Jeannette Piccard - Family and Education

Family and Education

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Jeannette was one of nine children born to Emily Ridlon and Dr. John Ridlon, who was president of the American Orthopaedic Association. She had a lifelong interest in science and religion. When she was 11, her mother asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Jeannette's reply—"a priest"—sent her mother running out of the room in tears.

She studied philosophy and psychology at Bryn Mawr College, where in 1916 she wrote an essay titled Should Women Be Admitted to the Priesthood of the Anglican Church? She received her bachelor's degree in 1918, and went on to study organic chemistry at the University of Chicago, receiving her master's degree in 1919. That same year she met and married Jean Felix Piccard, who was teaching at the university.

Jeannette was the mother of a house full of boys. Robert R. Gilruth, one of Jean's students and collaborators, said later in his oral history that he remembered a breakfast he had with the Piccards in a St. Cloud, Minnesota hotel before a balloon launching, "I don't know how many there were. It seems like there was a dozen.... I remember the youngest one took the corn flake box and dumped it on his father's head. Of course, Piccard just brushed it off his head and said, 'No, no.'" "He was very gentle. He loved his boys, and he thought boys would be boys, I guess." The Piccards had three sons of their own, John, Paul, and Donald (who would become a famous balloonist and ballooning innovator in his own right), as well as foster children. The Piccard family archive in the Library of Congress mentions correspondence from foster children whom the Piccards took in, although nothing else seems to be known about them.

The Piccards taught at the University of Lausanne from 1919–26. In 1926 they returned to the United States, where Jean taught organic chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The couple lived in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania before settling in Minneapolis in 1936 when Jean joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota. She received a doctorate in education from the University of Minnesota in 1942, and a certificate of study from the General Theological Seminary in 1973.

Gilruth made a point of describing Jeannette in his oral history. He said, "She was very bright, had her own doctor's degree, and was at least half of the brains of that family, technical as well as otherwise. …She was always in the room when he was lecturing or otherwise, almost always. She was something. She was good." David DeVorkin, curator of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, wrote a history of manned scientific ballooning. In DeVorkin's view, Jean and Jeannette's "entrepreneurship and subsequent success" in ballooning was due to "their enormous persistence…and considerable confidence, pluck, and luck".