@sholard_mancity The Slavery Abolition Act 1883 officially abolished the institution of slavery and liberated over 800,000 people across the Carribbean, Africa and North America. Yes the Royal Navy
Marie Curie died in 1934, but her tomb is still radioactive.
Marie Curie stands among the greatest scientists in history. She pioneered the field of radioactivity (a word she invented), isolated two new elements (polonium and radium), laid the groundwork for radiation-based cancer therapy, and became the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences: physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.
Yet her brilliance came at a devastating cost.
For years she handled intensely radioactive substances with bare hands, often slipping vials of radium into her pocket or keeping glowing samples on her desk like luminous souvenirs. In that era, no one fully grasped how lethal radiation could be. She died in 1934 at age 66 from aplastic anemia, almost certainly caused by cumulative, massive exposure that destroyed her bone marrow.
More than ninety years after her death, her personal effects remain dangerously radioactive.
Her laboratory notebooks, clothing, furniture, and even her cookbook emit radiation at levels that require them to be preserved in lead-lined boxes at France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Anyone granted access must sign a legal waiver and don protective suits.
When she and her husband Pierre were reinterred in the Panthéon in 1995—an honor reserved for France’s most illustrious figures—their coffins were encased in lead nearly an inch thick, not as ceremony, but as containment.
Curie did not merely advance science; she reshaped our understanding of the atom, opened the door to modern oncology and nuclear energy, and left a legacy that still glows—literally and figuratively—long after her death. Literally.