Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie was a French physicist who, with his wife Marie Curie, isolated the elements polonium and radium from pitchblende ore in 1898, working through painstaking fractional crystallization of tons of ore to obtain barely visible quantities of each new element. He shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel for their joint work on the radioactivity Becquerel had first observed. Before their work on radioactive elements he had already established the piezoelectric effect with his brother Jacques in 1880 and built sensitive instruments used in the couple's later research. He died in a street accident in Paris in 1906, struck by a horse-drawn cart, before their work on radium's chemistry and medical use was complete.