Layers of Brilliance: The Air She Breathed -- Episode Three
From Schenectady to the University of Cambridge, Katharine Burr Blodgett’s brilliance impresses the world’s leading physicists.
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Show Notes
The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis: her forte is experimentation, his is scientific theory. We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall theory of matter. All the while, Katharine builds her life in Schenectady: going to church, making new friends, falling in love. In 1924, she embarks on a new journey to the University of Cambridge, where she studies with some of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century.