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Building a Place to Learn: Spectroscopist Gladys Amelia Anslow’s Five Decades at Smith College
In the middle of the Twentieth Century, if you wanted to know about the bleeding edge of modern chemical spectroscopy, Gladys Anslow...
Dale DeBakcsy
Feb 11
53 views


Helen Dick Megaw and the Dynamic Lives of Inorganic Molecules.
In 1941, the first patent was filed for a hot new product that stood to revolutionize the electronics field - it was a capacitor that...
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 28, 2024
233 views


Probing the Ultraviolet: The Spectroscopic Marvels of Emma Perry Carr
In its externals the life of Emma Carr (1880-1972) bears many similarities to that of fellow physicist Margaret Maltby (1860-1944). Both...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 11, 2024
190 views


Against the Current: Margaret Eliza Maltby and the Fight for Women in Physics.
An American woman hoping to make her way in science in the 19th century carried with her the knowledge that, as soon as she had a child...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 29, 2024
155 views


Two Roads Diverged: Marietta Blau, Hertha Wambacher, and the Great Cosmic Ray Chase.
Untold billions of miles away, a star explodes, and violently ejects barrages of hydrogen and helium atoms into the universe at speeds...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 25, 2024
80 views


She Sang the Arc Electric: Hertha Marks Ayrton
Sometimes, simplicity dooms. In World War I, chlorine gas hailed down upon the British soldiers trudging through their semi-lives in the...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 28, 2024
201 views


The Last Woman Who Knew Everything: The Omnivorous Mind of Clémence Royer.
When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 21, 2024
221 views


Primal Screams: Sophie Germain’s Mathematical Labours
It is a well-known fact of humanity that the chances of a group of people electing to do something decent and necessary is inversely...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 6, 2024
330 views


From Quaker Crystallographer to World War Pacifist: The Journey of Kathleen Lonsdale
The list of Quaker women who made fundamental contributions to the science of crystallography while in prison is a short one. In fact,...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 28, 2024
101 views


Sofia Kovalevskaya: Love Makes all the Partial Difference
Everybody needs love, but for some the striving after it so dominates their every action and decision that it becomes impossible to ever...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 15, 2024
107 views


From Wartime Radar to W-Bosons: The Experimental Physics of Joan Freeman.
In 1983, one of the great pillars of modern physics was cemented in place when CERN announced the discovery of a group of particles that...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 7, 2024
361 views


Mary Somerville: British Mathematical Prometheus
In the 1750s, when France was foundering scientifically in the Cartesian shallows, it took Émilie du Châtelet’s French translation of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 26, 2023
124 views


Casualty of Genius: The Sacrifice of Mileva Marić-Einstein.
Content Note: By the end of this article, you are not going to like Albert Einstein much. If this is a problem for you, if part of your...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 19, 2023
1,255 views


Sex, Cards and Calculus: A Day with Émilie du Châtelet
In popular mythology, the 1687 publication of Newton’s Principia was the culminating moment when one human told the world how the...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 13, 2023
195 views


Mother of the Telephone, Grandmother of Flight: Mabel Hubbard Bell.
We have been living without the menace of Scarlet Fever for a solid century now, and in that time it has devolved from a creature of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 25, 2023
357 views


Letting the Light Through: Katharine Burr Blodgett and the Physics of Non-Reflective Coating.
Every day, we subject our eyes to a nearly ceaseless barrage of screen-mediated experiences - phones, computers, televisions, tablets,...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 18, 2023
180 views


Queen of Carbon: The Materials Science Legacy of Mildred Dresselhaus
Carbon. Its astounding versatility is matched only by our total and historic complacency in the face of its wonders. “Carbon? Whatever...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 11, 2023
134 views


Gone, Fission: How Lise Meitner was Written Out of the Nuclear Age
To fully appreciate Lise Meitner, you have to first forget everything you learned about the atom in high school. Forget that the nucleus...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
471 views


The Unstoppable Marie Curie
You want to see tough? Take a look at this picture of Marie Curie near life’s end. It’s not an image you see a lot, but there is no...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
324 views


A Bigger Boom: Mary Sherman Morgan, the World's First Woman Rocket Scientist.
On October 4, 1957, the United States received the greatest single blow to its prestige since the burning of the White House in 1814 with...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 6, 2023
1,027 views
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