Katherine Blodgett
Encyclopedia
Katharine Burr Blodgett (January 10, 1898 – October 12, 1979) was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D.
in Physics
from University of Cambridge
in 1926. After receiving her master's degree, she was hired by General Electric
, where she invented low-reflectance "invisible" glass.
. She was the second child of Katharine Burr and George Blodgett. Her father was a patent attorney
at General Electric
where he headed that department. He was shot and killed in his home by a burglar just before she was born. GE offered a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer. The suspected killer hanged himself in his jail cell in Salem, New York
. Her mother was financially secure after her husband's death. She moved to New York City after Katharine's birth with her son George Jr., two at the time. In 1901 the family moved to France
,
.
Blodgett subsequently won a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College
, where she excelled at mathematics and physics. She received her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1917.
Blodgett decided to pursue scientific research and visited the Schenectady GE plant during Christmas break of her senior year. Her father's former colleagues introduced her to research chemist Irving Langmuir
. After a tour of his laboratory, Langmuir told the eighteen-year-old Blodgett that she needed to broaden her scientific education before coming to work for him.
Following his advice, Blodgett enrolled at the University of Chicago
in 1918 to pursue a master's degree. Since a job awaited her in industrial research, she picked a related subject for her thesis: the chemical structure of gas mask
s. World War I
was raging and gas masks were needed to protect troops against poison gases
. Blodgett determined that almost all poisonous gases can be adsorbed
by carbon
molecules. She published a paper on gas mask materials in the scientific journal Physical Review
at the age of 21.
In 1924, Blodgett was awarded a position in a physics Ph.D. program at Sir Ernest Rutherford's
Cavendish Laboratory
. She wrote her dissertation on the behavior of electrons in ionized mercury vapor. Blodgett was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, in 1926.
coatings designed to cover surfaces of water
, metal
, or glass
. These special coatings were oily and could be deposited in layers only a few nanometers thick. It wasn’t until the 1930’s that she discovered uses for the coatings.
In 1938, she devised a method to spread these monomolecular coatings one at a time onto glass or metal. She used a barium stearate film to cover glass with 44 monomolecular layers that made the glass more than 99% transmissive, creating "invisible" glass. This coating is now called the Langmuir-Blodgett film
. One such use for her glass was in the stunning cinematography of the widely popular film, Gone with the Wind
(1939). The Langmuir-Blodgett trough is also named after her. She also invented the color gauge, a method to measure the molecular coatings on the glass to one millionth of an inch.
The "color gauge" works on the idea that different thicknesses of coatings are different colors. She saw that soap bubbles were different colors and discovered that at each place that the soap bubble was a new color, it is of a different thickness. Before her invention, the best instruments were only accurate to a few thousandths of an inch. She made a glass "ruler" to show different colors corresponding to the thicknesses. Measuring a thickness now became as simple as matching colors. Other inventions for which she was credited were poison gas adsorbents, methods for deicing
aircraft wings, and improving smokescreens.
Dr. Blodgett was issued eight US patent
s during her career. She was the sole inventor on all but two of the patents. On those two she was the primary inventor with Vincent J. Schaefer
as co-inventor. Blodgett also published over 30 technical papers in various scientific journals.
by the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Katherine Blodgett never married and lived a vibrant life, living in a Boston Marriage
for many years with Gertrude Brown, who came from an old Schenectady family. For another period she also lived with Elsie Errington, the English-born director of a nearby girl's school. "The household arrangement freed Blodgett from most domestic responsibilities- except for making her famous applesauce and popovers." Unfortunately, she did not leave any personal papers with her thoughts about her long-term relationships with these women.
there. She spent summers at a camp at Lake George in upstate New York, to pursue her love of gardening. Blodgett was also an avid amateur astronomer. She collected antiques, played bridge
with friends and wrote funny poems in her spare time. She died in her home on October 12, 1979.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in Physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
from University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
in 1926. After receiving her master's degree, she was hired by General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
, where she invented low-reflectance "invisible" glass.
Childhood
Katharine Burr Blodgett was born on January 10, 1898 in Schenectady, New YorkSchenectady, New York
Schenectady is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 66,135...
. She was the second child of Katharine Burr and George Blodgett. Her father was a patent attorney
Patent attorney
A patent attorney is an attorney who has the specialized qualifications necessary for representing clients in obtaining patents and acting in all matters and procedures relating to patent law and practice, such as filing an opposition...
at General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
where he headed that department. He was shot and killed in his home by a burglar just before she was born. GE offered a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killer. The suspected killer hanged himself in his jail cell in Salem, New York
Salem (village), New York
Salem is a village located in the town of Salem in Washington County, New York. It is part of the Glens Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area. The village population was 964 at the 2000 census....
. Her mother was financially secure after her husband's death. She moved to New York City after Katharine's birth with her son George Jr., two at the time. In 1901 the family moved to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
,
Education
In 1912 Blodgett returned to New York City with her family where she was enrolled in the Rayson School. This private school gave her the same quality of education that the boys her age were receiving. From an early age she had shown a talent for mathematicsMathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
.
Blodgett subsequently won a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
, where she excelled at mathematics and physics. She received her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1917.
Blodgett decided to pursue scientific research and visited the Schenectady GE plant during Christmas break of her senior year. Her father's former colleagues introduced her to research chemist Irving Langmuir
Irving Langmuir
Irving Langmuir was an American chemist and physicist. His most noted publication was the famous 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his...
. After a tour of his laboratory, Langmuir told the eighteen-year-old Blodgett that she needed to broaden her scientific education before coming to work for him.
Following his advice, Blodgett enrolled at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in 1918 to pursue a master's degree. Since a job awaited her in industrial research, she picked a related subject for her thesis: the chemical structure of gas mask
Gas mask
A gas mask is a mask put on over the face to protect the wearer from inhaling airborne pollutants and toxic gases. The mask forms a sealed cover over the nose and mouth, but may also cover the eyes and other vulnerable soft tissues of the face. Some gas masks are also respirators, though the word...
s. World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
was raging and gas masks were needed to protect troops against poison gases
Poison gas in World War I
The use of chemical weapons in World War I ranged from disabling chemicals, such as tear gas and the severe mustard gas, to lethal agents like phosgene and chlorine. This chemical warfare was a major component of the first global war and first total war of the 20th century. The killing capacity of...
. Blodgett determined that almost all poisonous gases can be adsorbed
Adsorption
Adsorption is the adhesion of atoms, ions, biomolecules or molecules of gas, liquid, or dissolved solids to a surface. This process creates a film of the adsorbate on the surface of the adsorbent. It differs from absorption, in which a fluid permeates or is dissolved by a liquid or solid...
by carbon
Carbon
Carbon is the chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6. As a member of group 14 on the periodic table, it is nonmetallic and tetravalent—making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds...
molecules. She published a paper on gas mask materials in the scientific journal Physical Review
Physical Review
Physical Review is an American scientific journal founded in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research and scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical Society. The journal is in its third series, and is split in several...
at the age of 21.
In 1924, Blodgett was awarded a position in a physics Ph.D. program at Sir Ernest Rutherford's
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics...
Cavendish Laboratory
Cavendish Laboratory
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory....
. She wrote her dissertation on the behavior of electrons in ionized mercury vapor. Blodgett was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, in 1926.
Work
Blodgett was hired by General Electric as a research scientist as soon as she had received her Master's degree in 1920. She was the first female to work as a scientist for General Electric Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. During her research, she often worked with Dr. Langmuir, who had worked with her father. Blodgett and Langmuir worked on monomolecularMonolayer
- Chemistry :A Langmuir monolayer or insoluble monolayer is a one-molecule thick layer of an insoluble organic material spread onto an aqueous subphase. Traditional compounds used to prepare Langmuir monolayers are amphiphilic materials that possess a hydrophilic headgroup and a hydrophobic tail...
coatings designed to cover surfaces of water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...
, metal
Metal
A metal , is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable and shiny, that is they reflect most of incident light...
, or glass
Glass
Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...
. These special coatings were oily and could be deposited in layers only a few nanometers thick. It wasn’t until the 1930’s that she discovered uses for the coatings.
In 1938, she devised a method to spread these monomolecular coatings one at a time onto glass or metal. She used a barium stearate film to cover glass with 44 monomolecular layers that made the glass more than 99% transmissive, creating "invisible" glass. This coating is now called the Langmuir-Blodgett film
Langmuir-Blodgett film
A Langmuir–Blodgett film contains one or more monolayers of an organic material, deposited from the surface of a liquid onto a solid by immersing the solid substrate into the liquid. A monolayer is adsorbed homogeneously with each immersion or emersion step, thus films with very accurate...
. One such use for her glass was in the stunning cinematography of the widely popular film, Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind
The slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork and Uncle Peter, and these slaves stay on with their masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 sets them free...
(1939). The Langmuir-Blodgett trough is also named after her. She also invented the color gauge, a method to measure the molecular coatings on the glass to one millionth of an inch.
The "color gauge" works on the idea that different thicknesses of coatings are different colors. She saw that soap bubbles were different colors and discovered that at each place that the soap bubble was a new color, it is of a different thickness. Before her invention, the best instruments were only accurate to a few thousandths of an inch. She made a glass "ruler" to show different colors corresponding to the thicknesses. Measuring a thickness now became as simple as matching colors. Other inventions for which she was credited were poison gas adsorbents, methods for deicing
Deicing
For snow and ice control on roadways and similar facilities, see Snow removalDe-icing is defined as removal of snow, ice or frost from a surface...
aircraft wings, and improving smokescreens.
Dr. Blodgett was issued eight US patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s during her career. She was the sole inventor on all but two of the patents. On those two she was the primary inventor with Vincent J. Schaefer
Vincent Schaefer
Vincent Joseph Schaefer was an American chemist and meteorologist who developed cloud seeding. On November 13, 1946, while a researcher at the General Electric Research Laboratory, Schaefer modified clouds in the Berkshire Mountains by seeding them with dry ice...
as co-inventor. Blodgett also published over 30 technical papers in various scientific journals.
Personal life
As detailed in Notable American WomenNotable American Women
Notable American Women is a novel, written by author Ben Marcus and published in March 2002.-Plot introduction:The novel, written as a follow-up to Marcus's literary debut, The Age of Wire and String, deals with an abstruse Ohio family, which shares the author's surname...
by the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Katherine Blodgett never married and lived a vibrant life, living in a Boston Marriage
Boston marriage
Boston marriage as a term is said to have been in use in New England in the decades spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe two women living together, independent of financial support from a man. The term was little known until the debut in 2000 of the David Mamet play of the...
for many years with Gertrude Brown, who came from an old Schenectady family. For another period she also lived with Elsie Errington, the English-born director of a nearby girl's school. "The household arrangement freed Blodgett from most domestic responsibilities- except for making her famous applesauce and popovers." Unfortunately, she did not leave any personal papers with her thoughts about her long-term relationships with these women.
Social life and hobbies
Blodgett bought a home in Schenectady overlooking her birthplace where she spent most of her adult life. She was an actress in her town's little theater group and volunteered for civic and charitable organizations. Blodgett was the treasurer of the Traveler's Aid SocietyTravelers Aid International
The Travelers Aid movement began in St. Louis, Missouri, under the leadership of Mayor Bryan Mullanphy. Its purpose was to provide assistance to American pioneers and new immigrants who became stranded on their journeys...
there. She spent summers at a camp at Lake George in upstate New York, to pursue her love of gardening. Blodgett was also an avid amateur astronomer. She collected antiques, played bridge
Contract bridge
Contract bridge, usually known simply as bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard deck of 52 playing cards played by four players in two competing partnerships with partners sitting opposite each other around a small table...
with friends and wrote funny poems in her spare time. She died in her home on October 12, 1979.