Gustave Eiffel

Gustave Eiffel. Born in Dijon in 1832, Eiffel graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855, the same year that Paris received first-world fair. He spent several years in southwest France, where he oversaw work on the great railway bridge in Bordeaux, and he was installed in its own way after 1864 as "builder", ie a business specializing in metal structural work. His

over the River Douro in 1876, the viaduct Garabit in 1884, the railroad of Pest in Hungary, the dome of the observatory at Nice, and the ingenious structure of the Statue Freedom. It culminated in 1889 with the Eiffel Tower. After the end of his career in business, marred by the failure of the Panama Canal, Eiffel began an active life …ver más…

She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students' revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.

Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the