Easter 2011
Augusta Ada King, often said to be the world’s first computer programmer
national physical gallery, teddington
burns and sickness from years of working in such close contact with radioactive materials. The Curies’ hard work was rewarded in 1903 with a joint Nobel prize in Physics with Becquerel, after which Pierre was made Professor at the Sorbonne. Life looked quite perfect for Marie: two beautiful daughters, a loving husband and the highest acknowledgement for her contributions to science. Sadly, in 1906 Pierre was hit by a horse-drawn vehicle in the street and killed instantly. Marie was devastated but did not give up on her career; she took over Pierre’s Sorbonne chair, becoming France’s first female professor. She continued characterising her new element, radium, and was awarded her second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. The Curies’ work was critical in the development of X-rays for medical use. At the break of World War One, Marie set up a Red Cross Radiation Unit, equipped ambulances with X-ray machines and worked on the front lines, nursing injured soldiers with her daughter. Her legacy lives on in numerous ways; be it in the many universities, the charity, or even the road in Paris named after Marie and Pierre. However, perhaps her biggest legacy is her example for women and men with scientific aspirations: with hard work and true devotion, it is possible to achieve the impossible.
Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine arguably owes more to the visionary insight of Augusta Ada King than to Babbage himself
Mirko Tobias Schaefer
workings of the Analytical Engine. Indeed, the first computers of the 20th century were programmed by punched cards. It could be argued that King was more of a visionary than Babbage, who only wanted to create a machine for number crunching, whereas she foresaw other potential functionality such as creating music. While modern computing is still dominated by men, no one is surprised any more by the sight of a female doctor. Yet the field of medicine used to be an exclusively male profession, and the first female doctors in the end of the 19th century faced many challenges—leading to the true sex of the first woman medic not actually being revealed until after her death. Much to the disbelief of many, Martha Stuart, or Dr James Barry as she was known, was said to have had a very hot temper and was incredibly flirtatious with beautiful women—perhaps out of frustration, or perhaps overcompensating in her disguise. She was an excellent doctor who was promoted to Inspector General, the highest rank possible for an army physician. It is impossible to talk about great females in medicine without mentioning the ‘Lady of the Lamp’, Florence Nightingale. Nightingale is famous for bringing about a drastic reduction in death rates in the Crimean War hospitals, from 42% to 2%, by enforcing cleanliness and better nursing practices. Moreover, she started the first women’s college of nursing in London, and was an expert statistician. Her reports were very influential in the sanitary reforms of the late 1800s. Moving from medicine to back to the physical sciences, 1867 takes us to the start of Marie Curie’s career. Born in Poland as Maria Sklodowska, she moved to Paris in 1867 to study for a degree in Mathematics and Physics. There she met Pierre Curie, and they were married within the year. They shared a love for science and worked together on radioactivity, a term coined by Marie herself. For her doctoral studies, Marie Curie worked on the uranium-rich ore, pitchblende, which she discovered to be more radioactive than pure uranium. Reasoning that new radioactive elements must be present in the ore, she focussed on its chemical separation, while Pierre studied its radiation properties. Through this work, she discovered two new elements: polonium, named after her home country, and radium, which Pierre showed could kill cancerous cells. It took Marie four years to purify 0.1 gram of radium from 8000 kilogram of pitchblende. She wrote, “I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue by the end of the day.” Marie and Pierre both suffered from radiation
Jessica Robinson is a PhD student in the Department of Oncology
Behind the Science 23