Today's Honorary Subscriber: Show Biography

Katherine Blodgett (1898 - 1979)

Today's Honorary Subscriber is the celebrated inventor and scientist Katherine Burr Blodgett (1898-1979), who was the first woman scientist with a doctorate hired at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. She was also the first woman to earn a Ph.D. degree in Physics from England's Cambridge University, where in 1924 she studied with Sir Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratories.

Later in her career she became the first woman to receive the Photographic Society of America Award. Among her other honors was the Francis P. Garvin Medal awarded by the American Chemical Society.

Blodgett made her mark in the scientific world by her work in thin film technology. In 1938 she succeeded in developing nonreflective ("invisible") glass by coating the surface with multiple layers of reflection-eliminating film reduced to the thickness of a single molecule. Her thin film procedures were a byproduct of the research on monomolecular coatings that she conducted as an assistant to Dr. Irving Langmuir, the 1932 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

The applications of thin film coating were numerous: automobile windshields, shop windows, showcases, cameras, spectacles, telescopes, picture frames, and other applications where it is desirable that images pass through glass without any distortion. In World War II, Blodgett's glass was used in periscopes, range finders, and aerial cameras. Since then, Blodgett's coatings have found many diverse applications, including ice-resistant airplane wings and even artificial rainmaking. Today, thin films are important in the fabrication of microelectronic components, solar cells, and solid state lasers and microchips that process information optically.

Blodgett was born in Schenectady, New York, which was where she would live out her life. After attending Bryn Mawr and receiving a B.A. degree in physics, she earned an M.S. degree at the University of Chicago. In addition to her patented procedure for applying thin film coatings, Blodgett also invented a color gauge method for measuring the thickness of thin film coatings, whose thickness were such that 35,000 layers were no thicker than a sheet of paper.