The Nobel Prize Committee initially ignored Marie Curie

One of the interesting facts about Marie Curie is that the Nobel Prize Committee initially ignored Marie Curie. Few people were aware of the Nobel Prize at the time; it had been founded in 1895. The wealth left behind in Alfred Nobel's bequest, a Swedish dynamite creator, was used to support the awards for chemistry, literature, peace, physics, and physiology or medicine. They were to be given out in honor of achievements in academia, science, or culture. The first Nobel Prize was given out in 1901 after Nobel's passing, but the Curies are credited with making the honor well-known.

Simply because Marie was a woman, she nearly didn't get the honor. Marie, Pierre, and Henri Becquerel were all nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics in 1902 by a member of the committee called Charles Bouchard, a physician, but they were not selected for the award that year. Then in 1903, without mentioning Marie, four additional distinguished men on the committee proposed Pierre and Henri for their work with radioactive elements.

Three of these four experts were sufficiently familiar with the Curies' research to be certain that Marie was the one who had independently isolated radium and discovered radioactivity in pitchblende. They nonetheless asserted that Pierre and Henri Becquerel "worked together and separately to secure, with much difficulty, some decigrams of this priceless mineral."