Salute the ‘Lady Edisons’ who excelled in ‘applied sciences’

Joining Buelah Louise Henry, Margaret Eloise Knight and Josephine Garis Cochran as top-notch female inventors who qualified as “Lady Edisons” are scientists Katharine Burr Blodgett and Stephanie Louise Kwolek. 

Katharine Blodgett’s father, who was General Electric’s chief patent attorney died tragically shortly before she was born in 1898 in Schenectady, N.Y. Her widowed mother moved to France in 1901 with Katharine and her older brother, George Jr. The children quickly gained fluency in French and competency in German. The family settled in New York City in 1912. 

In 1917, during her senior year at Bryn Mawr (Pa.) College, Katharine inquired about employment opportunities at GE, and Dr. Irving Langmuir, a staff chemist, urged her to earn an advanced degree. 

She earned a master’s degree in chemistry in 1918 at the University of Chicago and was hired to work in Dr. Langmuir’s research laboratory – the first woman scientist hired by GE.

 After six years at the company, Katharine Blodgett decided to pursue a doctoral degree with hopes of advancing further within GE. She was accepted to study at Cambridge University in England. In 1926, she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge. 

Dr. Blodgett returned to the GE lab and eventually began experimenting with glass. In 1938, she discovered a way to make a glass surface “invisible” to the human eye, using a thin layer of film that canceled out the light reflection without compromising the transparency of the glass.

 She received a U.S. patent for “invisible glass,” and her contributions to research in this field led to the application of glass surface film to optical equipment, lenses, windshields, picture frames and other glass products. 

During World War II, Dr. Blodgett’s research shifted towards defense applications. She aided in the improvement of gas masks, developed a machine to protect soldiers in combat by creating larger and longer lasting smoke screens and researched methods to reduce the hazard of icing on airplane wings. 

Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett retired from GE in 1963. She never married. She died at home in Schenectady in 1979, at age 81. 

One of her coworkers, Vincent J. Schaefer, recalled that “the methods she developed have become classical tools of the science and technology of surfaces and films. She will be long – and rightly – hailed for the simplicity, elegance, and the definitive way in which she presented them to the world.”

 

Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett was inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007.

Stephanie Louise Kwolek was born in 1923, the daughter of John and Nellie Kwolek, Polish immigrants, who were living in New Kensington, Pa., situated along the Allegheny River above Pittsburgh. 

“From her father, an amateur naturalist, she learned her love of science on their long walks through the woods together, identifying plants and wildlife. He died when Stephanie was just 10 years old,” reported Kiona N. Smith, a freelance science journalist.

 

“From her mother, a seamstress, Stephanie learned her love of textiles and fiber arts. At a young age, she considered a career in fashion, but her mother warned that she was too much of a perfectionist to be a designer.” 

“Instead, Stephanie Kwolek chose chemistry, a field for perfectionists if there ever was one,” Smith said. 

She was determined to become a physician. We’ll have to see how that turned out.