Layers of Brilliance: Vanishing Act -- Episode Six

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1:02Friends, they say it's a man's world. But don't you believe it? It's a woman's world, too. Women are not only doing a fine job in the home, they're also making substantial contributions to scientific work. In the General Electric Research Laboratory at Schenectady, you will find many women scientists doing interesting and important work. This is Dr. Catherine Blodgett, an authority on the properties of very thin coatings and films. A work in this field has made her famous among scientists throughout the world. In a promotional clip from 1954, Catherine Blodgett is shown working on semi-conductors, the cornerstone of the new field of electronics. She's now 56 years old. Her big breakthrough, the discovery of non-reflecting glass nearly 20 years behind her. She's still respected and celebrated. In 1951, for instance, she was honored by the American Chemical Society for her work in surface chemistry. But as that decade wore on, she gradually dropped away.

2:04And today, ask most anyone, even those who live in Schenectady, if the name Catherine Blodgett rings a bell. And this is what you hear. That is a name I have never heard before. I don't know who that was. Did you swim the Suez Canal? Oh, wait, no, that was somebody else. No. I don't know. Or remind me, what was her background? She was Dr. Blodgett's wife. I'm Katie Haffner, and this is Lost Woman of Science. Today, the final episode of Layers of Brilliance, the Chemical Genius of Catherine Burr Blodgett. We're calling this episode, Vanishing Act. It lasts, what disappears, and who decides? Because forgetting isn't an accident, it's a process. So how did the world come to forget Catherine Burr Blodgett? And what of her boss, Irving Langmuir? What happens when a scientist flies too close to the sun?

3:04Or in this case, to the clouds? I went to Schenectady last summer, and one of the first things I did was look for the house Catherine lived in for more than 50 years, at 18 North Church Street, in the city's historic Stockade District. Diagonally across from Catherine's, I could see the house on Front Street where Catherine was born, and where her father was murdered in 1897. I was delighted to see a plaque on Catherine's old house, how nice of the city to honor her with a plaque, but not so fast. When I got close enough to read the plaque, my delight dissolved. The name on the plaque at 18 North Church Street is Benjamin Van Fleck, who, according to the plaque, lived there in 1735. This Benjamin was part of one of the early Dutch families to settle in Schenectady in the 18th century. Now even Catherine's old house is tipping its hat to someone else.

4:07So what happened? After her 1938 discovery of non-reflecting glass, Catherine had become one of the general electric companies most celebrated scientists. She was invited to give talks and asked to sit for interviews. Several colleges and universities awarded her an honorary degree. Although her non-reflecting films were never commercialized, they were too soft and were wiped off too easily for use in actual products. GE did successfully commercialize one piece of her research. The color gauge Catherine created to track film thickness. It did this by matching the color a thin film reflected to the number of layers it contained. Following her most intense period of celebrity in 1939, courtesy of the exuberant GEPR machine, Catherine returned to her science. And in the never-adulment department, science with Irving Langmier. There was a team that had gotten together at the lab,

5:10which the key participants were Langmier, Schaefer, Catherine Blodgett. That's George Wise, the historian we've been hearing from this season. And a fourth person named Bernard Vonnegut was a physicist from MIT. And I hope that's known today for bringing his brother Kurt from the University of Chicago just connected to work as a publicity writer. And that would be Kurt Vonnegut, who I mentioned earlier on in the season, went on to become one of the most famous novelists of the 20th century and who got a lot of material for his fiction directly from his experience at GE. So, Bernard Vonnegut, Irving Langmier, Vincent Schaefer, and Catherine Blodgett. During World War II, they worked on smoke screens for the troops. That is a high-efficiency smoke generator that produced massive persistent screens to hide troops and ships from enemy view. The GE team discovered that boiling oil under specific pressure through a calibrated nozzle

6:15created an ideal white fog of uniform light scattering particles. Langmier's Schaefer and Blodgett, along with other members of the team, carried out some of the experiments that led to that discovery. In the spring of 1942, the team began testing its smoke generator, trying to determine how many gallons of oil had to be vaporized to create a smoke screen wide enough and dense enough to block visibility across miles. That was what the armed forces needed. Catherine leader recalled that period at her 1963 retirement dinner. She explained that the tests couldn't be made in the laboratory. They needed to be done under field conditions. They needed a place where the air would be quiet and smoke would spread out for long distance. The tests were carried out in the Schoheri Valley Southwest of Schenectady. The program was, we leave Schenectady at 3.30 in the morning and drive to the Schoheri Valley. That was all right.

7:18My job was to be ready at 3.30 when the boys came for me. With several coats of hot coffee in thermos bottles and a big pile of sandwiches. Did she just say she was assigned lunch? Okay, but that wasn't all Catherine did. Once they arrived, Vince and Irving would climb Roman's nose, a hill that rises sharply from the valley floor. They brought cameras with them and observed the smoke from above. Catherine stayed down in the valley. Her job was to operate the radio and relay information between the men on the hill and the team running the smoke generator below. And if the radio failed, as it often did, she was the backup system. Her instructions were simple. If she couldn't reach them by radio, just yell. Just yell. They ran the experiments all morning and then they'd have a picnic. Catherine loved that field work. It was a great anti-climax when we had to pick up a noon and go back to school

8:22and make it through the laboratory. And the work paid off in a huge way. Before the GE team began that smoke screen research, the Army's best attempts at a smoke screen were created by smoke pots. Those only obscured small areas and required many people to operate, plus they had to be tended to almost every hour to keep them producing the smoke. Plus, once the smoke was released, it irritated the noses and throats of the very people it was supposed to protect. The GE research team addressed these challenges. Their smoke screens covered many square miles and needed fewer people to operate them. In addition, the smoke produced was less toxic, so it didn't irritate the troops. In June 1944, on D-Day, the Allied forces deployed massive vertical smoke curtains to shield the invasion fleet from the German batteries that lined the coast. For Irving Langmier, this work manipulating the air,

9:22would inspire him and the team to focus on the strangest darn science they would ever do. Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. That's the great line from the writer Charles Dudley Warner, that his famous friend, Mark Twain, liked to quote, but what does that have to do with Irving Langmier? The smoke screen project, says George Wise, kind of morphed over into working on the atmosphere and particles and the atmosphere in general, one of which was what makes it rain or snow. This was the start of what became known as the cloud-seating project, an attempt to promote and even control precipitation, a science that could have wide implications if it was proven to be possible. Vincent Schaeffer was leading the experiments. In a speech years later, Catherine recalled the day a piece of equipment he had requested was delivered to the lab room they shared.

10:29Yes, a littered food freezer. The kind you put in your garage and use for storing frozen sides of beef. Vincent then lined it with black velvet so he could see if ice crystals were forming. Then he blew a big, long exhale into the freezer and watched his breath hang creating a super-cooled cloud. Right there in that portable freezer, the next question. What could be added to form ice crystals? The answer arrived by accident. One hot summer day to keep the temperature of the freezer down, Schaeffer dumped a bunch of dry ice in, and millions of tiny ice crystals formed on the black velvet lining. The tiny ice crystals were teeny tiny snowflakes, about 3,000ths of an inch in diameter, or a 50th the size of fully grown snowflakes. Then the question was this. Could this experiment to create snow work outside the lab up in the clouds?

11:32On November 13th, 1946, Schaeffer got in a small airplane with an unusual carry-on, six pounds of dry ice. As the plane flew over a thick cloud drifting leisurely over the border between New York and Massachusetts, Schaeffer dropped all six pounds of the dry ice particles into it. The cloud began contorting as if it was in pain. Within five minutes, the entire cloud had become snow. Though the snow evaporated before hitting the ground, from Langmuir's view in a connected control tower and Schaeffer's view up in the sky, they had witnessed true wonder. They had broken down a cloud. They had created the first artificial snowstorm. The researchers wondered if, instead of using dry ice, there was a chemical they could use to create those ice crystals. Next came an epiphany from Bernie Vonnegut. Using silver iodide might do the trick.

12:34Alas, the big bosses at GE weren't quite as keen on this cloud-seating adventure as Irving and Schaeffer and Vonnegut were. As George Wise points out, this was a far cry from the safe pursuits of efficient light bulbs and nifty multi-layer films. These men were talking about controlling the weather. GE immediately realized that if they carried it out on their own, they would likely be believed to have caused the terrible snowstorm or even some terrible thing. So they quickly turned it over to the government. The company worried that an artificial snowstorm could cause accidents on the roads and that GE would be held responsible. Eager to create a safe legal distance between itself and the project, GE opened all its patents for public use and waived royalty rights. The government took over and the experiment in cloud-seating got named Project Sirus. While GE funded most of the work, the US Air Force,

13:34which was then called the Army Air Forces, along with the Navy provided aircraft. And the government was quite intrigued by this thing because it was potentially a weapon and they did a number of experiments of various kinds. The most controversial was that they decided that they might be able to cause a hurricane to stop being a hurricane. That experiment didn't go according to plan. Instead of stopping, the hurricane changed course and blew out over land, creating a great deal of damage and upsetting a number of people. But was it really Langmere and his team who diverted the hurricane? Here's the author, Ginger Strand, who wrote about the cloud-seating experiments. Given how much energy is in a hurricane, it would take a lot more than some, you know, a little cloud-seating event to tip it in one direction or another.

14:34But Irving was eager to claim, you know, success for the experiment. Nobody has ever wanted to repeat that experiment since then. But I think it should be done again. That was Langmere himself describing the rogue hurricane to an audience after that happened, and playing it for laughs. And what was Catherine doing during this big distraction? Wisely, she stayed mostly on the sidelines. It's almost representative of the type of person that she probably was. That's Ginger again. Because she's kind of always in the room. In the room, but not truly involved. Because Catherine made it clear, she thought there were better ways these men could be spending their time, as Catherine herself once described it. One afternoon, when she was picking up her things to go home at 5.30pm, she and Barney Vannegett, others called him Bernie, but she called him Barney, were the only ones left. And she sang out, time to go home, Barney.

15:34And these guys are doing this crazy stuff, and they're like, oh, we're gonna seed the clouds and make it rain. They got dressed up in their outfits and got on the bomber planes, and pretended they were like, you know, aces, World War II aces. It flew around throwing dry ice and silver iodide at the clouds and stuff. And Catherine's there in the lab doing her experiments. And Catherine's like, you know, Bernie, you should probably go home to your wife. Catherine opted out of the cosplay, but she wanted to help if she could. And she did something quite remarkable. The new differential analyzer. To be employed in solving involved mathematical problems, it can handle in two weeks. Work that would require a skilled mathematician 17 years to complete. Years earlier, Lajit and Langmuir had used to that very computer to establish the trajectories of fine particles in the vicinity of fibers for the work they were doing on filters. Now, Catherine's computer skills were needed again.

16:36Here's Vincent Schaeffer. Lajit and Langmuir had the idea that he wanted to find out the trajectories of cloud droplets passing objects. He got Catherine on the job. And the trajectories she calculated remain of basic importance in the physics of precipitation and the field of aircraft de-icing. De-icing, by the way, was another of Catherine's areas of investigation during World War II. I'll never forget the admiration I had for Katie. The results of that research that she did is still being referred to. Most of the publications related to cloud physics today, it was really pioneering work. All of this raised a question, and I asked it of Ginger Strand. Did cloud seating actually work? You know, I had to basically get a tiny master's degree in cloud physics working on this project. But as far as I understand it, and talking to some of the smartest people who think about these things, it seems to me that it does work, but it does not work in the way that people in the general public think it works.

17:43It doesn't bring down rain from an empty sky. It doesn't steal rain from one location that would have landed at another. What it does is it just a cloud is not just a big reservoir of water up there. It's a whole bunch of chemical and physical processes happening up in the sky. Cloud seating just makes those processes a little more efficient. It helps the clouds kind of make more rain and drop more rain. Increasing the productivity of clouds by about 5 to 8%. So that's like, oh well, big deal. That's not going to make the desert bloom. And yet, what we are witnessing here is a man obsessed. I asked Ginger straight up, what was Langmier thinking? Even I who know nothing about any of this. I think that's like nuts. Yeah, well, it was a time of scientific miracles, right?

18:46George Wise agrees. It was very symptomatic of the feeling at the times when people thought that science would create miracles every five minutes. And the project service was one of those. But controlling the weather, at least as Irving Langmier envisioned it, was just plain folly. For Catherine, those staying in the background, doing the computations and analyses, contributing to our understanding of cloud physics, that might well be one of her biggest legacies from those years of her work. It was the detour hurricane in particular that turned popular sentiment against Irving Langmier, and some of his scientific colleagues grew wary. There was even one incident in Langmier's later years when he showed up to give a speech at a university, and the reception from the audience was so hostile and rude that he turned around and left. For a man who did such fundamental research in surface chemistry, and who won the Nobel Prize,

19:47there is something almost tragic about the scientific obsessions that took hold of him in his later years. In some ways, it's reminiscent of his wacky quantum theory in 1920. In 1953, he gave a famous lecture that all but defined his own scientific missteps. This is Irving Langmier on March 8, 1954. It is transcribed from a tip recording of the lecture on pathological science that I gave on December 18, 1953. The lecture was about what he called pathological science. Langmier defined this as scientific wishful thinking, fantastic theories contrary to experience. That lecture has become something of a classic among science historians, and yet at no point in the lecture did Langmier say he'd done any wishful thinking of his own.

20:48Here's David Kaiser, the MIT science historian. It's kind of tragic comic. He doesn't quite say, I fell victim to this myself, there's no whiff of that. It does seem really quite striking, even in the 1950s when he gave that talk as kind of grand, grand, you know, eminence in the field. There's no hint that this might actually frankly have applied to himself at times in his own career. Maybe even more tragic. He continued to pursue science that many would classify as pathological wishful thinking. In 1956, at age 75, Langmier was collaborating with a little known chemist, someone named William Mogerman, to publish an article in the popular press about a brand new theory that appeared to link the unpredictable action of atoms to cancer and the weather and maybe even totalitarianism. There's a kind of heartbreaking exchange between the two men that we found among Langmier's papers at the Library of Congress when Mogerman breaks the news to Irving that no one is interested in publishing their article.

21:53And just a few months later in the summer of 1957, while Langmier was visiting family in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, he died of a heart attack at age 76. His death was a shock to everyone, not least of all, Catherine Blodgett. More after the break. Hi, I'm Katie Halfner, co-executive producer of Lost Women of Science. We need your help. Tracking down all the information that makes our stories so rich and engaging and original is no easy thing. Imagine being confronted with boxes full of hundreds of letters in handwriting that's hard to read or trying to piece together someone's life with just her name to go on. Your donations make this work possible. Help us bring you more stories of remarkable women. There's a prominent donate button on our website all you have to do is click.

22:54Please visit LostWomenOfScience.org. That's LostWomenOfScience.org. In 1957, Doug Langmier died, left a hole in our group that nobody could ever film. That was Catherine Blodgett talking at her retirement dinner in 1963. What Catherine thought of her mentor and lifelong collaborators downward scientific spiral we don't know. His sudden death must have been a severe blow to her. She continued to work at GE for just six more years. At her retirement dinner, people got up one after the other to pay tribute to her. Colleagues presented her with a GE-inspired farewell gift. Hey Jim, tell us what it is. What's it? A TV set. They sang a song. KD Login, KD Login, will miss you, will miss you.

23:54It's the thought that counts, and Gwen Lloyd, a female Colle, got up and said how much Catherine was missed at the lab. This is particularly so in the case of the girls. You are our champion spokesman when we had a cause to breed. We don't know what we're going to do without you. Then the mayor of Schenectady presented Catherine with the Patrune Award for Outstanding Service, the highest honor the city bestows on a resident. When her turn came to speak, Catherine talked not so much about herself, but Irving Langmuir. It had been planned when I came to Schenectady. I was working for Dr. Langmuir. But I knew when Dr. Langmuir would be back, Dr. Langmuir came home. Listening to this makes you think it's a celebration not for her, but for him. I was privileged to get to know the very human side of Dr. Langmuir. He was the life of a pilot, wasn't he? And with that, Catherine Burr blodged it retired.

24:54The next decade was hard for her. We didn't see any more evidence of the voices that haunted her throughout her 30s and into her 40s, and we hope they quieted down. But into her 60s and 70s, her physical health deteriorated. Here's Catherine's great niece, Marika Olkama. My family put up guard railings to the entrance to my grandma's house to make it easier for her to get in. And then we went to her in Schenectady. And my impression was that it was a very old person's home. She had one of these chair lifts going up the stairs. By 1978, Catherine must have known. She was at the end of her life because she wrote to a relative asking if there was room for her at this cemetery in Bucksport, Maine, where both her father and mother are buried. The relative wrote back in an almost business-like tone informed her that there was no space left at the main cemetery.

25:55On October 12, 1979, Catherine Burr blodged died at home of a stroke. She was 81. The New York Times ran a brief obituary the next day, citing the highlights, non-reflecting glass, the color gauge, and, of course, her many years as Irving Langmuir's assistant. Then silence. There was a Catherine Gloget day in Schenectady, June 13, established by the mayor in 1951, but that has since disappeared from the city's calendar. At Catherine's alma mater, Bryn Marr, the General Electric Foundation established a fellowship program in her honor in 1980, but that program ended 13 years later. See what I mean about how forgetting is a process. We went on the hunt for any more mentions of her through the decades, and there are a few. There's a wonderful pamphlet that GE published in 1993 for a Girl Scout event titled,

26:55You Can Be a Woman Scientist II. It's written as if it's Catherine herself speaking to the Girl Scouts, and it's complete with experiments, like one with M&Ms, for which you need one bag, regular or fun size, a way to visualize thin films, and her famous pop-over recipe. I just had to try this myself. But everything in a bowl at least five minutes. My family helped. Oh, there it goes. They look like kind of muffins. And not very good muffins. I wonder what the problem is. Maybe 50 years ago, that's what pop-overs looked like. Could be. But it didn't pop. Not a lot of pop-edge. No. This clearly calls for further, very patient, experimentation. And how's this for posthumous recognition? In 2005, Catherine had a cameo in an episode of The Simpsons,

27:56when the family visits a new stamp museum that's come to town. Look at all these worthy Americans. I'm Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. And there, behind the Crystal Clear Museum Glass. Thanks to me, Catherine Blodgett, we have non-reflecting glass. The episode, of course, assumed that Blodgett's thin film had yielded the Crystal Clear Museum Glass of today. And while that isn't entirely right, it's not too far off base. Catherine did give us the foundational science, even if her version of the glass was too soft to commercialize. We also found a couple of research awards in physics and chemistry in Catherine's name in the UK, where she'd gotten her PhD. There wasn't much more about Catherine to find, but in 2008, her name did crop up again in Schenectady. An elementary school was named for her. We found a clip of the students at that school singing in her honors. We found a panther, perfect Blodgett people.

28:58I am Blodgett, I am Blodgett, I am Blodgett. But the school was then renamed and eventually shut down. Maybe this is wishful thinking. But I'm hoping this season about Catherine Blodgett will rekindle some interest among Schenectadians in the city's own native genius. While trying to nail down the details of what happened with that Catherine Blodgett school, I call Gary McCarthy, who's the mayor of Schenectady. And although he didn't know about Catherine Blodgett at the start of our conversation, after I told him about her and her work, he offered to put me in touch with the school superintendent or his deputy. And you might be able to raise their awareness on some of these things to get their thinking in different directions. And that is why we're here. To get every female scientist we shine a light on out into the sunshine of the broader world, whether it's a name on a school or on a street, a building or a scholarship.

29:58Maybe it's a full, richly detailed Wikipedia page or an appearance on the Simpsons. Why not? Catherine was an inspiration to other women interested in science and gave talks at schools and at meetings of her Santa Club. She influenced at least two of the Blodgett women who came after her. Catherine's niece, Catherine Blodgett Gabby, also attended Brinmore and became a prominent physicist. In 2015, Catherine Gabby established a summer research fellowship in her aunt's honor at the college. And Marika Alkama, Catherine's great niece, credits Catherine with inspiring her to become an electrician. With each visit she would bring something as a present for each of us. But what really caught my attention was when we got a make your own doorbell set. I was super excited to wire this up and put it on the door to my room.

30:58I really loved it. I thought, wow, you know, here you can build something. It works. And oh, Catherine's laboratory notebooks that crucial record of her working life, her thinking, her days, that we spent the season trying to locate nowhere in the vestiges of what was once the sprawl of corporate hugeness known as the General Electric Company are their signs that Catherine Blodgett's laboratory notebooks still exist. We got in touch multiple times with different GE entities, the company split into three in 2024. And we held out hope that the notebooks would show up even up to the minute before we recorded this last episode we hoped that one of those new entities would come through in the end. But it wasn't to be. They responded with emails letting us know they couldn't help but wished us well. If any of Catherine's notebooks still existed, no one could tell us where they were. And many email exchanges later,

31:59we got very disappointingly precisely nowhere. So in the face of all this, emails that politely closed doors, archives that go missing, institutions that no longer quite remember what they once made or who made it, I began to ask myself, why does any of this matter? Why insist on the past when the present seems indifferent to it? It's because this history, not just of Catherine Blodgett, but of the rich world that was the General Electric Company's research laboratory, deserves to be remembered. History isn't just a catalog of what happened. It's the memory of how we came to be who we are. On a fall day in 1918 and a brick building along the Mohawk River, the men running the GE Research Lab opened their doors to a 20-year-old prodigy who happened to be a woman. She was hired not as a curiosity, not as a token,

33:00but as a scientist. And that decision helped shape a world. The materials that help make our lives possible more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, our screens, our lenses, our electronic devices, the very way light travels through glass, were built on ideas born in the culture of scientific inquiry Catherine Blodgett stepped into. When we forget that, we don't just lose names, we lose a sense of how knowledge is made. Historians remind us that memory is a form of power to remember is to claim a place in the story. So when we say that Catherine Blodgett matters, we're not talking about one woman. We're talking about an era in which science could be bold and collaborative. We're talking about a laboratory that allowed discoveries to emerge in unexpected ways. And we're talking about this very moment, the choices we are making right now about who gets to belong, who gets to be remembered,

34:01and what kind of future we're building. History matters because it tells us not only who we were, but who we might become. And in remembering Catherine Blodgett, we aren't just looking backward, far from it. We are looking for a way forward. We go to our grave look up and we put the name in and then often it's misspelled, so you try another spelling and try another spelling and then it comes up on our website. That's Meg Winslow, Senior Curator of Historical Collections and Archives at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After her death, Catherine did come to be buried with members of her family. On a very rainy day last summer, lost women of science associate producer Hannah Samett went to Mount Auburn to find Catherine's grave, and she stopped in first to talk to Meg. So Catherine Blodgett is buried on Bagonia Path, Lod 9243, and she was buried here June 14, 1980.

35:02At the age of 81, we also have all the records having to do with the shipping and receipt of the cremated remains for Catherine Blodgett. Hannah then set out to find Catherine's grave. I hope this is recording. Maybe in true cemetery fashion, it is pouring rain. I'm trekking through the Bagonia Path. She finds the headstone. Catherine, that's really great to meet you. That really sums it up. It was indeed an honor for all of us to delve into the story of this woman who's life and work we wouldn't have known to see, unless we looked for her reflected light. You can remember someone when you are repeatedly reminded

36:03of them. The very name Lang Blodgett films might inspire the curious among us to wonder just who those two people were and look them up. Or you might send your kids to a school named Catherine Burblotted Elementary. If you keep talking about someone, aren't they in some way still here? Which is another reason we're telling you this story. Of a scientist who showed us what it's like to inhabit the world as a full human, even as she struggled with the self she had to live with. But come to think of it, she might well have been the sanest of the lot. This has been lost women of science. Our producers were Natalia Sanchez-Lewiza and Sofia Levin, with me, Katie Houghner, as senior producer. Hannah Samette was our associate producer, Ella Federer, was our consulting editor, and a Tui Ron was our sound designer and Hunt Stale she was our sound engineer.

37:03Elizabeth Yunan is our composer and Liske Bang designed the art. Thanks to senior managing producer Deborah Unger, program manager A.O. and Bertner, my co-executive producer Amy Scharf and marketing director Lily Weirn. We got help along the way from Ariel Platnick, Eva McCullough, Natalia Noblog, Teresa Cullen, Isabla Cwang, Joe Hyatt, and Zoe Liannhyatt. A super special thanks to Peggy Schott, to Chris Hunter at the Museum of Innovation and Science, to George Wise, Brynmore College, and Meg Winslow from the historical collections and archives at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we're grateful to Deborah Jonathan and Marika Alkama for helping us tell the story of their great Aunt Catherine. Hey, what about me? Oh, yes, Dolores. I gave the first drafts of all my scripts to my AI-pal Dolores to read aloud using software from the company Descript. Not only did Dolores save me a huge amount of time, but she was a great first-pass narrator.

38:05Thanks, it's been a pleasure working with you, Katie. I love what you all are doing with lost women of science. We're distributed by PRX and our publishing partner is Scientific American. Our funding comes in part from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ann Wigisky Foundation. And our generous individual donors. Please visit us at lostwomenofscience.org and don't forget to click on that all-important donate button. Very soon, we're bringing you a special bonus episode, which we're co-producing with the Science History Institute about Agnes Pockels, a 19th-century self-taught material scientist, whose work was fundamental to Catherine's discoveries. Keywords. Dish soap. I'm Katie Huffner. See you next week.

39:09Hi, I'm Katie Huffner, co-executive producer of Lost Women of Science. We need your help. Tracking down all the information that makes our stories so rich and engaging and original is no easy thing. Imagine being confronted with boxes full of hundreds of letters and handwriting that's hard to read or trying to piece together someone's life with just her name to go on. Your donations make this work possible. Help us bring you more stories of remarkable women. There's a prominent donate button on our website. All you have to do is click. Please visit lostwomenofscience.org. That's lostwomenofscience.org. From PRX.