Work
Blodgett was hired by General Electric as a research scientist as soon as she had received her Master's degree in 1920. She was the first woman to work as a scientist for General Electric Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. During her research, she often worked with Langmuir, who had worked with her father. Blodgett and Langmuir worked on monomolecular coatings designed to cover surfaces of water, metal, or glass. These special coatings were oily and could be deposited in layers only a few nanometers thick. It wasn’t until the 1930s that she discovered uses for the coatings.
In 1938, she devised a method to spread these monomolecular coatings one at a time onto glass or metal. She used a barium stearate film to cover glass with 44 monomolecular layers that made the glass more than 99% transmissive, creating "invisible" glass. This coating is now called the Langmuir-Blodgett film. One such use for her glass was in the stunning cinematography of the popular film, Gone with the Wind (1939). The Langmuir-Blodgett trough is also named after her. She also invented the color gauge, a method to measure the molecular coatings on the glass to one millionth of an inch.
The "color gauge" employs the concept 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 has a different thickness. Before her invention, the best instruments were only accurate to a few thousandths of an inch. She made a glass "ruler" to show different colors corresponding to the thicknesses. Measuring thickness became as simple as matching colors. her other inventions were poison gas adsorbents, methods for deicing aircraft wings, and improving smokescreens.
Dr. Blodgett was issued eight US patents during her career. She was the sole inventor on all but two of the patents. On those two she was the primary inventor with Vincent J. Schaefer as co-inventor. Blodgett also published over 30 technical papers in various scientific journals.
Read more about this topic: Katharine Burr Blodgett
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Not rarely, and this is especially true of wives and mothers, the motive behind assuming a disproportionate share of work and responsibility is completely unselfish. We want to protect, to spare those of whom we are fond. We forget that, regardless of the motive, the results of such action are almost always destructive and unproductive.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)