How is a legacy preserved and how is someone forgotten? Determined to make a definitive name for himself, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir ventured into science that many would call what he himself calls “pathological science” or “wishful thinking,” while chemist and physicist Katharine Burr Blodgett continued her work as a diligent experimenter. But Blodgett’s contributions have faded from the memory of the General Electric Company and the public. We visit her grave to say goodbye and examine the wisdom she passed on to the next generation of curious minds.
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Episode 6 – Disappearing Act
Advertiser: My friends, they said it was a man’s world, but don’t believe it. It’s also a women’s world. Women not only do excellent work at home, they also make substantial contributions to the scientific work of General Electric’s research laboratory. In Schenectady, you’ll find many women scientists doing interesting and important work.
This is Dr Katharine Blodgett, an authority on the properties of very thin coatings and films. Her work in this field made her famous among scientists around the world.
Katie Hafner: In a 1954 promotional film, Katharine Blodgett works on semiconductors, the cornerstone of the new field of electronics. She is now 56 years old, her big breakthrough, the discovery of anti-reflective glass, almost 20 years behind her. She is still respected and celebrated. In 1951, for example, she was honored by the American Chemical Society for her work in surface chemistry. But as the decade progressed, she gradually faded away. And today, ask almost anyone, even those who live in Schenectady, if the name Katharine Burr Blodgett means anything to you, and that’s what you hear.
Various voices: It’s a name I’ve never heard before. I don’t know who it was. Didn’t she swim the Suez Canal? Oh wait, no, it was someone else. No, that sounds familiar. I don’t know. Oh, remind me. What was his background? She was the wife of Dr. Blodgett.
Katie Hafner: My name is Katie Hafner and this is Lost Women of Science.
Today is the final episode of Layers of Brilliance, the chemical genius of Katharine Burr Blodgett. We call this episode Vanishing Act.
What lasts? What is disappearing? And who decides? Because forgetting is not an accident. It’s a process.
So how did the world forget Katharine Burr Blodgett?
And what about his boss, Irving Langmuir? What happens when a scientist flies too close to the sun…or, in this case, the clouds?
I went to Schenectady last summer and one of the first things I did was look for the house Katharine lived in for over 50 years, at 18 North Church Street in the Stockade Historic District.
Diagonally across from Katharine’s, I could see the house on Front Street, where Katharine was born and where her father was murdered in 1897.
I was delighted to see a plaque on Katharine’s old house. How nice of the city to honor him with a plaque! But… not so fast. When I got close enough to read the plaque, my joy faded. The name on the plaque at 18 North Church Street is Benjamin van Vleck, who according to the plaque was living there in 1735. This Benjamin was part of one of the first Dutch families to settle in Schenectady in the 18th century.
Now even Katharine’s old house is tipping its hat to someone else. So what happened?
After her discovery of non-reflective glass in 1938, Katharine became one of the General Electric Company’s most famous scientists.
She was invited to give lectures and do interviews. Several colleges and universities have awarded him an honorary degree.
Although its nonreflective films were never commercialized—they were too soft and wiped too easily to be used in real products—GE did manage to commercialize part of its research: the color gauge Katharine created to track film thickness. To do this, he matched the color reflected by a thin film to the number of layers it contained.
After her most intense period of fame in 1939, thanks to GE’s exuberant public relations machine, Katharine returned to her science and, in the never-boring department, to science with Irving Langmuir.
George Wise: There was a team that met at the laboratory, the main participants were Langmuir, Schaefer, Katharine Blodgett…
It’s George Wise, the historian we’ve been hearing about this season.
George Wise: …And a fourth person named Bernard Vonnegut, who was an MIT physicist, best known today for bringing his brother Kurt to Schenectady to work as a copywriter.
Katie Hafner: That would be Kurt Vonnegut, who, as I mentioned earlier in the season, became one of the most famous novelists of the 20th century and who drew a lot of material for his fiction directly from his experience at GE.
Thus Bernard Vonnegut, Irving Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer and Katharine Blodgett….
George Wise: During World War II, they worked on smoke screens for the troops.
Katie Hafner: That is, a high-efficiency smoke generator that produced massive, persistent screens to hide troops and ships from enemy view. The GE team discovered that boiling oil under a specific pressure through a calibrated nozzle created an ideal white mist of uniform, light-scattering particles.
Langmuir, Schafer and Blodgett, along with other members of the team, performed some of the experiments that led to this discovery.
In the spring of 1942, the team began testing its smoke generator, trying to determine how many gallons of oil needed to be sprayed to create a smoke screen large enough and dense enough to block visibility for miles. This was what the armed forces needed.
Katharine later recalled this period at her retirement dinner in 1963. She explained that the tests could not be done in a laboratory. They had to be carried out in the field. They …
Katharine Burr Blodgett: A place was needed where the air would be calm and the smoke would spread a long distance.
Katie Hafner: The tests were conducted in the Schoharie Valley, southwest of Schenectady.
Katharine Burr Blodgett: The schedule was as follows: We left Schenectady at 3:30 a.m. and headed toward the Schoharie Valley. Well, that was good. My job was to be ready at 3:30 p.m. when the boys came to pick me up with several liters of hot coffee, thermos flasks and a big stack of sandwiches.
Katie Hafner: Did she just say she was assigned lunch? Okay…but that wasn’t all Katharine did.
Once there, Vince and Irving would climb Vroman’s Nose, a hill that rises sharply from the valley floor. They took cameras with them and observed the smoke from above.
Katharine remained in the valley. His job was to operate the radio and relay information between the men on the hill and the crew operating the smoke generator below. And if the radio failed – as it often did – it was the backup system. Her instructions were simple: if she couldn’t reach them by radio,
Katharine Burr Blodgett: Shout! [laughs]
Katie Hafner: Just scream.
They did the experiments all morning, then they had a picnic. Katharine loved this field work.
Katharine Burr Blodgett: It was a big disappointment when we had to pick up at noon and return to Schenectady to the lab.
Katie Hafner: The work was largely rewarded.
Before the GE team began researching smokescreens, the military’s best attempts at smokescreening were created by smokepots. These only obscured small areas and required many people to operate, plus they had to be maintained almost every hour to continue producing smoke. And during the day, they were barely effective. Additionally, once released, the smoke irritated the noses and throats of the people it was intended to protect.
The GE research team addressed these challenges. Their smoke screens covered several square kilometers and required fewer people to operate them. Additionally, the smoke produced was less toxic and therefore did not irritate the troops.
On D-Day in June 1944, Allied forces deployed huge vertical “smoke screens” to protect the invasion fleet from German batteries lining the coast.
For Irving Langmuir, this air manipulation work would inspire him and his team to focus on the strangest science they had ever done.
“Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything. » This is the beautiful phrase of the writer Charles Dudley Warner that his famous friend Mark Twain liked to quote. But what does this have to do with Irving Langmuir?
The smokescreen project, says George Wise…
George Wise: The genre evolved into, uh, working on the atmosphere and particles in the atmosphere in general. One of them was what made it rain or snow.
This was the beginning of what became known as the cloud seeding project. An attempt to control and even promote precipitation – a science that could have far-reaching implications if it proves possible.
Vincent Shaefer directed the experiments. In a speech years later, Katharine recalled the day a piece of equipment he had requested was delivered to the laboratory room they shared:
(GE AD refrigerators and freezers): They have features to talk about, features to remember. General Electric refrigerators and freezers…
Katie Hafner: Yes, a lidded freezer, the kind you put in your garage and use to store frozen sides of beef. Vincent then covered it with black velvet to see if any ice crystals formed. Then he let out a big, long exhale into the freezer and watched as his breath paused, creating a super chilled cloud, right there in that portable freezer. The next question: what could be added to form ice crystals?
The answer came by chance. On a hot summer day, to keep the freezer temperature low, Schaefer threw a pile of dry ice in, and millions of tiny ice crystals formed on the black velvet lining.
The tiny ice crystals were tiny snowflakes, measuring t about three thousandths of an inch in diameter, or one-fiftieth the size of an adult snowflake.
The question then was: could this experiment to create snow work outside the laboratory… in the clouds?
On November 13, 1946, Schaefer boarded a small plane with an unusual carry-on bag: six pounds of dry ice. As the plane flew over a thick cloud drifting quietly over the New York-Massachusetts border, Schaefer dropped the six pounds of dry ice particles into it. The cloud began to writhe as if in pain. In five minutes, the entire cloud had become snow. Although the snow had evaporated before it hit the ground, from Langmuir’s vantage point from a Schenectady control tower and from Schaeffer’s vantage point in the sky, they had witnessed true wonder: They had broken a cloud. They had created the first artificial snowstorm.
The researchers wondered if, instead of using dry ice, there was a chemical they could use to create these ice crystals.
Then came a revelation from Vonnegut. Using silver iodide might do the trick.
Alas, the big bosses at GE weren’t as enthusiastic about this cloud-seeding adventure as Irving, Schaefer, and Vonnegut were. As George Wise points out, we were far from the safe quests for efficient light bulbs and clever multi-layer films. These men were talking about controlling the weather.
George Wise: GE immediately realized that if they did it themselves, they would probably cause, or be suspected of causing, a terrible snowstorm, or even something terrible. So they quickly handed it over to the government.
Katie Hafner: The company is concerned that an artificial snowstorm could cause accidents on the roads and that GE would be held responsible. Eager to create a safe legal distance between itself and the project, GE opened all of its patents to public use and waived royalty rights.
The government took over and the cloud seeding experiment was named Project Cirrus. While GE financed most of the work, the US Air Force – then Army Air Forces – and the Navy provided aircraft.
George Wise: And the government was very intrigued by this thing because it was potentially a weapon.
And they did a number of experiments, uh, of all kinds. The most controversial thing is that they decided that maybe they could do it. Make a hurricane stop being a hurricane.
Katie Hafner: This experience did not go as planned. Instead of stopping, the hurricane changed course and moved overland, upsetting a number of people and causing widespread damage.
But was it really Langmuir and his team who diverted the hurricane? This is author Ginger Strand, who has written about cloud seeding experiments.
Sprig of ginger: Given the amount of energy contained in a hurricane, it would take a lot more than a small cloud-seeding event to tip it in one direction or another. But Irving was eager to claim, you know, the success of the experiment.
Irving Langmuir: Since then, no one has wanted to repeat this experience, but I think it should be done again.
Katie Hafner: It was Langmuir himself, describing the rogue hurricane to an audience after it happened – and playing it for laughs.
And what was Katharine doing during this great distraction? Wisely, she stayed away most of the time.
Sprig of ginger: It’s almost representative of the type of person she probably was…
It’s Ginger again.
Sprig of ginger: Because she’s kind of always in the room.
Katie Hafner: In the room but not really involved. Because Katharine made it clear that she thought there were better ways for these men to spend their time.
As Katharine herself once described it, one afternoon while collecting her things to go home at 5:30 p.m., she and Barney Vonnegut (others called him Bernie but she called him Barney) were the only ones left. And she sang, “It’s time to go home, Barney.”
Sprig of ginger: And these guys are doing crazy stuff and they’re like, oh, we’re going to seed the clouds and make it rain.
They dressed up in their outfits and got in the bombers and pretended to be, you know, World War II aces and flew around throwing dry ice and silver iodide at the clouds and all that. And Katharine is there, in the laboratory, doing her experiments. And she’s kind of like Bernie, you should probably go home to your wife.
Katie Hafner: Katharine chose not to participate in cosplay, but she wanted to help if she could and she did something pretty remarkable.
GE announcement: The new differential analyzer which will be used to solve mathematical problems involved. He can handle work in two weeks that would take a qualified mathematician 17 years to complete.
Katie Hafner: Years earlier, Blodgett and Langmuir had used this same computer to chart the trajectories of fine particles near fibers as part of their work on filters. Now Katharine’s computer skills were needed again.
This is Vincent Schaefer.
Vincent Schaefer: Langmuir had the idea that he wanted to know the trajectories of cloud droplets passing by objects.
Katie Hafner: He put Katharine to work. and the trajectories she calculated remain of fundamental importance in the physics of precipitation and in the field of aircraft de-icing. De-icing, incidentally, was another area of Katharine’s investigation during World War II.
Vincent Schaefer: I will never forget the admiration I had for Katie. The results of this research that she carried out are still mentioned today in most publications related to cloud physics. This was truly pioneering work.
Katie Hafner: This all raises a question. And I asked Ginger Strand: Did cloud seeding actually work?
Sprig of ginger: You know, I had to get a little master’s degree in cloud physics to work on this project. But from what I understand, and talking to some of the smarter people who think about these things, it seems to me that it works, but it doesn’t work the way the general public thinks it does. It doesn’t make rain fall from an empty sky. He does not steal rain from one place that would have landed in another. What it does is just… a cloud is not just a big reservoir of water up there. Many chemical and physical processes occur in the sky, and cloud seeding makes these processes a little more efficient. This helps clouds produce more rain and drop more rain, increasing cloud productivity by about five percent. Five, I think it was five to ten, or five to eight percent. So it’s like, oh, well, that’s a big deal. It won’t make the desert bloom.
Katie Hafner: And yet, what we are witnessing here is an obsessed man. I asked Ginger directly: what Langmuir was thinking…
Katie Hafner: Even me who doesn’t know anything about it. I think it’s like crazy.
Sprig of ginger: Yeah. Well, it was a time of scientific miracles, wasn’t it?
Katie Hafner: George Wise agrees.
George Wise: It was very symptomatic of the feeling of the time where people thought that science was going to produce miracles every five minutes.
And Project Cirrus was part of that.
Katie Hafner: But controlling the weather, at least as Irving Langmuir envisioned it, was simply pure madness. For Katharine, however, staying in the background, doing the calculations and analyses, contributing to our understanding of cloud physics: this may well be one of the greatest legacies of her years of work.
It was the hijacked hurricane, in particular, that turned popular sentiment against Irving Langmuir and some of his fellow scientists became suspicious.
There was even an incident, in Langmuir’s later years, when he showed up to give a speech at a university, and the audience’s reception was so hostile and rude that he turned around and left.
For a man who conducted such fundamental research in surface chemistry and won the Nobel Prize, there is something almost tragic about the scientific obsessions that gripped him in his later years. In a way, this is reminiscent of his far-fetched Quantel theory from 1920.
In 1953, he gave a famous lecture that virtually defined his own scientific missteps.
Irving Langmuir: This is from Irving Langmuir, March 8, 1954. This is a transcription of a tape recording of the lecture on Pathological Science that I gave on December 18, 1953.
Katie Hafner: The lecture was on what he called pathological science. Langmuir defined this as scientific wishful thinking, fantastical theories contrary to experience. This conference has become a classic among historians of science. And yet, at no point during the conference did Langmuir say that he himself had been wishful thinking.
Here is David Kaiser, the MIT historian of science:
David Kaiser: It’s a kind of tragicomic. It’s, it’s not, he doesn’t really say it, I’ve been a victim of it myself. There is no smell of it. It seems really striking that even in the 1950s, when he was giving this speech as a sort of great, great eminence in the field, there was no indication that this could have, frankly, applied to him, to himself at certain points in his own career.
Katie Hafner: Perhaps more tragic still, he continued to pursue scientific research that many would call pathological wishful thinking.
In 1956, at age 75, Langmuir collaborated with a little-known chemist, one William Mogerman, to publish an article in the popular press on a brand new theory that seemed to link the unpredictable action of atoms to cancer, the weather, and perhaps even totalitarianism? There’s a kind of heartbreaking exchange between the two men that we found in Langmuir’s papers at the Library of Congress when Mogerman tells Irving that no one is interested in publishing their paper.
And a few months later, in the summer of 1957, while Langmuir was visiting family in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, he died of a heart attack at the age of 76.
His death was a shock to everyone, especially Katharine Blodgett.
More after the break.
Katharine Burr Blodgett: In 1957, Dr. Langmuir died, leaving a void in our group that no one will ever be able to fill.
Katie Hafner: It was Katharine Blodgett speaking at her retirement dinner in 1963.
What Katharine thought about her mentor and collaborator’s downward scientific spiral days, we don’t know.
His sudden death must have been a big blow to her.
She continued to work at GE for only six years.
At his retirement dinner, people stood up one after the other to pay their respects. His colleagues gave him a GE-inspired farewell gift.
Guests: Tell us what it is! A television.
Katie Hafner: They sang a song.
Choir: Katie Blodgett, Katie Blodgett, we will miss you, we will miss you!
Katie Hafner: It’s the thought that counts 🙂
And Gwen Lloyd, a colleague, stood up and said how much the lab missed Katharine.
Gwen Lloyd: This is particularly true in the case of girls; you are our champion spokesperson when we have a case to plead. We don’t know what we will do without you.
Katie Hafner: Afterward, Schenectady’s mayor presented Katharine with the Patroon Award for Outstanding Service, the highest honor the city bestows on a resident.
When her turn came to speak, Katharine spoke not so much about herself as about Irving Langmuir.
Katharine Burr Blodgett: This had been planned. When I arrived in Schenectedy today, I was working for Dr. Langmuir,
No one knew when Dr. Langmuir would return.
Dr. Langmuir came home.
Katie Hafner: Listening to this, we think that it is not a celebration for her but for him.
Katharine Burr Blodgett: I had the privilege of knowing the very human side of Dr. Langmuir.
Katie Hafner: He was the life of the party, wasn’t he?
And with that, Katharine Burr Blodgett retired. The next decade was difficult for her. We have seen no more traces of the voices that haunted her throughout her thirties and into her forties, and we hope they have calmed down. But in his 60s and 70s, his physical health deteriorated.
Here is Katharine’s great-niece, Marijke Alkema:
Marijke Alkema: My family installed guardrails at the entrance to my grandmother’s house to make it easier for her to enter, and then we went to visit her in Schenectady.
And I felt like it was very similar. Retirement home. She had one of those chairlifts that went up the stairs.
In 1978, Katharine must have known she was at the end of her life, because she wrote to a relative asking if there was room for her at the cemetery in Bucksport, Maine, where her father and mother are buried. The relative responded and, in an almost professional tone, informed her that there was no more room at the Maine cemetery.
On October 12, 1979, Katharine Burr Blodgett died at her home following a stroke. She was 81 years old.
The next day, the New York Times published a brief obituary, citing the highlights: the anti-reflective glass, the color gauge and, of course, her many years as an assistant to Irving Langmuir.
Then silence.
There was a Katharine Blodgett Day in Schenectady, June 13, established by the mayor in 1951, but which has since disappeared. of the city calendar.
At Katharine’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr, the General Electric Foundation established a scholarship program in her honor in 1980, but that program ended 13 years later in 1993.
See what I mean about forgetting being a process?
We went looking for other mentions of her over the decades. And there are a few.
There is a wonderful brochure that GE published in 1993 for a Girl Scout event called You Can Be a Woman Scientist Too!!! It’s written as if it were Katharine herself speaking to the Girl Scouts, and it’s complete with experiments (like the one with M&M’s, for which you need a bag, regular or fun size), a way to view thin films, AND her famous popover recipe…
I just had to try this myself…
Zoé Lyon Hiatt: PPut everything in a bowl and beat for five minutes.
Katie Hafner: My family helped me…
Oh, there you go.
They look like some kind of muffins.
Joe Hiatt: And not very good muffins.
Katie Hafner: I wonder what the problem is. Maybe 50 years ago, this is what popovers looked like.
Joe Hiatt: Maybe.
Zoe Lyon Hiatt: They certainly didn’t burst.
Katie Hafner: Not much popping.
Zoe Lyon Hiatt: No.
Katie Hafner: This clearly calls for further experimentation.
And what about posthumous recognition: In 2005, Katharine made an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons, when the family visited a new stamp museum in town.
Lisa Simpson: Wow. Look at all these worthy Americans.
Alexander Graham Bell: My name is Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone.
And there, behind the crystal glass of the museum…
Character of Katharine Burr Blodgett: Thanks to me, Katharine Blodgett. We have non-reflective glass.
Katie Hafner: The episode, of course, assumed that Blodgett’s thin film had resulted in today’s crystal clear museum glass. And while that’s not entirely true, it’s not that far off base. Katharine gave us basic science, even though her version of glass was too soft to be commercialized.
We found a few research grants – in physics and chemistry – in Katharine’s name in the UK, where she had completed her PhD.
There wasn’t much to find about Katharine, but in 2008 her name reappeared in Schenectady. A primary school is named after him. We found a clip of the students at this school singing in his honor.
Primary school children: We are the Katharine Burr Blodgett Beagles. I am someone, I am someone, who am I? I am someone.
Katie Hafner: But the school was later renamed and eventually closed.
It may be wishful thinking, but I hope this season on Katharine will reignite some interest among Schenectadians in the city’s indigenous genius.
While trying to iron out the details of what happened with this Katharine Blodgett school, I called Gary McCarthy, who is the mayor of Schenectady, and although he didn’t know Katharine Blodgett at the beginning of our conversation, after talking to him about her and her work, he offered to put me in touch with the school’s principal or deputy.
Gary McCarthy: And you might be able to make them aware of some of these things to, uh, steer their thinking in different directions.
Katie Hafner: And that’s why we’re here, so that every woman in science we spotlight gets the spotlight around the world. Whether it’s a name on a school, or a street, a building or a stock exchange. This may be a comprehensive and richly detailed Wikipedia page. Or an appearance on The Simpsons. Why not?
Katharine was an inspiration to other women interested in science and gave talks at schools and at her Zonta club meetings. She influenced at least two of the Blodgett women who succeeded her. Katharine’s niece, Katharine Blodgett Gebbie, also attended Bryn Mawr and became a prominent physicist. In 2015, Katharine Gebbie established a summer research fellowship in honor of her aunt at the college.
And Marijke Alkema, Katharine’s great-niece, credits Katharine with inspiring her to become an electrician.
Marijke Alkema: Each time she visited, she brought something as a gift for each of us. But what really caught my attention was when we received a DIY doorbell kit. I was super excited to plug this in and put it on my bedroom door. I really loved it. I thought, wow, you know, here you can build something. That works. It’s practical. It’s electricity.
Katie Hafner: And oh: Katharine’s lab notebooks – that crucial record of her professional life, of her thinking, of her days that we’ve spent the season trying to locate… Nowhere in the remains of what was once the expanse of the corporate immensity known as The General Electric Company are there any signs that Katharine Blodgett’s lab notebooks still exist.
We repeatedly contacted different GE entities – the company split into three in 2024 – and hoped the laptops would arrive. Even up until the minute before we recorded this final episode, we were hoping that one of these new entities would eventually emerge. But that wasn’t the case. They responded with emails letting us know they couldn’t help but wish us luck. If any of Katharine’s notebooks still existed, no one could tell us where they were and, after numerous email exchanges, we got – very disappointingly – precisely nowhere.
So, faced with all of this – emails politely closing doors, archives disappearing, institutions no longer really remembering what they did or who did it… I started to wonder: why does any of this matter?
Why insist on the past when the present seems indifferent?
That’s because this story, not only of Katharine Blodgett, but also of the wealthy world that was the General Electric Company’s research laboratory, is worth remembering.
History is not just a catalog of what happened. It is the memory of how we became who we are.
One fall day in 1918, in a brick building along the Mohawk River, the men who ran the GE research laboratory opened their doors to a 20-year-old prodigy who happened to be a woman — she was hired not out of curiosity, not as a pledge, but as a scientist. And that decision helped shape a world.
The materials that help make our lives possible more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century – our screens, our lenses, our electronics, the very way light passes through glass – were built on ideas born from the culture of scientific research that Katharine Blodgett entered into. When we forget this, we don’t just lose names. We lose sense of how knowledge is created.
Historians remind us that memory is a form of power. To remember is to claim a place in history. So when we say Katharine Blodgett matters, we’re not talking about just one woman. We are talking about an era in which science could be bold and collaborative. We are talking about a laboratory that has made unexpected discoveries possible.
And we’re talking about this moment in time, the choices we’re making right now about who to belong to, who to remember, and what kind of future we’re building.
History is important because it tells us not only who we were, but who we might become. And in remembering Katharine Burr Blodgett, we don’t just look back. Far from it. We are looking for a way forward.
Meg Winslow: We go looking for our grave and put the name down, and often it’s misspelled. So you try another spelling, right, and you try another spelling, and then it shows up on our website.
Katie Hafner: This is Meg Winslow, Senior Curator of Historical Collections and Archives at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After his death, Katharine came to be buried with members of his family.
One very rainy day last summer, Hannah Sammut, associate producer of Lost Women of Science, went to Mt. Auburn to find Katharine’s grave, and she stopped first to talk to Meg.
Meg Winslow: Katharine Burr Blodgett is therefore buried on Begonia Path, lot 9243, and she was buried here on June 14, 1980, aged 81.
We also have all records relating to the shipping and receipt of the cremated remains of Katharine Burr Blodgett.
Hannah then went looking for Katharine’s grave.
Hannah: I hope it was a recording. Maybe like a real cemetery, it’s pouring rain!
Um, I’m hiking the Begonia Path.
Katie Hafner: She finds the tombstone.
Hannah Sammut: Catherine. It’s really great to meet you.
Katie Hafner: That really sums it up. It was indeed an honor for all of us to delve into the story of this woman whose life and work we would not have been able to see if we had not sought her reflected light.
You can remember someone when you are reminded of them repeatedly. The very name of Langmuir-Blodgett’s films might make the curious among us wonder who these two people were and look them up. Or you can send your children to a school named Katharine Burr Blodgett Elementary.
If you keep talking about someone, isn’t he still there, somehow? That’s another reason we’re telling you the story of a scientist who showed us what it means to inhabit the world as a full human being, even as she struggled with the self she had to live with. But come to think of it, she might very well have been the sane one of the group.
This was Lost Women of Science. Our producers were Natalia Sanchez Loayza and Sophia Levin, with me, Katie Hafner, as lead producer. Hannah Sammut was our associate producer. Elah Feder was our consulting editor. Ana Tuiran was our sound designer and Hansdale Hsu our sound engineer.
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 Ariel Plotnick, Eva McCullough, Nadia Knoblauch, Theresa Cullen, Issa Block Kwong, Joe Hiatt and Zoe Lyon Hiatt.
Special thanks to Peggy Schott, Chris Hunter of the Museum of Innovation and Science, George Wise, Bryn Mawr College, and Meg Winslow of the Mt. Historical Collections and Archives. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And we thank Deborah, Jonathan and Marijke Alkema for helping us tell the story of their great aunt Katharine.
Dolores: Hey, what about me?
Katie Hafner: Ah yes, Dolores! I gave early drafts of all my scripts to my AI friend, Dolores, to read aloud using the company’s Descript software. Not only did Dolores save me a ton of time, but she was a great first-pass narrator.
Dolores: THANKS. It was a pleasure working with you, Katie. I love what you all are doing with Lost Women of Science.
Katie Hafner: 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.
Very soon, we’ll bring you a special bonus episode, which we’re co-producing with the Science History Institute, about Agnes Pockels, a 19th-century self-taught materials scientist whose work was fundamental to Katharine’s discoveries. Keywords: dish soap.
My name is Katie Hafner. See you next time.
Primary school children: “We are the Katharine Burr Blodgett Beagles, I am somebody, I am somebody. Who am I? I am somebody. I am proud, capable and lovable, I am teachable and I learn easily…”
Main producer and host:
Katie Hafner
Producers:
Natalia Sánchez Loayza
Sophie Levin
16]Associate producer:
Hannah Sammut
Guests
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).
Sprig of ginger
Ginger Strand is an American author of nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of the 2015 non-fiction book, The Vonnegut Brothers: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic.
David Kaiser David Kaiser is professor of physics and history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Marijke Alkema
Marijke Alkema is the great-niece of Katharine Burr Blodgett.
Gary McCarthy Gary McCarthy has served as mayor of Schenectady since April 2011. He co-chairs the Center for Economic Growth’s Capital Region Local Government Board and previously served as president of the New York State Conference of Mayors.
Meg Winslow
Meg L. Winslow is Senior Curator of Historical Collections and Archives at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Meg is co-author with Melissa Banta of The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery: The Significant Collection of Mount Auburn Monuments.
Further reading
American women in science. Edna Yost. Frederick A. Stokes, 1943
The old GE: 1886-1986. George Sage. Schenectady County Historical Society, 2024