Lost Women of Science

The 1930s prove to be an exceptional decade for research at The General Electric Company. Katharine Burr Blodgett works closely alongside her boss, Irving Langmuir who, in 1932, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In 1938, Katharine’s meticulous experiments with thin film coatings on solid surfaces lead to her most important breakthrough: non-reflecting glass. The General Electric Company’s public relations machine kicks into high gear. Katharine becomes an overnight sensation, both in the scientific community and in the press, which dub her discovery “invisible glass.” The assistant to the Nobel Prize winner, long invisible herself, takes center stage. 

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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. 

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Katharine Burr Blodgett arrives at The General Electric Company’s legendary research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, known as the “House of Magic.” She was just 20 years old when she entered a world built almost entirely for men. She joins as assistant to the brilliant and eccentric Irving Langmuir, a star chemist whose fundamental work in materials science and light bulbs would bring fame to him, and fortune to GE. 
The General Electric Company was an obvious choice for a brilliant young scientist. But was it the promise of scientific discoveries that drew Katharine to Schenectady or the need to confront the personal tragedy that marked the place where her own story began? Perhaps it was both.

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In the first of this five-part season we trace Katharine’s early years as she picks up European languages, her early scientific education at a progressive New York school for girls and then Bryn Mawr, a women’s college. She seems destined to end up working at the General Electric Company’s industrial research lab, but first she must prove herself at the University of Chicago, where, in the middle of World War I, she works to improve the life-saving gas mask. 

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Introducing Layers of Brilliance, a six-part season that brings to life the story of a woman whose discoveries in materials science quietly shape our everyday world – but whose legacy was long eclipsed by the famous scientist she worked with.
In 1918, at just twenty years old, Katharine Burr Blodgett arrived at the General Electric Company’s industrial research laboratory in Schenectady, New York – a place known as the House of Magic. There she began a decades-long collaboration with Irving Langmuir, GE’s star scientist, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. While Langmuir became a public figure, Blodgett became something else: the mind and hands behind experiments so delicate they operated at the scale of single molecules.
Blodgett’s work on films just one molecule thick would lead to multiple U.S. patents and form the basis of technologies embedded in today’s screens, optics, and electronics.
Listen as we peel back the layers of Katharine Burr Blodgett’s life – how she made groundbreaking science inside a world built for men, how she struggled against profound personal challenges, and how a woman whose work helped shape modern materials science nearly disappeared from history.

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