July 25, 1895

Pierre & Marie Curie

Pierre Curie and Marie Sklodowska met in Paris in 1894. Sklodowska, 27, had recently attained her physics and mathematics degree at the Sorbonne. She planned to earn her teacher’s diploma and return to Poland. Curie, 35, was already an established French physicist and devoted to his scientific work. Strangely enough, the two bonded over their interest in magnetism, and that bond eventually became something more.

They married in 1895 at the town hall in Sceaux, where Curie’s parents lived. The money they were given at their wedding was used to buy bicycles; riding would be one of their favorite hobbies outside of the lab throughout their marriage. The couple would eventually go on to discover two new elements, polonium and radium, and would coin the term “radioactivity” to describe the emission of uranic rays after experimenting with uranium. They would win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.