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Two days of free email tactics, starting Nov 12
GURU kicks off Nov 12. Join the 29,000+ marketers who showed up last year, 100% free and virtual.
GURU Conference, powered by Constant Contact, is back November 12–13. It's 100% virtual and 100% free, and it's packed with tactics you can use right away on newsletters, deliverability, design trends, AI, and what NOT to do with email.
What to expect:
Speakers including Molly Ringwald, Dan Levy, Amy Porterfield, Frank Vella + more
Sessions from world-class marketers at top brands
Networking every day
DJs, world-record breaking, and an alarming amount of rom-com fun!
Last year, 29,000+ marketers joined us. This year is even bigger, and spots are limited.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, MASTERS OF TRIVIA
Trivia is more than a game; it’s a global tradition of knowledge and competition. Masters of Trivia’s tournaments have gone live, with 30 fast, multiple-choice questions. Most correct wins. Speed breaks ties. Compete worldwide for a $MOT token prize purse, plus valuable in-kind prizes.
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—— ON THIS DAY ——
NOVEMBER 7, 1867
Warsaw, Poland
159 years ago
Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the physicist and chemist who discovered polonium and radium and won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Maria Salomea Sklodowska was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire, the fifth child of two teachers. Universities in Russian-controlled Poland were closed to women, so she studied at an illegal institution known as the Flying University, which moved between private apartments to avoid the authorities. She and her sister Bronislawa made a pact: Maria would work as a governess to pay for Bronislawa's medical studies in Paris, and Bronislawa would then support her in turn.
She arrived in Paris in 1891, enrolled at the Sorbonne under the name Marie, and lived in an unheated attic room on very little food while taking degrees in physics and mathematics. She met Pierre Curie, a physicist working on crystals and magnetism, and married him in 1895. She wore a dark blue dress to the wedding because it would be practical afterward in the laboratory.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Radioactivity, the phenomenon Marie Curie named and investigated, and whose study transformed physics, chemistry and medicine in the twentieth century.
Her doctoral work followed up on Henri Becquerel's observation that uranium salts emitted rays. Using an electrometer Pierre had helped develop, she measured the effect precisely and established that the emission came from the atom itself rather than from any chemical arrangement, a result that undercut the assumption that atoms were indivisible and stable. She coined the term radioactivity. Noticing that the ore pitchblende was more active than its uranium content explained, she concluded that it contained unknown elements, and she and Pierre processed tonnes of residue in a leaking shed to isolate them. They announced polonium, named for her occupied homeland, and radium in 1898.
The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was initially to be awarded to Becquerel and Pierre Curie alone. Pierre protested, and Marie's name was added. She became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. Pierre was killed in 1906 when he was run over by a heavy horse-drawn wagon on a Paris street. Marie took over his teaching post, becoming the first woman to hold a professorship at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium and the isolation of pure radium metal. She remains the only person to have won in two distinct scientific fields.
That same year she was refused election to the French Academy of Sciences, and the French press mounted a campaign against her over a relationship with a married colleague, with the attacks drawing openly on her being foreign-born and a woman. During the First World War she designed and equipped mobile radiological units, known as petites Curies, that brought X-ray imaging to field hospitals, and trained women to operate them. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by decades of exposure to radiation, having worked for years with no shielding and keeping glowing samples in her desk. Her notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Her work showed that atoms are not stable and indivisible. Establishing that radioactive emission comes from inside the atom overturned a basic assumption of nineteenth-century physics and opened the path to nuclear physics and the understanding of atomic structure.
She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences. Physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, achieved in a scientific establishment that had to be pressured into including her name on the first one and that later refused her a seat in its own academy.
She turned her discoveries toward practical medicine. Radium-based therapy for cancer and the mobile X-ray units she designed and ran during the First World War applied the new physics directly to treating the wounded and the sick.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867, in a Warsaw where universities would not admit her, and studied in apartments to dodge the authorities. She named radioactivity, found two elements in a leaking shed, won two Nobel Prizes, was blackballed by the French Academy, and died of the thing she discovered.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”
— Marie Curie
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Marie Curie, the Flying University, the discovery of polonium and radium, her two Nobel Prizes, and her wartime radiology units?
