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:
“Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.”
—Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904)
“I do not want to be covetous, but I think I speak the minds of many a wife and mother when I say I would willingly work as hard as possible all day and all night, if I might be sure of a small profit, but have worked hard for twenty-five years and have never known what it was to receive a financial compensation and to have what was really my own.”
—Emma Watrous, U.S. inventor. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“The belief that there are final and immutable answers, and that the professional expert has them, is one that mothers and professionals tend to reinforce in each other. They both have a need to believe it. They both seem to agree, too, that if the professional’s prescription doesn’t work it is probably because of the mother’s inadequacy.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)