Katherine Blodgett
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[edit] Child Hood
Katharine Blodgett was born on January 10, 1898 in the city of Schenectady New York. She was the daughter of Katharine Burr and George Blodgett. Just before she was born, her father had been killed when he was shot in his own home during an attempted robbery. After her birth, her family moved to France, and then back to New York City in 1912.
[edit] Education
Katherine's mother enrolled her in private school. This allowed her to get the same quality of education that the boys her age were receiving. Katherine’s best subject was math. When she was just 15, she graduated for high school. She next attended Bryn Mawr College on a scholarship that she had received. She received her Bachelor’s Degree at the age of 19. Upon receiving her Bachelor’s, she then went on to get her Master’s Degree in chemistry at the University of Chicago. When she was just 28 years old, she was named the first woman to ever get her Ph.D in physics from Cambridge University in (1926). Her Ph.D. thesis at was written on the topic of Absorption of Gases by Carbon. During World War I, many gas masks were needed. Gas masks help protect troops against smoke and other deadly gases. Katie figured out that many of the poisonous gases that the troops wish to be protected against can be absorbed by carbon molecules. This helped to make gas masks better.
[edit] Work
Katherine was hired byGeneral_Electric as a Research Scientist as soon as she had received her Master's degree in 1920. She was the first female scientist to work at the General Electric Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. During her research, she often worked with Dr. Irving Langmuir, who had previously worked with her father. Katherine and Langmuir worked on monomolecular coatings designed to cover surfaces of water, metal, or glass. These special coatings that they worked on were oily and could be spread in a thin layer on water, metal, or glass. These coatings were so thin that 35,000 of them stacked on top of each other are only as thick as a piece of paper. However it wasn’t until the 1930’s that she had discover what to do with the coatings she had been working on.
[edit] Inventions
In 1938, she figured out how to spread these monomolecular coatings one at a time onto glass or metal. She used a barium stereate film to cover glass with 44 monomolecular coatings to create the first "invisible" glass. Her invention made glass less distorted and more than 99% non-reflective. This coating is now called the Langmuir-Blodgett film. She had also invented the color gauge, which was a way to measure the tiny molecular coatings on the glass to the nearest 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. Katie's gauge could give measurements down to less than one millionth 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 she was credited for were poison gas absorbents, methods for de-icing aircraft wings, and improving smokescreens.
[edit] Social Life
She was an actress with her town's little theater group. She also volunteered for civic and charitable organizations. She also enjoyed writing funny poems in her spare time.
[edit] Awards
Katherine had received a numerous awards throughout her lifetime. In 1951 she was chosen by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of the 15 "women of achievement” Among many other awards she had received, the mayor of Schenectady New York honored her with Katherine Blodgett Day on June 13, 1951 because of all the honor she good that she had brought to her community.
Patent #US 2,220,860 (March 16, 1938) was issued for the "Film Structure and Method of Preparation".
