Katharine Burr Blodgett’s relatives run the Lost women of science the production team to a collection of papers and objects stored in a New England storage unit, revealing an inner struggle she carefully kept out of sight, even as she wrote the story in the laboratory.
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Transcription
Episode 5 – The Self You Must Live With
Katie Hafner: In 1929, when she was 31, Katharine Blodgett began an amateur acting career with the Schenectady Civic Players.
His first role for the Players was in a play called Harmonics by Alice Gerstenberg. The entire one-act play consists of a long, tense encounter between two women whose inner thoughts are personified on stage.
One of the women, Margaret, has been invited to tea by an unfriendly socialite, and she tries to be polite to her annoying hostess, whom she really can’t stand. Katharine plays Margaret’s inner voice, “Maggie”. Maggie is like a splinter in Margaret’s brain, poking and prodding at her.
Voiceover: Don’t appear anxious. Flatter her. Change the subject.
Katie Hafner: Maggie, the inner voice becomes more and more insistent.
Voiceover: She’s taunting you. For the love of God, fight back!
Katie Hafner: This role turned out to be much more significant than we had imagined when we discovered it – even a sort of premonition.
Today, on Layers of Brilliance… Nobody knew Katharine Blodgett.
We tend to live our lives as if they are, in one way or another, already written. Not in a mystical sense, just in a human sense. We bring stories about ourselves to the surface of our consciousness, and then, often without realizing it, we begin to act out those stories.
Your younger self can often foreshadow your older self – and an older self can, in turn, shed light on who you are still becoming. In this sense, we become our own self-fulfilling prophecies.
It was late last spring, a few months into our reporting journey for this season, when I dove into Katharine’s family tree and came across a great-niece, Deborah Alkema, who lives in Massachusetts. I find a number and decide to call. To my surprise, she answers the phone!
About 20 minutes into our conversation, Deborah Alkema mentions a storage unit.
Storage unit?
Yes, a family storage unit in New Hampshire, where I spend the summer.
Deborah told me she was planning to sort things out and thinks she will drive there in the next few months. I say, how about in the next few weeks? Visions of lab notebooks – stacks of them – dance in my head. Of course, says Deborah. He is a very kind person. And I suggest we meet her there.
Deborah Alkema: Yeah. The entrance is right there. Mm-hmm.
Katie Hafner: Oh, I see.
Deborah Alkema: So you just want to stop somewhere there.
GPS voice: Your destination is on the left.
Deborah Alkema: The entrance is right there.
Katie Hafner: We’re in Belmont, New Hampshire, about 30 minutes north of Concord, the capital of this live-free-or-die state. And as we pull into the parking lot, Deborah tells me what she remembers about her great-aunt Katharine.
Deborah Alkema: She came to visit us regularly and brought us toys and other scientific objects.
And my sister credits him with bringing the electric doorbell kit that got my sister interested in electricity, and she’s an electrician.
I was like in my early teens when she died, I think.
Katie Hafner: Northland Secure Storage.
Deborah Alkema: Yeah.
Katie Hafner: How long have you owned this unit?
Deborah Alkema: Since mom died. I’ve gotten really bad over the years.
I have to get into my storage unit that way.
Storage employee: What unit are you in?
Deborah Alkema: This one here.
Katie Hafner: Oh, wow.
In this small space are cardboard boxes and plastic storage containers. There are two or three dozen of them. All piled up.
Deborah Alkema: Yes, we have a lot of family papers.
Katie Hafner: We start to search. looking at the labels on the boxes..
Miscellaneous objects…
SO…
Uh, fucking smoke.
Something caught my eye. At the top of one of the boxes we just opened is a very, very old book bound in thick brown leather, frayed at the edges, with Katharine B. Blodgett handwritten on the cover and the number 968 at the top, in black ink.
Katie Hafner: This is his lab notebook. His laboratory notebook from October 19, 1918. So, basically, absolutely. First, the ratings.
Deborah Alkema: So she would have been 20 years old. Mm-hmm.
Katie Hafner: She would have been 20 years old. There’s not much in it. No, it only goes to page 10.
Deborah Alkema: Hmm.
Katie Hafner: Is that it? A hundred years later, Katherine Blodgett’s lab notebooks ended up in a storage unit in New Hampshire? All right. I resist – barely – the urge to text everyone on the production team.
If there is this notebook, the others must be somewhere in the pile of ruined cardboard boxes and old plastic containers.
Katie Hafner: Let me take this, let me see, let me put this down.
I tell Deborah how grateful I am to her and her siblings for not throwing away Katharine’s papers, and she understands.
So one thing we said in our first season was, please, if you have a grandmother who you think could have done something interesting with her life…
Deborah Alkema: Save the stuff.
Katie Hafner: Or great aunt… Don’t throw it away. RIGHT? RIGHT. Or if there’s an attic to clean, go through that.
Deborah Alkema: Go through it.
Katie Hafner: Speaking of which, once we decided we couldn’t do all of this in the afternoon we had reserved for ourselves, Deborah confided a lot of it to me. I put everything in my car then in my house. And it’s all there. Heaps and heaps of Katharine Blodgett’s accumulated life.
The boxes open into piles, and the piles spread out. First, my dining table disappears. Then the chairs. Then the dining room floor all around. Every piece of the boxes requires attention.
The work is slow, physical, exhausting.
Peggy Schott arrives from Baltimore to help sort through all the scientific papers. Our associate producer, Hannah, is flying in from Boston. Eva, an intern at Lost Women of Science, is also coming to spend a few days. And we form a small makeshift community centered around Katharine’s life.
But once everything is out of the boxes, it turns out that there are no other lab notebooks.
Just this one from 1918, notebook number 968, which Katharine perhaps one day put under her arm, or slipped into her bag, and went home with it. The only notebook she kept.
And for this notebook to be different now.
It looks less like an accident. Rather a beginning she wanted to remember.
The absence of notebooks becomes not only disappointing but significant. The long sequence of missing pages begins to feel like a part of the story itself.
Because Katharine Blodgett’s work was never really hers.
All laboratory notebooks kept by GE scientists belonged to the company. George Wise, the historian we’ve heard about in other episodes and who has written extensively about GE, pointed this out.
George Wise: However, they were preserved as legal evidence.
Katie Hafner: Legal evidence to support GE’s patents.
George Wise: They are useful during court proceedings. Every entry is supposed to be witnessed by someone.
Katie Hafner: But beyond their legal use, the company did not seem to value them.
George Wise: There was no willingness to let anyone other than patent attorneys see it and its usefulness in court.
To my knowledge, at no time was the idea raised that these items would be preserved for the benefit of the public or for the benefit of other scientists, even though that would have been a useful thing to do.
Katie Hafner: The laboratory notebooks that we were able to consult – like those of Irving Langmuir or Vincent Schaefer – must have been saved by someone, then donated for preservation purposes. Someone who understood that one day, people like us would find value in themselves.
But the mountain of material that was Katharine and this now covers every surface in my dining room requires our forensic attention. Because you never know.
It’s overwhelming, though.
This is not an archive. It’s a weather system. The paper drifts over the decades. Ink, newspaper and handwriting – handwriting over the years, from clear and neat to almost indecipherable.
Part of it is a dazzling time, like the stacks of postcards her mother sent over the years – one for almost every day – bright and loving.
Also Bryn Mawr reunion programs. And flyers from the Zonta Club, the professional women’s group to which she belonged, as well as rosters and calendars and mailing lists. Small communities, saying: You belong here.
Pure Sun.
And some of it looks darker. Much darker.
The newspaper clippings about his father’s murder – dozens of them, each recounting the same tragedy in a slightly different tone. Even though she never talked about it, she obviously needed to find and keep as much of it as possible.
All these killing cuts created a long low pressure system. Something that never really went away.
And there are bundles of letters from the 1800s – many of them love letters from his parents – tied with string that has become stiff and brittle.
All mixed up with neat and impersonal tax returns. Share certificates. Fresh and gray.
And then, sudden waves of success. His Cambridge lecture notes. Dozens of newspaper clippings about Katharine.
There is a thick album, loaded with photos and headlines, showing Katharine at awards ceremonies, standing stiffly next to men in dark suits, finally being recognized by a world that didn’t always know what to make of her.
There is the Bible study workbook from 1917. Two little toys rnals “line per day”: the one from 1942 to 1946 is dense with crisp, clear writing so small I needed a magnifying glass, and the other is from the 1970s, when his writing had thinned to a blackened scribble.
And letters from different people, handwritten and typed, short and long, some sent as telegrams. Much of the correspondence comes from someone named Alice Penrose, who signed as Granny – even if she wasn’t Katharine’s grandmother, a mystery that would take on a strange weight.
Katharine’s meticulous maintenance of her garden, from the pH of the soil to the buds that germinated throughout the seasons. Each rose is numbered and studied like a laboratory specimen. His scraps of recipes scribbled in his ongoing quest for the perfect popover. On a sheet of paper, she had written a recipe for making enough applesauce to feed a small platoon. My dining room has been invaded by decades passing in overlapping currents. Long seasons of being.
Late one night, when I was alone, I was peering around the dining table and noticed something.
It was a series of envelopes always from the same person, but the stationery changed from year to year. Washington University, St. Louis. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore.
Different cities. The same name. I had looked through these envelopes earlier, but I hadn’t given them much thought or delved into them yet. But that evening, the return address of one of them caught my eye: McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts… It wasn’t a co-worker or a cousin, or a friend or a romantic interest who was writing to Katharine. It was his psychiatrist.
In 1931, Katharine was hospitalized at McLean, a renowned psychiatric hospital located in Belmont, a suburb of Boston. And while there, she was under the care of a psychiatrist named John Whitehorn.
The breakdown, we now know, occurred in late February 1931, a little more than 12 years after she began working at GE. It was while she was visiting her brother George and sister-in-law Isabel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was overwhelmed by voices only she could hear, and I suspect it was her brother and sister-in-law who took her to McLean, an elite psychiatric hospital in nearby Belmont. McLean was a leading institution in what it called the “moral treatment” of mental illness, offering more humane treatments than its counterparts. Katharine was receiving the best possible care at a time when little was known about the treatment of mental illness, in what was widely considered the best place for those whose minds had turned against them.
She stayed there for about two months, then returned to her life. At his work. In the laboratory.
Suddenly, everything on my dining table looked different. The story I thought I knew of Katharine’s adult life had just changed. He was a brilliant scientist, a brilliant mind – to draw a parallel with the deeply troubled genius mathematician John Nash – grappling with an extraordinary inner life.
More after the break.
Katie Hafner: Although Katharine was not hospitalized again after her stay at McLean in 1931 – at least to our knowledge – the voices did not disappear. They came back. For years, on and off, they hovered and stalked.
At the request of the family, and to protect Katharine’s privacy, we will not go into detail about the voices Katharine heard.
Some of them were disturbing, others were benign. For example, she was in the laboratory, doing calculations, and what she called her split self, came out of nowhere and clear as a bell, she heard: “Good job!
We asked Nick Rosenlicht, a psychiatrist in Berkeley, California, with decades of experience, to comment on this topic.
He said he was struck by how engaged she was with the voices, carrying on real dialogues.
Nick Rosenlicht: She feels like they’re almost, you know, it’s almost like they’re imaginary friends or enemies of hers.
Katie Hafner: Sometimes she referred to them as “behind-the-scenes voices.” In any case, why these voices materialized at that time, in 1931, perhaps even before, we do not know.
But the fact is that they would seem inappropriate. And more and more unwanted.
One thing: her father’s murder and the fact that it was unsolved was something Katharine had a hard time getting over. Otherwise, why would she keep so many press clippings, many of which are duplicates…
In fact, we found a large envelope addressed to psychiatrist John Whitehorn, in which she had enclosed a flashy magazine called “True Confessions” from 1924, 29 years after the murder, containing an article written by the detective who investigated her father’s murder. Typical of a tabloid magazine, the murder was recounted, sparing no detail or drama. The detective wrote about his hunt for the “bad guy” in a wild tale.
And according to one account, Katharine at one time attended a few seances led by a prominent Schenectady spiritualist in hopes of conjuring up the ghost of her late father.
Letter exchanges between Katharine and John Whitehorn continued for years. We see the correspondence primarily from his side, and it is clear that he deeply admired Katharine’s scientific achievements and was in awe of her and Irving Langmuir.
He frequently commented on Katharine’s publications and occasionally suggested alternative explanations for Langmuir’s discoveries in articles, meticulously drafting chemical equations and models.
He even did his own experiments, measuring changes in subjects’ heart rates during sleep for research on stress, which he was eager to share with Katharine.
After a while, Katharine’s illness simply did not show itself.
Until it did. In 1940, almost a decade after Katharine was hospitalized, after years of working miracles in the laboratory through her patience, her energy, her… unfailing curiosity… two years after her discovery of non-reflective glass, she sent two letters to Dr. Whitehorn asking for help – and after the second, he responded.
His letter was brief.
He compared the voices to an imaginary man under a bed, “so fascinatingly feared by the neglected woman.”
Who knows what he meant by that, but he made a suggestion. He suggested that she rely on her “increasing boredom and disgust” with the voices in order to overcome them or, at least, no longer be so tormented by them – to empty them of what he suggested was her fascination with them.
He said he didn’t know of any medication or surgical measures to get rid of the voices. He recommended that Katharine stay busy interacting with real people. And if that failed, he wrote, a lengthy series of psychiatric interviews might be necessary.
In other words, he was lost.
Nick Rosenlicht: I mean, he’s really quite cavalier about it.
Katie Hafner: Nick Rosenlicht again.
Nick Rosenlicht: As you know, stop this stuff. You are an adult. You don’t have to imagine these things, and you know, you know they’re not real.
He refers to these unjust voices as if they were things she had some control over.
Katie Hafner: Keep in mind that there were no known treatments for conditions like Katharine’s at the time.
And as much as she wished, she had no control over the voices.
What all of this crystallized for me and the rest of the production team was that the decade when Katharine Blodgett was doing the most extraordinary science of her life was also a decade where her mind was not at peace.
There is a special form of courage there: the courage to show up, day after day, when your own mind is not always on your side.
Katharine didn’t just do difficult scientific work. She did it while keeping herself slightly away from the world. Imagine yourself trying to think – to really think, to concentrate on detailed, demanding work – while being interrupted by a second unwanted conversation going on in your head.
Now add to that another kind of loneliness. Katharine Blodgett was often the only woman in the room, surrounded by men who respected her but couldn’t, even for a minute, understand her place in their world.
In the mountain of papers in the storage locker was a notebook that didn’t look like much. It was a spiral-bound lined page book made by a company called Tumbler.
But when I opened it, I realized that this Tumbler notebook had nothing to do with Katharine’s work in the lab.
It was a sort of diary… And most of the entries started with “Dear Grandmother”.
She was that… Grandma, as I mentioned earlier, was not Katharine’s grandmother. She was Alice Penrose, someone with whom Katharine had a complicated and thorny relationship. Alice was director of home economics at the Ballard School, a professional school of the YWCA in New York. It appears that the two women knew each other through Katharine’s mother.
Katharine and Alice were in frequent contact. Alice even wrote to Katharine while she was at McLean. Alice Penrose therefore saw the most fragile part of her young friend.
Katharine had given a lecture to Alice’s students on electricity. Alice had borrowed money from Katharine and was paying it back in fits and starts. Alice was much older than Katharine. Strangely, she signs many of her letters “Your grandmother”. Some of their letters are downright hostile, but Granny’s entries in the Tumbler Notebook are all love and affection.
And here’s the even weirder part: Katharine wrote these entries in 1939.
Three years after the death of Alice Penrose.
So it’s not a match. It’s a one-way conversation. And everywhere in this notebook, in this one-sided conversation, Katherine speaks, to quote Granny, “of her divided self.”
Natalia Sánchez Loayza: You’re muted, Katie.
Katie Hafner: I know. The dog barks. Wait.
Our producer Natalia and I go on Zoom with a guest.
Sorry about that. Let’s start by asking you to tell us your name and what you do.
Elizabeth Lunbeck: My name is Elizabeth Lunbeck and I am professor of the history of science in residence at Harvard University and chair of the history of science department.
Katie Hafner: Liz studies the history of psychiatry and we turned to her to help us understand what we discovered about Katharine.
In the Tumbler Notebook, Katharine calls what she has a “split personality”, the only time we see her put a name to it.
Liz sees something else.
Elizabeth Lunbeck: Is this just a way of describing one’s inner life? I’m not sure if it’s a split personality. She calls it that, but maybe she’s just t very sensitive to different aspects of one’s own experience…
Katie Hafner:Liz points out something about the Tumbler notebook that I didn’t fully register until she said it:
Elizabeth Lunbeck: What strikes me is the effort she put into trying to contain, manage and deal with everything that was tormenting her. Just like the scientist she was, she had a very scientific approach to herself.
She was very careful in her descriptions of her inner state. She repeatedly spoke of experiences about herself.
Katie Hafner: In her entries in Granny, Katharine asked the same question several times, looking at the variables.
What happens when she leans into the “split self” – and what happens when she tries to exclude it? What makes it better? What makes it worse?
Elizabeth Lunbeck: We talk about ourselves all the time now. She is one of the first to embrace the hunted kind of self. She follows the vagaries, the vicissitudes of herself in a very concrete and detailed way.
Katie Hafner: Above all, said Liz….
Elizabeth Lunbeck: She is a scientist herself. She’s a scientist in a laboratory. She’s a scientist in her garden. She is above all a scientist.
Katie Hafner: And there was an aspect of Katharine’s self… that Liz kept coming back to – the part that enlightened her –
Elizabeth Lunbeck: It is striking how heavy his ambition is. What really strikes me here is her description of how she deals with the ambitious part of herself. This separate self. He tells her you are doing a great job. You are really good.
Katie Hafner: According to Katharine, the ambitious part of herself doesn’t fully resemble her. It’s behind the scenes.
In a Granny in the Tumbler notebook entry, Liz picked up on a particular phrase, an idea that comes up repeatedly:
Elizabeth Lunbeck: I desperately need to be proud of myself.
Katie Hafner: But she can’t really bear this pride directly.
Elizabeth Lunbeck: The easiest way to do this is to think of you, grandmother, who is proud of me.
Katie Hafner: It’s a pride she borrows and can’t truly own. And this borrowed pride becomes a sort of scaffolding – something she could stand on long enough to continue.
As Liz Lunbe You see, Katharine was struggling with her ambition. What she presented to the world – assistant to the great Irving Langmuir – and her ambition were in conflict.
Elizabeth Lunbeck: I think maybe she’s in prey or torment, it’s too strong. What she shows the world is she, you know, she’s a nice little old lady and, you know, she works her garden.
But internally, she wants to be recognized. She wants to do more, she wants more approval.
Katie Hafner: And then she was also busy doing other things, which…
Elizabeth Lunbeck: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think she was, she was very busy, busy, preoccupied with something else, which was trying to understand herself.
Katie Hafner: So when Vincent Schaefer said he never saw her depressed?
Of course not. Because whatever that struggle was, Katharine carefully – almost perfectly – hid it.
Elizabeth Lunbeck: It is not surprising that her colleague Vincent Schaefer saw nothing of what we were able to see afterwards, as she carefully kept him away from her professional life.
Katie Hafner: What we see in this notebook is a portrait of effort.
A woman who tries – day after day – to manage her own mind. Trying to be, as she put it in the language of her time, “a normal human being”.
Trying to keep her ambition alive without being punished – by her world or by herself.
And then, every morning, she returns to the laboratory and lowers a sheet of glass to the surface of the water. Again. And again.
The discovery of Katharine’s mental health issues clarified as well as clouded things. Some things started to make sense. Or at least I decided to impose some sort of explanation. To the world, it seemed like she didn’t need to draw attention to herself. As those around her saw it, she was content to stay in the lab, for the most part, conducting experiments.
But I imagine GE’s spotlight on her, with all the stories written about her discovery, might have amplified her feelings of ambition. Because it is clear from her journal that she struggled with her ambition and her desire to be able to feel proud of everything she accomplished, she returns to it again and again.
Among the hundreds of fascinating – okay, fascinating to us – scraps of paper that we found, constituting the poetry of everyday life – we found something else that was intriguing.
The Katharine who investigated, probed, and tried to understand – even take control of – a mental illness that often got the better of her over the years – this Katharine – turned to self-help literature.
It was a typed extract from a book called… The self you must live with. The author was a pastor and theologian who taught mind control.
The book appears to be a self-help classic with a generous helping of Christian teachings. It was published in 1938, the year Katharine discovered non-reflective glass, the year she filled the pages of the Tumbler notebook.
His chosen excerpt: “A self is something you continually create… a source of misery or a source of power – which depends on the interests you cultivate, the thoughts you allow. The greatest achievement in life is to continually remake yourself so that… well… you know how to live.”
Katie Hafner: This was Lost Women of Science. The producers of this episode were Natalia Sanchez Loayza and Sophia Levin, with me as lead producer. Hannah Sammut was our associate producer. Elah Feder was our consulting editor. Ana Tuiran did our sound design and engineering, and Hansdale Hsu mastered the episode.
Elizabeth Younan is our composer and Lisk Feng designed the art.
Thank you to Senior Producer Deborah Unger, Program Manager Éowyn Burtner, my Co-Executive Producer Amy Scharf, and Marketing Director Lily Whear.
We received help from Eva McCullough, Nadia Knoblauch, Theresa Cullen, Carolyn Klebanoff and Issa Block Kwong.
Special thanks to Peggy Schott, Nick Rosenlicht and Liz Lunbeck.
And we thank Deborah, Jonathan and Marijke Alkema for helping us tell the story of their great aunt Katharine. We are distributed by PRX and our publishing partner is Scientific American. Our funding comes in part from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation, as well as our generous individual donors.
Please visit us at lost women of science.org, and don’t forget to click that all-important donate button. My name is Katie Hafner. See you next week.
Main producer and host: Katie Hafner
Producers:
Natalia Sánchez Loayza
Sophie Levin
Associate producer: Hannah Sammut
Guests
Deborah Alkema
Deborah Alkema is the great-niece of Katharine Burr Blodgett.
George Sage
George Sage is a former communications specialist at the GE Research and Development Center in Schenectady. He is also a historian of science and technology and author of The old GE (2024).
Nicolas Rosenlicht Nicolas Rosenlicht is a psychiatrist with over 40 years of experience in Berkeley, California, and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
Elizabeth Lunbeck Elizabeth Lunbeck is professor of the history of science in residence at Harvard University and chair of the Department of History of Science. She specializes in the study of the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology.
Further reading
Psychiatry Crossroads: A History of McLean Hospital. SB Sutton. American Psychiatric Press, 1986