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:
“On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so;
Yet strive so, that before age, death’s twilight,
Thy Soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will, implies delay, therefore now do:
Hard deeds, the body’s pains; hard knowledge too
The mind’s endeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the Sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)
“If work is part of your identity, think very carefully before you give it up. Giving it up won’t make you a better mother; it will make you less of the person you are; and that will make you less of a mother.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)