Dale DeBakcsy
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...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 21
Naval Engineer Raye Montague and the Tale of the World’s First Computer-Designed Naval Vessel.
In March 1971, a computer science whiz with an unlikely background was given six months to complete a seemingly impossible project for...
102 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 20
Marie-Anne Lavoisier and the Birth of Modern Chemistry.
It is early August in the year 1794, and jails, choked with the enemies of Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee for Public Safety,...
103 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 7
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...
356 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 25, 2023
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...
305 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 23, 2023
Steering the Future of Women in Science: The Institutional Wizardry of Microbiologist Rita Colwell.
One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. ...
47 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
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...
458 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
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...
273 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 6, 2023
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...
1,015 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 29, 2023
Water, Fire, and Lightning: The Life of Laura Bassi, the First Woman Professor of Science.
It's April of 1732, and the hot ticket in Bologna is not an opera, a play, or a beheading, but rather that most mundane of things: a...
532 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 24, 2023
Born Not Taught: Marian Koshland and the Source of Antibody Variation.
The human body is a truly wonderful place to live, if you can fit in it. It's warm and protected and, because humans are such clever at...
747 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Sep 10, 2023
A Life in Service to the Birds: America’s Pioneering Woman Ornithologist, Florence Merriam Bailey
In the late eighteenth century, it would have been not at all unusual to run into a woman on the streets of New York wearing upon her...
122 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 13, 2023
Making Continents Move: The Ocean Cartography of Marie Tharp
If you're a scientist, and you've lived long enough, there's a good chance that you'll see your life's work overwritten and forgotten in...
222 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 24, 2023
The Totally Improbable, Completely True Life of Betsi Cadwaladr, Welsh War Nurse
On a winter’s night in 1854, two steel-willed women regarded each other with mutual dislike across a desk located on a scrap of...
33 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 16, 2023
Of Artificial Radiation and Natural Genius: The Chemistry of Irène Joliot-Curie
Radioactivity is a great thing. Terrible, as they say, but great. The medical applications of radioactively tagged molecules, as Rosalyn...
220 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 10, 2023
Margaret Floy Washburn and the Motion of Thought.
Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) was the first American woman to receive a PhD in psychology (though not, as we learned from our time...
24 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 8, 2023
ATLAS Soared: Fabiola Gianotti and the Discovery of a Higgs Particle
In a corner of a room, tucked unostentatiously away from the notice of the raving hordes of just barely contained school children using...
7 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 5, 2023
Lavinia Waterhouse: Gold Rush Physician, Frontier Suffragette
Lavinia Waterhouse (1809–1890) lived at the intersection of a tangle of ideas that, to the twenty-first-century mind, have no business...
26 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 4, 2023
Margaret Mead and the Anthropology of Cultural Relativism.
There is hardly a name in science more encrusted with bad faith generalizations and well-meaning but ahistorical hagiography than that of...
469 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 2, 2023
Maria Sibylla Merian:17th Century Artist, Entomologist, Explorer and Proto-Ecologist!
Biological classification took a while to figure itself out. For centuries, it was a mish-mash of Aristotelian sentiments and cabinets...
11 views
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