Layers of Brilliance: The Air She Breathed -- Episode Three
About this episode
The episode explores the partnership between Katharine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir at General Electric, highlighting her contributions and personal life.
The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis: her forte is experimentation, his is scientific theory. We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall theory of matter. All the while, Katharine builds her life in Schenectady: going to church, making new friends, falling in love. In 1924, she embarks on a new journey to the University of Cambridge, where she studies with some of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Topics covered
- women in science
- partnership
- lightbulb innovation
- physics
- historical figures
- laboratory dynamics
Keywords
- Katharine Burr Blodgett
- Irving Langmuir
- General Electric
- lightbulb
- University of Cambridge
- 1924
- women in science
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: The General Electric Company
Places: Schenectady, University of Cambridge
More episodes of Lost Women of Science
- Elizabeth Roboz Einstein: The Determined Genius Behind a Multiple Sclerosis Breakthrough
- Conversation: If I Am Right, and I Know I Am: Inge Lehmann, the Woman Who Discovered Earth’s Innermost Secret
- BONUS: Agnes Pockels and the Kitchen Sink Myth
- Layers of Brilliance: Vanishing Act -- Episode Six
- Layers of Brilliance: The Self You Have to Live With - Episode Five
- Layers of Brilliance: The Breakthrough - Episode Four
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