Agnes Pockels

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Agnes Luise Wilhelmine Pockels (February 14, 1862 in Venice, Italy, – 1935), was a German hausfrau and pioneer in chemistry.

[edit] Biography

Her father served in the Austrian army. When he fell sick with malaria, the family moved to Brunswick, Lower Saxony. Already as a child, Agnes was interested in science and would have liked to study physics. In those days, however, women had no access to universities. It was only through her younger brother Friedrich, then studied at the famous university of Göttingen, that she gained access to scientific literature.

Legend has it that doing the dishes in her own kitchen Agnes discovered the influence of impurities on the surface tension of fluids. To measure the tension she developed the Pockels trough, precursor to the Langmuir scale, and published the first stearine acid.

In 1931 she received, together with Henri Devaux, the Laura Leonard award from the Colloid Society. In the following year (1932) the Technische Hochschule Braunschweig granted her an honorary PhD degree.