Born in 1894, physicist Marietta Blau’s research led to a way to capture the tracks of speeding subatomic particles.
In 1937, Blau & Hertha Wambacher made a discovery that launched the field of particle physics. But she was forced to pause her work in 1938 bc of the Nazis.
When I post about #science & #history, I tend to highlight the trailblazers we don’t usually read or hear about in #HistoryRemix.
But tonight I want to share this beautifully composed piece about Nikola Tesla.
While his inventions are legendary, you may not know how Tesla’s OCD shaped his approach to science & ultimately led to his world-changing ideas. It also left him isolated & alone. But he still experienced deep connection by caring for birds. https://nautil.us/teslas-pigeon-460446/
Born in 1885, Clara Belle Williams became the 1st Black graduate of New Mexico College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts (now NMSU).
While a student, many professors did not allow her into lecture halls so she took notes from the hallway. When she graduated in 1937, commencement ceremonies were canceled bc a group of students refused to walk with her.
Born in 1896, biochemist Gerty Theresa Cori became the 1st woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (and the 3rd to win a Nobel Prize).
Cori faced gender discrimination & was marginalized for years. But she never gave up.
In 1894, a Boston man bet another $20K that no woman could travel around the world by bicycle.
So Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, then penniless, learned to bike & set out to prove him wrong & earn prize money.
From 1894-95, she did just that (sailing between continents). Kopchovsky kept her husband & family a secret, using the alias Londonderry. She won $10K for her accomplishment & returned to raise her family.
We hear a lot about famous men like Einstein & Darwin.
But there are so many incredible stories of other pioneering trailblazers who have made significant contributions in #science, math, engineering & more, yet haven’t been credited, acknowledged or celebrated.
And when we don’t see ourselves in the #history of STEAM, we may not recognize we are all capable of great achievements too.
That’s why I share the stories you see at #HistoryRemix
Born in 1794, pioneering marine biologist Jeannette Villepreux-Power collected specimens from local fisherman in Sicily for study. She built a natural history collection & was especially interested in cephalopods like octopus & squid 🐙.
Villepreux-Power invented the modern aquarium was one of the first people to observe living cephalopods & their behaviors.
Born in 1938, Jeanne Hoff, was the 1st openly transgender psychiatrist. She used her voice to speak out for others, such as a Black transgender woman diagnosed by doctors w “mental retardation" & “sexual perversion” due to her gender identity.
Hoff shared her transition experience in a documentary to encourage her transgender patients to live openly & confidently. She passed away earlier this Fall & absolutely belongs in #HistoryRemix.
Born in 1848, Caroline Still Anderson completed high school at 15. When she enrolled at Oberlin College, she was the only Black student in her class.
Anderson went on to become a physician, driven to improve the social & political conditions of Black people. She also served as a prominent a social reformer in Philadelphian society.
Born in 1918, Gertrude Elion faced discrimination in #science, unable to get a job as a woman. So she volunteered as a lab dishwasher, earning enough $ for grad work at NYU, where she was the only woman in chemistry classes.
Educator, scientist & writer Ana Roqué de Duprey was born in Puerto Rico in 1853.
Known as the “Flower of the Valley” for her work in botany, Roqué wrote the Botany of the Antilles, the most comprehensive study of flora in the Caribbean & was instrumental in the fight for the Puerto Rican woman’s right to vote.
Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was born ~780. He not only revolutionized algebra, but his contributions in mathematics, astronomy & geography have been central to hundreds of years of scientific advances.
Born in 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin perfected X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging using X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure.
She determined the structures of insulin, penicillin & vitamin B12, leading to tremendous advances in medicine.
In 1916, 23 yr old chemist Alice Ball discovered a breakthrough in treatment for Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease). She was the 1st woman & 1st Black chemistry professor at UHawaii.
Tragically, Ball passed away months after her discovery due to complications from a lab accident.
What happened next? Arthur Dean, head of her dept, continued the work publishing Ball’s process as “Dean’s method.”
@Yoshi If you check out #HistoryRemix, you'll see that over & over throughout history, women's discoveries & ideas have been attributed, or at times, stolen, by men.
Katherine Esau, born in 1898 in Ukraine, was a pioneering botanist who studied plant anatomy & viruses.
Esau began studying agriculture in 1916 in Moscow. Her family fled to Berlin & ultimately arrived in the US in 1922.
Esau earned a PhD & her research on plant structure spanned 7 decades. She wrote 6 textbooks & was the 6th woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Born in 1861, Nettie Stevens received her PhD in 1903. She went on to discover sex chromosomes in mealworms. Until then, it was believed that the mother or environment determined males & females.
But... Edmund Beecher Wilson published first. He may have seen Stevens' results & also didn't quite get everything right.
"Christopher Nolan's #Oppenheimer explores the work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer & colleagues to create the atomic bomb.
Yet, the film fails to depict a key part of the story, using 2 female scientists as stand-ins for ALL of the women who contributed."
Hundreds of women were essential to the Manhattan Project, including Nobel Prize winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer. But they are largely absent in the #film.
Born in 1928, Vera Rubin set her sights on Princeton, but they wouldn’t accept female grad students in astronomy. So she earned her master’s from Cornell & PhD from Georgetown.
In 1965, Rubin became the 1st woman allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory. She went on to find evidence for the existence of dark matter.
Rosalind Franklin’s research was crucial to discovering DNA’s double helix structure. But she never received proper acknowledgement for her contribution.