Pierre Curie

Discovers piezoelectricity with his brother Jacques. They demonstrate that compressing certain crystals generates an electric charge. It sounds obscure. It'll later make quartz watches, sonar, and ultrasound possible.

Marries Marie Sklodowska. Their wedding gift to each other: a pair of bicycles. No ring, no church ceremony. They honeymoon by cycling through the French countryside.

He and Marie announce the isolation of radium before the French Academy of Sciences. They've been processing tons of pitchblende ore by hand in a leaky shed. Marie's lab notebooks remain so radioactive they're stored in lead-lined boxes.

Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie and Henri Becquerel. The committee originally plans to honor only Becquerel and Pierre. Pierre insists Marie be included. She becomes the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Killed instantly on Rue Dauphine in Paris when he slips in the rain and his head is crushed under the wheel of a horse-drawn cart. He's 46. Marie receives his bloodstained clothing at home. She writes in her diary: "It is the end of everything, everything, everything."