This bonus episode of Lost women of science season on Katharine Burr Blodgett is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast produced by the Institute of History of Science.
Agnes Pockels has done pioneering work in the field of surface science. His invention, the Pockels trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katharine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in materials science that quietly shape our everyday world.
But the way we talk about Pockels’ life and work often relies on familiar tropes about women’s domestic roles, as well as assumptions about how science is done and what it was like to do science as a woman in the 19th century.
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Pockels’ story invites us to rethink how we define success as scientists. Is our definition too narrow? And what could we gain if we opened it up a little more?
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Alexis Pedrick: From the Institute of History of Science in collaboration with Lost women of sciencefor a special joint episode, my name is Alexis Pedrick, and this is Distillations.
Lost Women of Science has just launched its new season, Layers of Brilliance, dedicated to Katharine Burr Blodgett, a scientist whose discoveries in materials science are quietly shaping our everyday world.
Blodgett began working for General Electric in 1918. The research she conducted there led to several U.S. patents and formed the basis of the technologies we use today in our displays and electronic devices. But Blodgett’s legacy has long been overshadowed by the famous scientist she worked with, Irving Langmuir. So where do we come in?
Well, Blodgett and Langmuir’s experiments used a version of an instrument originally invented by an earlier scientist, a woman named Agnes Pockels, and this episode is all about her.
In 1891, the prestigious international scientific weekly Nature did something unusual. They published a letter written by a woman. Her name was Agnes Pockels and her letter was addressed to an English man known as Lord Rayleigh. Lord Rayleigh or John Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh, was what is known as a hereditary peer.
I was informed that not everyone reads as many historical novels as I do and therefore may not be familiar with the term. This simply means that he inherited his title through his family lineage and was entitled to sit in the House of Lords. Very chic.
Lord Rayleigh was also a physicist. He would win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904. All this is to say that he had the kind of influence that could encourage the editor of the journal to publish a letter written by a woman.
Agnes had written to Lord Rayleigh after learning that he was experimenting on what today is called surface science. Surface science is the study of the dividing line where two different phases of matter meet – think of where a solid meets a liquid or where a liquid meets a gas. These meeting points are often very reactive and the outermost layer of molecules acts in truly unique ways that can be useful to us. Take dish soap, for example. It is an intermediary between water and fat. Why does it work? Because it reduces the surface tension of water reaching dirt. Surface science is fundamental to everything from catalytic converters to computer chips to water filtration. This even comes into play with medical implants. So now you are aware of the science that Agnes was working on.
She began her letter to Lord Rayleigh by saying:
Frauke Levin reading Agnès Pockels’ letter: My lord, would you kindly excuse me for venturing to bother you with a German letter on a scientific subject? Having heard of the successful research you carried out last year on the hitherto little-known properties of aquatic surfaces. I thought you might be interested in hearing my own observations on the subject.
Alexis Pédrick: What findings? And what was Lord Rayleigh’s reaction? Well, to answer that, we should bring in some reinforcement.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: My name is Brigitte Van Tiggelen, but you can call me “Brigitte” or “Bridget” or “Bridgetta”…
Alexis Pédrick: Brigitte is our colleague here at the Institute of History of Science. She is now director of international affairs, but she started as a researcher and specializes in women and scientific couples, notably Agnes Pockels. We asked him what happened when Lord Rayleigh received Agnes’ letter.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: Lord Rayleigh is really interested in what Agnes Pockels is doing. Of course, he’s also intrigued by the fact that she might be a woman. He is not very sure, but he is especially interested in the experimental device that Agnès was able to build.
Alexis Pedrick: Agnès was not content with making observations. She built her own instrument to measure them. Eventually this instrument, the Pockels trough, became the basis for the modern Langmuir-Blodgett trough, which helped Irving Langmuir carry out the work in surface chemistry that won him a Nobel Prize in 1932. Lord Rayleigh immediately understood how impressive Agnes’ instrument was.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: He actually asks Agnes, could you please make one for me and send it to me? And she says, well, you know, it’s hard. I’m building it, you know, little by little, you know, step by step myself. And I can’t do another one, but I can give you the details. In the end, Lord Rayleigh recognizes that his experimental apparatus is better than the one he was using, and he will somehow use it in further research.
Alexis Pédrick: Perhaps you think you know where this story is going, that I am about to tell you how Agnès Pockels broke through barriers and became the “Marie Curie” of surface science. Or that she had her accomplishments unceremoniously removed from the record, and we’ve only just paid tribute to her. This is the fate of many women scientists of the past whom we have lost sight of. But I’m not here to tell you any of those things. Instead, I’m going to tell you that Agnes’s story is complicated, and if her legacy has been lost, perhaps it’s because our own assumptions and 21st century way of seeing the world have gotten in the way.
Agnes’ story invites us to think about how we define success as a scientist. Does this become a full professor? Win a Nobel Prize? How about inventing or discovering something that makes the world a better place? Agnes’ story makes us wonder if our definition of success is too narrow. And what do we have to gain if we open it up a little more?
Chapter One: The Discovery of Agnes.
If I had to choose one word to summarize the way we usually tell the story of Agnès Pockels, I would choose “hypothesis”, or rather “hypotheses”, in the plural. We do a lot about Agnes’ life, starting with the very first thing we learn about her.
So without further ado, I present to you hypothesis number one: the offbeat story of Agnès’ discovery makes sense for a woman of her time. When we started working on this episode, almost every source we read on the Internet talks about how Agnes became interested in surface science by observing the behavior of soapy water while she was washing dishes.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: She’s interested in what happens on the surface of water – it could be soil water, it could be oil, it could be all sorts of things – behavior under changing circumstances.
Alexis Pédrick: It’s a tidy story. Agnès observed how the soap behaved on the surface of the water, and boom! Revelation. It’s like other stories of discovery that we celebrate: Isaac Newton getting hit in the head with an apple and then, boomin a flash, he formulated the gravitational theory. But none of these stories are accurate, and they obscure how science is actually done in a deliberate and active way. It’s not just people walking around who get hit in the head – literally. We reached out to one of Bridget’s colleagues to hear her take on the history of tableware.
Don Opitz: My name is Don and I am an associate professor at DePaul University with affiliations in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the Department of History, and LGBTQ Studies. I should probably say that I am also a historian of science.
Alexis Pédrick: Don was studying Lord Rayleigh when a classmate asked him a question that changed the course of his research.
Don Opitz: She randomly asked me: have any women influenced Lord Rayleigh’s science? And I’m like, I don’t know. So I decided to answer this question.
Alexis Pédrick: That’s how he learned about Agnes Pockels, and primary sources made him realize pretty quickly that the whole “woman finds out while doing the dishes” thing probably deserved to be questioned.
Don Opitz: You know, there are pictures of the house they lived in, and it’s quite an imposing house, an imposing looking house – they probably had domestic help. That would have been pretty standard for someone of his class. So now, in general, in history, and historians of science even more, don’t talk much about domestic personnel in their histories. I think that’s starting to change now, but surely there were domestic staff in that house as well. So I think the extent to which she actually did the dishes is open to question.
Alexis Pédrick: But if she really did the dishes, what’s the problem? Well, think about how we tell the story of food. This gives the impression that Agnes once got into science. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. And to explain, we have to go back to the beginning.
Chapter two: Agnès’ early years.
Agnès Louise Wilhelmine Pockels was born in 1862 in Venice. At that time, Venice was part of the Austrian Empire and Agnes’ father was serving in the army. When he fell ill with malaria in 1871, Agnes’ family moved to Braunschweig, which was part of the newly formed German Empire.
Petra Michnik: She was therefore nine years old when she arrived in Braunschweig.
Alexis Pédrick: This is Petra Mishnik, retired professor from the Technical University of Braunschweig.
Petra Michnik: But at this At the time, there was no possibility for girls to go to university. This was not allowed. But she was so interested in natural sciences that she learned many things, like how to deduce and so on.
Alexis Pédrick: Agnes attended the municipal high school for girls.
Petra Michnik: So what she learned focused mainly on languages and textile work and maybe music, literature – those things that seem like what young women should learn.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: So it was a family where you were not only expected to be at home, raising children or taking care of your loved ones, but you were also expected to have conversational skills, be educated, be interested and passionate about something, mainly intellectual pursuits.
Alexis Pédrick: Her routine was pretty standard for a young woman in her class. She was learning all the skills she would need to become the future governess of her house. And you can spin that statement, but running a household was no joke. You had to manage staff, respect budgets, have the skills to organize social meetings where you had to hold intellectual conversations. And all the while, Agnès continued to pursue her scientific studies alone.
All of this makes me think again about the kitchen sink story. Perhaps Agnes actually made scientific observations while washing the dishes, but isn’t it more likely that she went to the sink with the intention of making scientific observations?
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: She was a curious, curious mind, and she observed something that didn’t quite make sense, but didn’t quite make sense to someone who was already educated and aware of what science is and how the natural world follows rules and so on.
Alexis Pédrick: Agnes had a younger brother, Friedrich or Fritz, who was three years her junior. He also loved science and eventually studied physics at the University of Göttingen. However, this is important for practical reasons. On the one hand, Fritz shared his textbooks with Agnes so that she could study on her own. But we wanted to hear Brigitte’s perspective on their relationship before making any assumptions.
I was wondering if you could talk a little more about that, about siblings doing science together growing up?
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: Yes, I really like this question because a trope in the history of women in science is that women are always featured or supported because there is a family member. It could be a father, a husband, a lover, a close friend, a son, a brother, a cousin, whatever. So they only exist in the scientific community by proxy, and I find it very sad to really keep this point of view. Sometimes this applies, but sometimes it doesn’t.
Alexis Pédrick: Which brings us to hypothesis number two: that Fritz influenced Agnes scientifically. Brigitte overturned this hypothesis.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: In the case of Agnes and Fritz, Agnes is the oldest. She’s the eldest – sorry. And he’s two or three years younger. So it’s a difference when you grow up as siblings, especially as teenagers, right? Which means that probably, more likely than not, Agnes had an influence on her brother, perhaps even in choosing a scientific career and supporting that career in whatever way she could offer.
Alexis Pédrick: From a distance, you can understand why the tendency might be to assume that Fritz was the one guiding Agnes. After all, he was at college and she was at home. But Petra Mishnik says their scientific dialogue went both ways.
Petra Michnik: You can’t do science when you don’t have anyone to discuss your ideas and thoughts. And it was obvious that his brother fully respected his research and knowledge.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: We can therefore consider this relationship as something that goes beyond simple access to the scientific community or networks through one’s brother, who is a member of this network. But it’s more of an exchange, and in fact a very balanced and warm exchange, it seems, because they have a very strong and close relationship.
Alexis Pédrick: At the age of 19, Agnes was planning her own experiments.
Petra Michnik: And she was a very, very careful observer. She saw so many details and realized that the little things that others might overlook mean something, and she wanted to find out what that was.
Alexis Pédrick: Agnès was very interested in the physical properties of water surfaces and impurities, such as soil or oil. She wanted to know how different impurities affected water, and she realized she could calculate it by measuring surface tension.
Petra Michnik: And then she had this fantastic idea to build this Pockels trough, as it’s mentioned.
Alexis Pédrick: She built it using an old pharmacist’s scale and other household items. But don’t let that description fool you. It was a pretty sophisticated tool. There was a metal bar that allowed him to divide the water surface into two parts. She used a button as a disk to determine the force needed to remove it from the surface, as well as a scale to measure the amount of water displaced.
Petra Michnik: Thus, she was able to measure surface tension and the dependence on several parameters. And it really is a fascinating idea.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: And what she really discovered was that at some point, when you push a surface, which is oil, for example, when you try to push the oil surface onto a smaller surface, it suddenly, physically behaves differently than the flat surface, so to speak.
Alexis Pédrick: Agnes discovered this with her homemade instrument in her home laboratory inside her house. Which brings us to a third hypothesis: because she was doing this work at home, it didn’t matter in itself.
Don Opitz: I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s easy to view women’s contribution to science as something national. There are all these tropes and stereotypes about gender roles and women’s roles in particular, especially in the Victorian era, that would automatically align women’s work with that of the household. And then also in the kitchen.
Alexis Pédrick: Chapter Three: Home is where the laboratory is.
Our 21st century minds really seem to latch on to this whole “science lab inside your house” thing. It just seems unserious and unprofessional. It somehow bothers us to consider Agnes an amateur.
Don Opitz: So when you Google Agnes Pockels, the Wikipedia entry that appears will identify her as a citizen scientist. And in fact, in the 19th century, scientists who did science out of pure love of science and not as a profession were amateurs. And it wasn’t a derogatory term. In fact, Lord Rayleigh was an amateur scientist and proud of it. So, that Agnes Pockels was an amateur in her contacts was actually a pretty cool thing.
Alexis Pédrick: So when Agnes sent him that letter, he saw a kindred spirit, someone who did the same kind of work as him.
Don Opitz: Rayleigh immediately recognized that Agnes was doing domestic style research, much like he also did at his country estate, in fact, in the stable lofts, you know, basically like the garage at his house. And this humble way of doing research was very familiar to him and it was something that he appreciated, that he was proud of and that he defended.
Germany was beginning in earnest to create large physical institutes, laboratories like institutional laboratories, to become more professionalized when it came to scientific research, in a way that England simply was not yet. And what Agnes was doing was more private investigation on a small scale, on a domestic level – something you could do in your garden shed or in your basement or in your kitchen, as the case may be, and it was a type of science familiar to British scientists.
Alexis Pédrick: That’s why it wasn’t an insult when he forwarded Agnes’ letter to Nature with a cover note describing her as a German lady working with household appliances. He said his results on the behavior of contaminated water surfaces were valuable, and he meant it.
The Nature article was Agnès’ first publication. She was 29 years old. Two years later, in 1893, things changed.
Don Opitz: This was the time when German universities were open to women, either through lecture programs or by allowing foreign students to come and study in Germany.
Alexis Pédrick: Agnes was invited to use the laboratory at the University of Göttingen, where her brother went.
Don Opitz: Her parents convinced her not to do it and to stay home.
Alexis Pédrick: Chapter Four: The Devoted Daughter.
Alright, we know that sounds bad. There’s only one way to read this, right? Her parents convinced her not to take advantage of this opportunity because they wanted to clip her wings. But the truth is much more complicated.
Don Opitz: It wasn’t that she wasn’t allowed to. It was that she felt a sense of duty to her parents and that she was the only girl in the house.
Alexis Pédrick: Agne’s parents had a reason for wanting her to return home. They were sick and needed someone to take care of them.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: The parents lived near Venice, in an area plagued by malaria. They were in really poor health – all of them, including Agnes, in fact. Fritz died very early, so the family’s health situation is really not good.
Alexis Pédrick: When Agnes planned her future, she took her parents’ health into account. It’s less sensational than the idea that they forced their only daughter to stay at home simply because she was a woman. Although it is also wrong to say that being a woman did not play a role at all.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: We could ask ourselves the following questions. The first question is, you know, what is the real motivation for saying yes or no? And what role do social codes play in this?
Alexis Pédrick: Did Agnes’ parents expect her brother to take care of them? No, of course not. Agnes was the girl. It was his social duty. There were also practical considerations. Agnes’s house was quite far from the University of Göttingen. She would have had to move, which led to even more complications.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: You know, is it appropriate for a woman from a middle-class family to go out and, you know, live with her brother or maybe alone, just to pursue science?
Alexis Pédrick: So, yes, Agnes faced sexism and the decisions she made were partly due to society’s expectations of women and how they were supposed to behave. And we could easily imagine Agnes being trapped by her situation, a woman who has no chance of imagining any other kind of life. Except that Agnès had an example of an alternative life in her own family.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: Her aunt was a famous painter, she lived in Paris and moved to Berlin on her own. And I think having that in your family gave Agnes a sense of autonomy and self-determination within all the constraints of that space and time.
Alexis Pédrick: Why then did she not take advantage of the opportunity? We will never know for sure. But there is another factor to consider.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: The other thing, in fact, and this is of course an assessment that can only be made in the long term, is that she was invited to a laboratory which did not belong to her, which she did not govern. He would have been asked to work in a certain way, at a certain pace, on a certain subject, perhaps. And she would have lost the freedom of investigation.
Alexis Pédrick: That is to say, outside of a university laboratory, Agnès was able to continue her research and experiments as she wished, and that is a very different way of seeing things.
Was the invitation to college an honor? Of course. But was this the only way for Agnès to continue her scientific studies? No way. In fact, Bridget has a bold vision that shatters our assumptions about what science is supposed to look like into smithereens.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: University laboratories are not always the pinnacle of scientific research. A laboratory is created within an institution. It has its own objectives, its own configuration. Who is the boss? Who said it was interesting or not? You can publish it, but you can’t.
There are many stories in the history of science where the boss said, “oh no, that’s not interesting or it’s an artifact.” And it turned out to be a discovery, or rather an interesting phenomenon that could be studied in more detail.
What I mean by that is that on the one hand, science prides itself on working in the laboratory and being productive, active, etc. But this also means that the individual can get lost. What if the individual wants to do something different? Well, there’s no room for them.
Alexis Pédrick: Just as Agnes could look to her aunt as an example of an independent career woman, she also witnessed the academic scientific career of her brother Fritz, and it was not always so glamorous.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: Fritz was pressed for all kinds of academic and community service tasks. Fritz also suffered from the fact that everything he did was not fashionable or what the rest of the community was interested in. Whereas, in a way, being in her space, Agnes could just live with her own subject, you know, make surface films, build and devote ten years to improving her instrument and then develop ways to experiment, change the parameters, but all at her own pace.
And I think, of course, it’s also after the fact, that, you know, at the moment you make a choice, you don’t know where you’re going. But I think that’s an aspect that is also often overlooked, is that there is this freedom, this sense of self.
And if I may conclude with a parallel that is not a complete parallel, but Lord Rayleigh himself, he was a professor of physics at Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory and chose to retire early to his own mansion, in which he had space devoted to experimentation and continued to experiment from home.
Don Opitz: I will say, however, that she was very proud of her status as guardian of her parents and sort of chatelaine of the house. And that was a respectable thing for upper middle class women at that time. She was intelligent and had the ability, flexibility and resources to do what she loved to do, which was original research in chemistry and physics.
Alexis Pédrick: But that doesn’t mean her decision to stay home was easy or that the path she chose didn’t have its challenges.
Don Opitz: Did she complain? Yes. She would complain, you know, about the illness that her parents would face, you know, at that time or another. And then also when she contracted an illness, and that affected, you know, her own ability to take care of her parents and fulfill her responsibilities.
Alexis Pédrick: And that doesn’t mean she has no regrets.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: And who knows? You know, at some point she could have looked back and said, wow, what a mistake. We also know that at one point she tried to be completely independent. She was looking for a place to live independently, which also didn’t work out. At least, you know, from what we have, you know, you can be very devoted to your family. And that’s a point, just have enough and…
Mariel Carr: And then you look for an apartment.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: Yeah! So maybe we shouldn’t ruin his reputation on this podcast without further proof.
Alexis Pédrick: At one point, Agnes wrote in her diary that she had been to a sanatorium and was battling many vague ailments like dizziness and headaches. So relevant. We can idealize people of the past, but Agnes was just a person trying to live her life, deal with difficulties, and in the meantime, do science.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: It’s like, you know, she’s really pushed herself, but at the same time, she knows that if she doesn’t get back into shape, there are going to be so many people depending on her. And it’s very telling, for example, that in the notes of her niece and her sister-in-law it says that like a soldier, she stood tall until the end. And this comes from a family where Agnès’ father is actually a soldier. And again, you know, how much weight does that factor into his decision? You know, as she is, she’s in her position, and that’s what her position is. And she wants to keep her job.
Alexis Pédrick: After the publication of Agnes’ letter in Nature, her studies of surface science expanded. She continued to correspond with Lord Rayleigh and refine her methods, even drawing attention to how dirty equipment could affect the reproducibility of her work. She was, as we said, extremely thorough.
Petra Michnik: She realized that she had made a mistake, that she had overlooked certain shortcomings in the experimental setup, and then she immediately wrote to him, yes, to clarify this point. And she always wanted to do very serious work and be very open and self-critical, and also look for limits, efforts, mistakes, etc. So it’s really impressive. And that’s a fundamental thing she did.
Alexis Pédrick: Agnès refined her trough and built a second version capable of taking even better measurements. And from her studies, she defined what we today call the Pockels Point, that is to say the minimum surface area that a single molecule can occupy in monomolecular films. And she went on to publish 14 articles about her work. Although she never received a formal scientific appointment, she was recognized in 1931 when she received the Laura R. Leonard Prize from the Colloid Society, alongside Henri Devaux, a French botanist.
So what do we think of this story of Agnès? Well, it is worth keeping in mind that when we look at the past from a modern perspective, it may be more difficult for us to understand people. We might poo-poo their decisions, misrepresent them, or miss them altogether.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: When we look at scientists of the past, we look at them through what we know about science and how it works today.
Alexis Pédrick: We want our stories of women scientists to fit into nice little boxes. But can a human life fit so perfectly into something? We are tempted to ask ourselves: was Agnès a feminist? But if you’ve listened to this story, the answer shouldn’t surprise you.
Petra Michnik: So she stayed within her framework, yes, the framing of that time was something that she accepted. And she evolved within this framework. And he was obviously very talented and very intelligent to do such serious, self-critical work, which was really a breakthrough in this field.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: I don’t think she was a rebel. But she still followed her own path. She forged her own relationships. And she wasn’t afraid to take action for herself. What I mean by that is that even today, you know, in our — in our very free society and culture, we believe that, you know, everyone acts on their own impulses and choices. But we all have constraints and social codes that we must respect.
Alexis Pédrick: And really, why does Agnes have to be a rebel? Why do we expect her to wear all the hats? This comes down to the same problem inherent in the infamous kitchen sink story. Yes, that could be quite fun. Eureka moments often are. But what this insinuates about what we expect of women in science isn’t all that great.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen: First of all, I’ve never heard anyone suspect that Lord Rayleigh or, later, Irving Langmuir came up with the idea of working on water surface films because they were washing dishes. So it’s a very gendered stereotype.
The second thing that strikes me more and surprises me is the fact that this is a story, a trope, that is repeated throughout most of Agnes Pockels’ presentation. And what that says besides being very gendered, what’s also conveyed as a message is that, well, you know, girls and ladies, you can do both. You can be interested and fully involved in households and producing science. In fact, the best women scientists have achieved this. And I think that’s a very damaging message. And it also undermines the idea of promoting women and girls in science, in my opinion. So I would really like this dishwashing thing to be erased from literature as soon as possible.
Alexis Pédrick: Don’t they all? Perhaps it is enough to say that Agnes was a very great woman of science, and now that we know more about her story, we are happy to finally know her.
Alexis Pédrick: The Distillations podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded at Laurie J. Landau Digital Production Studios. Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our producer is Rigoberto Hernández. This episode was reported and produced by Mariel Carr and Alexis Pedrick, with additional reporting by Sofia Levin. Fact-checked by Alexandra Attia and sound design by Ana Tuirán.
Support for the distillations was provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation.
Lost Women of Science is distributed by PRX and their publishing partner is Scientific American. Their funding comes in part from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. You can visit our websites at sciencehistory.org and losswomenofscience.org to learn more about us.
My name is Alexis Pédrick. Thanks for listening.
Guests
Brigitte Van Tiggelen
Brigitte Van Tiggelen is Director of International Affairs at the Institute for the History of Science, working from the Institute’s office in Paris. A physicist and historian by training, she is co-editor of Women in their element: some women’s contributions to the periodic system (2019), a volume that brings together more than two decades of research and publications on the lives and work of women scientists.
Donald L. Opitz
Donald L. Opitz is a historian of science who teaches in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and the Department of History at DePaul University. He is writing a book that traces the international movement for the advancement of women in agriculture and horticulture from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.
Petra Michnik
Petra Mischnick was a professor of food chemistry at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. There, she founded and directed the Agnes Pockels Student Lab to inspire young children, especially girls, to pursue science.
Further reading
“Reimagining women in science: projecting identity and negotiating gender in science”, by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Donald L. Opitz,.in The changing image of science. Springer Dordrecht, 2002
“Pockels’ Trough”, by Andrea Sella, in World of chemistry. Published online May 21, 2015
“Agnes Pockels: The Making of One”Looking for a housewife“, by Brigitte Van Tiggelen. Presented at the 24th International Congress on the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, July 21 to 28, 2013.
