Men and women, blue eyed, blond haired or dark eyed, dark haired (or any combination of three of the above) worked in taut silence (or while listening to their iPods) to fulfill the pledge they'd made to blog about a woman in technology as a tribute to Ada Lovelace.
Ada Lovelace Day, the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson, is a truly successful viral campaign, launched, from what I could see, almost entirely on Twitter with blog back-up. I'm blown away by this engraving of Ada done by Jake von Slatt - surely he doesn't need to blog, having already created a piece of art?
For a relatively accurate account of Marie Curie's life, the Wikipedia article does well enough. I don't think it captures the romanticism of her life, her heroism, or what must have been her passion. I cannot imagine the kind of dedication it would take to win not one, but two Nobel Prizes, in two different disciplines.
The parody in the first paragraph of the Monday, July 16, 1934, Time obit entitled 'Death of Mme Curie' wasn't meant to be disrespectful. Marie Curie 2.0 could exist - may even exist, although hopefully she's learned to minimize risk in this iteration. MC2.0 would be considered both a homewrecker and a cougar, it seems, since the original had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, an ex-student of her late husband.
I don't remember that part of the story from the Greer Garson/Walter Pidgeon film Madame Curie.
Nor do I remember the speech she delivered in the film, 'expressing her belief that science is the path to a better world.' But I know that she was one of my heroines, and that her courage and tenacity paved the way for women like me, who chose briefly to work in the field of nuclear energy and had no fear because of the work begun by Dr. Curie.
While you may quibble (I certainly do) with some of the overly romantic wording of the Wikipedia entry for Marie Skłodowska Curie ('Maria had found a new love, a partner and scientific collaborator that she could depend on.'), it's hard to quibble with this statement: 'She was ahead of her time, emancipated [and] independent.... Albert Einstein is supposed to have remarked that she was probably the only person who was not corrupted by the fame that she had won.'
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