Education
In 1912 Blodgett returned to New York City with her family where she was enrolled in the Rayson School. This private school gave her the same quality of education that the boys her age were receiving. From an early age she had shown a talent for mathematics. Blodgett subsequently won a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College, where she excelled at mathematics and physics. She received her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1917.
Blodgett decided to pursue scientific research and visited the Schenectady GE plant during Christmas break of her senior year. Her father's former colleagues introduced her to research chemist Irving Langmuir. After a tour of his laboratory, Langmuir told the eighteen-year-old Blodgett that she needed to broaden her scientific education before coming to work for him.
Following his advice, Blodgett enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1918 to pursue a master's degree. Since a job awaited her in industrial research, she picked a related subject for her thesis: the chemical structure of gas masks. World War I was raging and gas masks were needed to protect troops against poison gases. Blodgett determined that almost all poisonous gases can be adsorbed by carbon molecules. She published a paper on gas mask materials in the scientific journal Physical Review at the age of 21.
In 1924, Blodgett was awarded a position in a physics Ph.D. program at Sir Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory. She wrote her dissertation on the behavior of electrons in ionized mercury vapor. Blodgett was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, in 1926.
Read more about this topic: Katharine Burr Blodgett
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.”
—Robert Hewison (b. 1943)
“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)