’s ideas down, we’d probably have colonies throughout the solar system by now. Instead, we have just one shitty little space station.
Sigh.
Born Maria Sklodowska in Poland in 1867, Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, and the only woman ever to win it twice. She’s also the only person to win a Nobel for two different scientific fields—physics and chemistry.
She shared her first Nobel with husband Pierre. This was not an example of “we need a dude’s name on this.” He actually knew his shit and they had a loving marriage. In fact, the Nobel committee wanted to only give it to him, but Pierre was all you better include my wife or you can shove that Nobel up your alimentary canal. Good husband, that Pierre. Alas, he got his head fatally squished by a horse-drawn cart in 1906. Gross.
April 20, 1902 was the day Marie and Pierre successfully isolated radioactive radium salts in their Paris laboratory.
The term “radioactivity,” aka “invisible cancer air,” was coined by Marie. She’d been studying a mineral called pitchblende, of which uranium is the primary element. She figured it contained additional radioactive stuff. Pierre joined in her research and in 1898 they discovered polonium, so named after Marie’s home country. Polonium, FYI, is the shit the Russian government (allegedly) used to poison former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 after he blabbed about their corruption. And now I’m on Putin’s shit list.
Anyway, radium does not freely occur in nature, and they painstakingly refined tons of pitchblende to isolate one-tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride.
Because capitalism, radium would come to be used in many products, such as to make watch dials glow, and in toothpaste. Yes, people died. Google “Radium girls.” It also has medical and industrial uses, despite being radioactive as fuck. Actually, because it’s radioactive as fuck. Curie died in 1934 at the age of 66 from aplastic anemia, believed to be caused by her exposure. Drag.
By the way, Marie and Pierre’s older daughter Irène followed in her parents’ footsteps, winning a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 for the discovery of artificial radiation.
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"If the penisers weren’t such sexist ass wagons always putting women’s ideas down, we’d probably have colonies throughout the solar system by now. Instead, we have just one shitty little space station."
You read my mind - I often think this when I see footage of famines or droughts - all those lives ending, and one of them could be the next Einstein or Curie, and we'd never know. Where the human race could be right now, if we took basic care of each other. Fantastic post, yet again, JF!
It is an honour to be on Poo-tin's shitlist. Bravo!