

Her performance at the Folies Bergère in Paris was a smashing success, and she became a regular there, performing her "Fire Dance" as well as the "Serpentine Dance." She was a fixture of the local Art Nouveau scene, hanging out with such luminaries as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, and many other contemporary artists and writers. According to dance historian Jack Anderson, "The costume for her Serpentine Dance consisted of hundreds of yards of China silk which she let billow around her while lighting effects suggested that it was catching fire and taking shapes reminiscent of flowers, clouds, birds, and butterflies."Īlas, other, lesser dancers soon appropriated her work for their own performances, prompting a frustrated Fuller to tour Europe in hopes of gaining more recognition for her art. She was something of a self-taught chemist, eventually patenting the use of various chemical compounds and salts to create color gel and luminescent lighting.įuller achieved notoriety and rave reviews with her signature " Serpentine Dance" ( captured on film by the Lumière brothers in 1897, although Fuller was not the dancer featured).
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She started experimenting with a long skirt, moving it in different ways to explore how it reflected light, and by 1891, she had figured out how to illuminate her silk costumes during performances with lights of different colors to create striking visual effects. Born in the Chicago suburbs in 1862, she was a child actress who later began choreographing and performing her own dances, usually in burlesque, vaudeville, and circus venues. Loïe Fuller, on the other hand, has been largely relegated to the footnotes of history, although there has been a resurgence of interest in her career and influence in recent years-most notably in a featured segment during Taylor Swift's 2018 Reputation Tour, and the work of choreographer Jody Sperling. She remains the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice and the only person to do so in two different scientific fields. She won a second Nobel Prize (this time in chemistry) in 1911 for the discovery of polonium and radium. After Pierre's tragic death in a 1906 street accident, Marie developed new techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes from pitchblende and eventually succeeded in isolating radium in 1910. The couple shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Becquerel for their work developing a theory of radioactivity-she was the first woman to be so honored. With Pierre, she uncovered evidence of two new elements they dubbed polonium and radium. Becquerel's uranium rays so fascinated Marie that she made them the focus of her own research.įurther Reading Review: Rosamund Pike is riveting as Marie Curie in uneven biopic Radioactive Soon after, Henri Becquerel published his insight that uranium salts emitted rays that would fog a photographic plate in early 1896. The Curies had been married for six months when Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays (winning the very first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901). She met a chemist named Pierre Curie, and they began collaborating, eventually falling in love and getting married in 1895. She left her native Poland and moved to Paris at 24 to pursue a degree in science, living in abject poverty while studying and conducting research. The details of Marie Curie's life are very well-documented and well-known. Science writer and communicator Liz Heinecke brings the lives of these two visionary women together in an illuminating new biography, Radiant: The Scientist, the Dancer, and a Friendship Forged in Light. At the same time, a modern dancer and pioneer in theatrical lighting named Loïe Fuller, who was all the rage in Paris, dreamed of incorporating radium into her stage act. This was when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, made their breakthrough discoveries in radioactivity, discovering two new elements.

Both the arts and the sciences flourished in Paris during the years of the so-called Belle Époque at the dawn of the 20th century.
