Women in Industrial Research 3515106707, 9783515106702

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Women in Industrial Research Edited by Renate Tobies and Annette B. Vogt Wissenschaftsgeschichte Franz Steiner Verlag

Wissenschaftskultur um 1900 – Band 8

Women in Industrial Research Edited by Renate Tobies and Annette B. Vogt

wissenschaf tskultur um 1900 herausgegeben von Olaf Breidbach Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Mitchell G. Ash, Wien | Peter Bowler, Belfast | Horst Bredekamp, Berlin | Rüdiger vom Bruch, Berlin | Gian Franco Frigo, Padua | Michael T. Ghiselin, San Francisco | Zdene’k Neubauer, Prag | Federico Vercellone, Udine

Band 8

Women in Industrial Research Edited by Renate Tobies and Annette B. Vogt with the assistance of Valentine A. Pakis

Franz Steiner Verlag

Cover: Researchers at the experimental laboratory of OSRAM’s Factory A, in Berlin (1924). Sitting in the middle: Dr. Iris Runge, with laboratory assistants sitting to her left and right. Standing (from left to right): Dr. Walter Heinze, Dr. Magdalene Hüninger, (unknown), Dr. Ilse Müller, Dipl.-Ing. H. Lutterbeck. Source: [STB] 754, p. 7v

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2014 Layout: Stefan Tobies Druck: Laupp & Göbel GmbH, Nehren Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-10670-2

FOREWORD The contribution of women to the history of science is a significant theme, but it is only over the past decade that it has been structured in substantial depth. Initial approaches to this topic in the history of science were biographically oriented and exemplary. Of interest were the individual fates of prominent women and the suppression of their accomplishments by male colleagues, as happened in the case of Rosalind Franklin, whose findings had been crucial to elucidating the structure of DNA. What scholars sought were the historical circumstances encountered by the earliest women scientists such as Lise Meitner, and the way in which these circumstances had granted them, or refused them, access to the world of science. An Austrian of Jewish heritage, Meitner was endangered in 1938 while working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Physical Chemistry in Berlin, and she fled from Germany to Sweden. After 1947 – having refused to work on the development of the atomic bomb, and thus having rejected job offers in the United States – she served as the director of the Department of Nuclear Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and she won numerous awards. Unlike Otto Hahn, however, she did not win the Nobel Prize. From 1919 to 1937, after enduring a great deal of initial difficulties, the Frenchwoman Cécile Vogt worked as a department director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurology in Berlin, an institute that had been formed out of the neurobiological laboratory led by her husband Oskar Vogt, who was himself the director of the KWI. As a socialist, Oskar Vogt was pressured by the National Socialists to abandon his position in 1937, and thus at the end of the 1930s Cécile Vogt moved with her husband to the Black Forest, where the two of them founded a private institute for neurology. These individual fates demonstrate that it was only with great difficulty that women could attain and keep even second-tier academic positions. How did the situation look outside of the academic realm? Since 1890, and particularly in Germany, there has been a massively expanding industrial sector that, in the fields of electrical engineering and chemistry especially, achieved its innovative potential by establishing in-house research departments. In 1883 in Berlin, the company AEG was founded as the German Edison-Society for Applied Electricity. Even before the First World War, this firm established itself as one of the largest armament manufacturers in the German-speaking world, second only to the Krupp Steel Works in Essen. Beginning in 1905, light bulbs were produced with Tungsten filaments, and as early as 1906 they bore the brand name OSRAM. During the first decades of the twentieth century, light bulbs became one of the most successful products of the electrical industry. The telegraph construction company Siemens & Halske, which had been founded as early as 1847, began as of 1880 to offer products to the postal and telegraph services in Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Siemens & Halske, which surpassed its competitors in

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the telephone business by means of its own research and development, was able to establish in 1907 the first fully automated local operating system and, in 1913 and 1914, the company completed and installed the first trans-regional telephone cable between Berlin, the Rhineland, and the Ruhr District. Things developed analogously in the chemical industry. In the 1880s, the Chemical Company BASF (Baden Aniline and Soda Factory) built its own representative laboratory. The companies Bayerwerke, Farbwerke Hoechst, Leopold Cassela & Co., and Agfa operated in a similar manner. The latter firm, which was created in 1873 out of a merger of earlier companies as the Stock Corporation for Aniline Fabrication (Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication), adopted the name Agfa in 1897 as a trademark for “chemical compounds for photographic purposes.” How did women establish themselves in the scientific departments of these industrial workplaces? Until now we have known little about female laboratory assistants and their possible career paths. We have known little, too, about the women who were active as scientists in the rapidly expanding industrial sectors of the early twentieth century. How were traditions from small manufacturing plants transmitted to large-scale industry, where even modestly trained experimenters initially forged careers and where specific training profiles first had to be established in the fields of engineering and the natural sciences? Did women achieve access to these spheres of activity or did the developments of the time displace them from the fields of work that had hitherto been available to them? It remains to be asked, too, how roles were changed under the fluctuating social conditions around the beginning of the First World War, to what extent women were thereby assigned new areas of activity, and how and whether they were able to establish themselves in such fields for the long term. By now we still know far too little about the contributions of women to the academic world, in the strict sense, and about the cultural environment of academia itself. Even less is known, however, about the role of women in the fields of trade and industry and thus about the fields in which the new natural sciences were being applied. How, perhaps, were such circumstances affected early on by the situation of war in 1870 and 1871? To what extent were professional prospects altered in the wake of such events? To what extent were developments consolidated that had at first originated as emergency measures? The biographical explorations presented in this volume provide initial answers to such questions. The book investigates the work of women in non-academic positions, positions that opened new spheres of activities for them while also, however, limiting their potential again and again. The individual studies demonstrate the extent to which these were “women-specific” limitations, the extent to which specific fields of activity were perhaps also made available to women, and how women were able to integrate non-academic and academic work. The book describes careers that unfolded in this intermediate space, that of an ever expanding and academically oriented industrial sector. Based on detailed source studies, the book provides not only initial answers, but it also allows for the entwinement of academic and industrial careers to be traced with respect to their availability to women researchers during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Foreword

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This volume describes the relationships that existed between industry and academic institutions such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the universities. It showcases individual careers in the realm of industry and the particular niches in which women were active. In the case of the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena, it also illustrates the total potential that women could achieve at a research-oriented enterprise toward the end of the twentieth century. The career paths outlined here should provide the foundation for and encourage further in-depth analysis of the presence of “women in industrial research.” Olaf Breidbach – Jena (October 2013)

CONTENTS Foreword ............................................................................................................... v List of Tables ........................................................................................................ xi List of Figures ....................................................................................................... xi Editors’ Preface ................................................................................................. xiii Introduction: Women Researchers in Industrial Laboratories: Trends and Perspectives Renate Tobies and Annette B. Vogt ...................................................................... 1 Part I: Links between Academic and Non-Academic Professions Renate Tobies, Annette B. Vogt, and Brenda Winnewisser ................................ 25 1 Women Scientists with Different Laboratory Practices: Transitioning from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society to Industrial Laboratories, and Vice Versa Annette B. Vogt ................................................................................................... 27 2 Collaboration and Competition between Academia and Industry: Hedwig Kohn and OSRAM, 1916–1938 Brenda Winnewisser ............................................................................................ 45 3 The Background and Career of Angeliki Panagiotatou: The First Female Physician in Greece to Hold a Ph.D. Poly Giannakopoulou .......................................................................................... 59 Part II: The Electrical Engineering Industry Renate Tobies ...................................................................................................... 73 4 Lillian Gilbreth and Irene Witte – Women of Efficiency Herbert Mehrtens ................................................................................................. 77 5 Female Scientists in German Electrical Engineering Corporations and Their Patronage Relationships Renate Tobies ...................................................................................................... 87 6 From the German Electrical Engineering Industry to the United States: The Case of Cecilie Froehlich Renate Tobies .................................................................................................... 103

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Part III: The Chemical, Cosmetics, and Nuclear Industries Jeffrey A. Johnson, Maria Rentetzi, and Renate Tobies .................................... 115 7 Women in the Chemical Industry in the First Half of the 20th Century Jeffrey A. Johnson ............................................................................................. 119 8 Creating a Niche for Women in the Cosmetics Industry Maria Rentetzi .................................................................................................... 145 9 Dora J. Leipunskaya and the Contributions of Women to the Nuclear Industry Peter Bussemer .................................................................................................. 159 Part IV: Optical Companies and Institutions for Applied Optics Renate Tobies .................................................................................................... 179 10 Women Academics and Industrial Researchers in Thuringia during the Early Twentieth Century Renate Tobies .................................................................................................... 183 11 Maria F. Romanova and Her Research on Applied Optics in Russia and Germany Peter Bussemer .................................................................................................. 201 12 Female Employees at Carl Zeiss-Jena during the 1960s and 1970s Katharina Schreiner ........................................................................................... 213 13 Designing Planetariums for the Carl Zeiss Corporation: An Architect Tells Her Story Gertrud Schille ................................................................................................... 229 Index of Names ................................................................................................. 245 Notes on Contributors ..................................................................................... 255

Contents

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LIST OF TABLES Table Title Number 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 10.1 12.1

Page

Women with a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Berlin Female Physicists from Berlin at Industrial Corporations Women with a Doctorate in Chemistry Female Chemists from Berlin at Industrial Corporations Women Scientists between Industry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society Women’s Dissertations in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Jena (1925–1945) An Overview of Female Employment Rates at Zeiss-Jena in 1977

31 31 32 33 37 188 217

LIST OF FIGURES Figure Title Number

Page

2.1

The German physicists Hermann Senftleben, Hedwig Kohn, and Elizabeth Benedict, quantifying sunlight in the Riesengebirge, summer 1918

46

2.2

Last page of a transcript of the last letter from Hedwig Kohn to Alfred R. Meyer, dated June 5, 1917

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2.3

OSRAM advertisement

53

2.4

Title page of a lab “newspaper” celebrating a new Breslau physics Ph.D

53

3.1

Greek female physicians: Polymnia Panagiotidou, Ioanna Stephanopoli, Anthi Vasiliadou, and Thiresia Roka. The Greek physician Angeliki and her sister Alexandra Panagiotatou Angeliki Panagiotatou Researchers at the experimental laboratory of OSRAM’s Factory A, in Berlin Lillian Moller Gilbreth Ilse Müller, German chemist at OSRAM, 1929 Magdalene Hüniger, German chemist at OSRAM, 1929 The German-American applied mathematician Cecilie Froehlich and Students at City College New York, 1955 Emma Wolffhardt, German chemist at BASF, in March 1944 Florence Wall, American chemist and representative of cosmetology at New York World’s Fair 1939–1940 (New York Public Library Reproduction, Image ID: 1668719). The Russian nuclear physicist Dora Leipunskaya as a student, 1934 Members of the University Observatory in Jena, Germany (1930) A Christmas Party at the Abbeanum, University of Jena, in 1928 Marga Faulstich, German chemist at the SCHOTT Corporation in Mainz, Germany

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3.2 3.3 4.0 4.1 5.1 5.2 6.1 7.1 8.1

9.1 10.1 10.2 10.3

65 67 76 79 96 98 108 118 154

165 182 189 197

xii 11.1 12.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4

Contents Maria Romanova, Russian physicist in applied optics The Title Page of Carl Zeiss im Bild international, 2013, Issue 1 (Carl Zeiss Archive) The planetarium in Tripoli – proposal and layout (courtesy of the author) The planetarium in Wolfsburg – original proposal (courtesy of the author) The planetarium in Wolfsburg – cross section of the revised plan (courtesy of the author) The planetarium in Berlin – project meeting in Berlin with city architects, urban planners, and architects from the Ministry of Culture (courtesy of the author, who is pictured standing on the left)

209 226 238 240 242 243

EDITORS’ PREFACE In many industrialized nations, the stereotype persists that mathematics, science, and technology are unsuitable subjects for women, and that industrial laboratories and other non-academic professional workplaces are inappropriate for them. The dominant conception of a “scientist” remains male. Women scientists in top positions are still a minority today, and this is even more the case in industrial laboratories and other non-academic scientific settings. Looking back in time, however, we find a number of women scientists who were active in academia and beyond; many of them worked in industrial research laboratories and contributed significantly to their scientific and technological fields. Our intention here is to expand this area of investigation by examining the place and role of women in industrial research and other professional arenas in light of new sources and important documents. Moreover, we intend to compare the opportunities available to women across several professions and institutions. The book focuses especially on the approximate period between 1900 and the 1960s. This was an era of political upheavals and historically momentous events – the two World Wars, the Nazi regime in Germany and in the occupied countries, the difficult conditions for émigrés who tried to escape Nazi persecution, and a divided Germany after the Second World War. The political circumstances were always and everywhere a factor that influenced the situation for women, from their educational opportunities to their access to higher positions within academic and non-academic research units. Again, this book presents new research results concerning women who conducted scientific work in industrial corporations during the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century. One of our goals was to discuss the conditions under which women were able to become successful industrial researchers, and with this in mind we investigated the positions of women in the chemical, cosmetic, nuclear, electrical engineering, communications, and optical industries. Attention has been paid to female researchers in the steel, aviation, and computer industries as well. Furthermore, our aim was to compare the opportunities of women in several academic disciplines, at various institutions, and in different countries. With a comparative and contextual approach, we examined the research process in nonuniversity settings from the perspective of gender. Thus the contributions to this book address the following topics, among others: the development of local cultures in science and technology and the significance of gender in this process; the roles of both male and female scientific personae and their careers at different research laboratories and enterprises; and gender differences in research methods and approaches to scientific communication.1 1

On the concept of scientific personae, see DASTON 2003; DASTON/SIBUM 2003 (see also the bibliography appended to our Introduction).

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Historians of science have made some progress toward a deeper understanding of the role of various laboratory practices and instrument making (for instance, in chemistry and microbiology, in physics and technology) and the role of women scientists related to this development. Some of the findings presented here incorporate insights from the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, which took place in Manchester in July of 2013, and we hope that this book can be regarded as a contribution to the newly established international project known as the “Women in Science Research Network.” We hope, moreover, to answer some open questions about the situation of women scientists in different industrial research units, and in doing so to rescue their careers, and the paths that led them there, from their previous invisibility.2 Such was the general aim of all the contributors to this book. For a broader understanding of historical developments, we have chosen to adopt an international comparative approach. We were able to invite authors from the United States, Germany, and Greece to contribute their insights concerning women scientists in industrial laboratories and other non-academic professional settings, and thus we have been able to present an ample picture of the field. Of course, it would be impossible to consider every international development in detail. That said, we were nevertheless able to identify several trends based on our own investigations and on recent scholarly literature; such trends are the subject of our introductory chapter. Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank, first and foremost, all the authors who kindly contributed to this book. We are grateful for their expertise and their generosity in sharing it. To Brenda Winnewisser we owe a special debt of gratitude, for in addition to contributing a chapter she also provided us with a great deal of valuable editorial advice. Our deep thanks are also due to Olaf Breidbach, the director of the Institute for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Jena, for his willingness to include this book in the series Wissenschaftskultur um 1900 and for writing his thoughtful foreword. From the publishing house itself, Katharina Stüdemann and Thomas Schaber deserve special mention for their pleasant assistance and collaboration. Some of the authors and other colleagues participated in an international workshop that took place at the University of Jena in March of 2013. For the organization of the workshop and for the publication of the present book, financial support was made available through the visiting professorship program at the University of Jena. Such support would not have been possible without the initiative of the professor of physics Elke Wendler, who organized a visiting professorship, dedicated to the field of women in science, for Renate Tobies.

2

Regarding the “invisibility” of women in science, see ORESKES 1996.

Editors’ Preface

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For their collegiality, we are indebted to numerous colleagues and to staff members at several archives. We would like to thank Reinhard SiegmundSchultze, a professor of the history of mathematics in Kristiansand, Norway, for his encouragement and for providing us with references to several sources. We are especially grateful for the permission granted by Ms. Anna Maria Elstner (née Runge) to use the papers left to her by her aunt, Iris Runge. Furthermore, our gratitude extends to the historian of physics Christian Forstner of the University of Jena, who included some of our research in his project Physics and the Cold War. Special thanks go to several former members of the research and calculating departments of the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena for supporting this project with references, discussion, and advice. In addition to Gertrud Schille and Katharina Schreiner, who contributed chapters to this volume, we would like to mention Bärbel Käpplinger, a former member of the Zeiss microscope-calculation department, and the professor of instrument design Manfred Steinbach, who had a long career at Zeiss and is now the president of the Association for the History of Technology in Jena (Verein Technik-Geschichte in Jena e.V.), where we were able to present some of our preliminary research findings. We thank Dr. Wolfgang Wimmer, head of the Carl Zeiss Archive in Jena, for his helpful collaboration and multifaceted support; the same thanks go to Margit Hartleb and Dr. Bauer (Archive of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena), Dr. Sabine Happ (Archive of the University of Münster), Dr. Ulrich Hunger (Archive of the University of Göttingen), Karin Keller (Archive of the Martin Luther University of HalleWittenberg), Jörg Schmalfuß (Archive of the Deutsche Technik-Museum in Berlin), Dr. Winfried Schultze (Archive of the Humboldt University of Berlin), and to Prof. Dr. Eckart Henning, Dr. Lorenz Beck, and Dr. Marion Kazemi at the Archive of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. Finally, our gratitude extends to Valentine A. Pakis, who translated some of the chapters of this book from German into English and who improved the English of all the contributions submitted by non-native speakers. Renate Tobies and Annette B. Vogt Jena and Berlin – November 2013

INTRODUCTION

WOMEN RESEARCHERS IN INDUSTRIAL LABORATORIES: TRENDS AND PERSPECTIVES Renate Tobies and Annette B. Vogt Our primary aim in this introduction is to formulate a number of theses regarding the factors and parameters that determined the careers of women in industrial laboratories during the first decades of the twentieth century. These theses derive from our own long-standing investigations about female scientists and female researchers and their career paths,1 on the chapters written by our colleagues in this book, and on the many discussions that this collaboration incited. Here we would like to describe the trends of this relatively new research field, to analyze its development, and to enumerate some of the overarching issues that have informed this book and that will prove relevant to further studies. The following theses can be thought of as a summary of Women in Industrial Research, and we hope that they might also serve to instigate discussions in the future. Thesis 1 Approximately from the year 1900 onwards, equal access to education at all school and university levels and access to academic careers were preconditions that enabled women to join industrial research laboratories. In countries where access to educational institutions, especially to universities, was less dependent on state regulations, some female scientists were able to obtain positions in engineering and industrial research laboratories. Based on international comparisons, Ilse Costas developed an explanatory model for women’s access to academic careers.2 For careers in industrial laboratories, our investigations have confirmed that the preconditions in these fields were similar. In the United States and Great Britain, for instance, women had (easier) access to uni1 2

See TOBIES 1997, 2006, 2008, 2013; VOGT 2000a, 2000b, 2007, 2008. See COSTAS 2002, 2003.

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versity educations somewhat earlier than in Germany, and thus a few female scientists were able to contribute to industrial firms there relatively earlier. Here we can mention, by way of example, Hertha Marks Ayrton, who in 1899 became the first female member of the British Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the American Edith Clarke, who began her career at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1912. Both were able to develop important devices and won awards for their work (see the Introduction to Part II). The German-American Lillian Moller Gilbreth, moreover, is an interesting example of a women researcher who established her own successful company in the United States. Lillian and her husband, Frank Gilbreth, founded the Gilbreth Consulting Firm, which approached ergonomics and industrial efficiency on a scientific basis. Their studies helped to improve productivity at several corporations, and Lillian Gilbreth went on to work as a consultant for five American presidents. She also served as a role model for Irene M. Witte in Germany, a female expert in scientific management (see Chapter 4).3 It was often the case that foreign women scientists and researchers became role models for German women. This is also true regarding women’s access to university studies. Women students from Russia, the United States, and Great Britain had opened the way for women students from Germany to study at German universities and to obtain university degrees. In fact, women students from abroad were the first women to receive doctoral degrees from German universities. The Russian Sofia Kovalevskaya earned a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Göttingen as early as 1874 (the first German woman did so in 1895); the Russian Julia Lermontova completed her doctorate in chemistry at the same university in the same year4; in 1895, the American Margaret E. Maltby became the first women to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at a German university, and she did so at the most famous international center of mathematics and science at the time, namely the University of Göttingen.5 Exceptional conditions and circumstances were required for these female students to earn doctoral degrees, for it was not until 1909 that all the federal states of Germany (beginning with Baden in 1900) officially opened their universities and technical universities to women students.6

3 4 5 6

See, for example Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers On the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1917), a German edition of which appeared in 1922. See also POKORNY 2003. See TOLLMIEN 1997. On Kovalevskaya, see HIBNER-KOBLITZ 1983. On American women in German speaking countries, see SINGER 2003. On the first American female doctoral student at the University of Jena, see Chapter 10 of this book. See Table 1 in TOBIES 2012, p. 6. On the special case of Berlin, see also VOGT 2004, 2007. At the time, Berlin had two institutions of higher education, the University of Berlin, which was founded in 1810, and the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg, which was a technical university. Later, most of the German “Technische Hochschulen” changed their names to “Technische Universitäten” for the sake of international compatibility. Throughout this book, we use the term “technical university” to designate both institutions.

Introduction

3

Thesis 2 For a long time, female students who received a doctoral degree in mathematics, physics, or chemistry preferred teaching jobs at secondary schools. Being a teacher was an acceptable profession for young women at the time in most European countries, including Germany. Only a few qualified female specialists, especially those with interdisciplinary training, ventured to apply for positions at industrial laboratories. When, after extensive debates and struggles, German universities finally opened their doors to female students, the curricula at girls’ secondary schools were accordingly reformed and supplemented. The girls’ schools were then in need of female teachers, especially of mathematics and the sciences. At the same time, the first female students who had studied regularly at German universities were completing their studies and receiving academic degrees. The job opportunities for them in newly reformed or opened schools were therefore relatively good, at least until the late 1920s. In Germany, moreover, the teaching profession was considered to be quite respectable. Female physicians and female teachers were the first to be welcomed and acknowledged by the German Empire, and thus it is no surprise that the first women scientists to complete their studies sought employment in schools before attempting to find positions in academic or non-academic research institutions. The opportunity to become a teacher offered a degree of security in an otherwise uncertain job market. This was true both for male and female scientists, but such security was especially important for female scientists, whose opportunities were relatively limited. This thesis is supported by a prosopographical study that was funded by the German Volkswagen Foundation.7 In it, we analyzed the careers of more than three thousand male and female students who, from 1902 to 1940, had successfully completed their studies of mathematics and two other scientific disciplines at German universities, and who had also become certified to teach at secondary schools. Of this group, 15.2 percent were women. Approximately twenty percent of our sample of 3,040 teachers had obtained a doctoral degree in mathematics, physics, or another scientific discipline. Interestingly, this same percentage applied to both men and women alike. Teaching examinations required expertise in at least three different disciplines, and the combination of mathematics, physics, and chemistry was the most preferred by both male and female students at the time. Most of these students, including those who received a doctoral degree, became school teachers, typically in secondary schools. Our study also included a detailed analysis of the career paths of those who had completed a doctorate in mathematics from 1907 to 1945. Of these, only 3.6 percent of the men and 3.4 percent of the women went on to work in industry. Although sources concerning

7

See ABELE/NEUNZERT/TOBIES 2004. Surveys of the results are published in English in TOBIES 2011, 2012a.

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the history of industrial laboratories are often obscure or lacking, we can assume that these percentages correspond somewhat accurately to the actual situation. We should add that the Diplom degree (which corresponds to a master’s degree) in mathematics and physics was not generally offered at German universities before 1942. Its purpose was to shorten the time of university study on account of the war, which the Nazis had just begun. For chemistry, however, the Diplom degree was introduced as early as the last third of the nineteenth century, much like the Diplom-Ingenieur degree that German technical universities had been offering since the 1870s. The first female engineer to earn a Diplom did so in 1913 at the Technical University of Darmstadt; it was such a notable event that the newspapers reported about it.8 Because of an abundance of students who studied chemistry, more scientifically trained men and women were able to achieve positions in the chemical industry, at least at first, than in others. On the nature of these positions, see Theses 3 and 5 below and Chapter 7. A gender-based quantitative study of the careers of physicists has yet to be conducted.9 Having studied the career paths of industrial researchers during the first three decades of the twentieth century, we discovered that the total number of male and female researchers with university degrees was relatively small, and thus the number of female researchers with such credentials was even smaller. Our discussion is therefore limited to a small sample of industrial researchers and to the small cluster of laboratories that employed academically trained physicists and mathematicians. This is not only true for Germany but also for the other industrialized countries before the Second World War. Thesis 3 It was common for female industrial researchers to maintain close relationships between industrial laboratories and academic research institutions. We would like to underscore the following six issues: (1) Doctoral candidates were able to work on their theses at non-university laboratories, be it at private or industrial facilities. Chapter 1, for instance, is concerned with women who received doctoral degrees in physics and chemistry at the University of Berlin and yet had conducted their research at private laboratories. Similar examples are discussed in Part II (on the electrical industry), Part III (on the chemical industry), and Part IV (on the optical industry).

8

9

On August 3, 1913, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung published a photograph of seven male graduates in engineering together with the female graduate Jovanka Bontschits, who later became a famous architect in Belgrade. For a reproduction of the photograph, see Friederike Lübke, “Fräulein Diplom-Ingenieur,” Die Zeit, No. 38 (September 12, 2013), p. 74. For an early prosopographical study of American mathematicians, physicists, and chemists, see KEVLES (1979). The latter work, however, was not concerned with drawing comparisons based on gender.

Introduction

5

(2) Female scientists were able to make career changes from academic institutions to industrial enterprises, and vice versa. This is the main theme of Chapter 1, which describes women scientists in Germany who, between 1912 and 1945, were able to conduct research at some of the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society as well as in industrial laboratories. (3) Women working at academic institutions occasionally did so as outside contractors for industrial firms, as was the case with the physicist Hedwig Kohn and her work at the University of Breslau for the OSRAM firm in Berlin. In Chapter 2, Brenda Winnewisser explains that these connections were not only characterized by cooperation but also by competition. Without the expectation of producing specialized industrial research, women scientists could also hold university positions that were nevertheless funded by industrial corporations. For example, the assistant position at the Institute for Applied Mathematics of the University of Jena, which was given to Dorothea Starke, was financed by the famous Carl-Zeiss Foundation from 1928 to 1931 (see Chapter 10). (4) On occasion, corporations were interested in paying academic female researchers for the right to use their patents, as happened to the physicist Isolde Hausser (see Chapter 5). Other arrangements were made when a company was interested in applying new research findings. A noteworthy example is that of Margarethe von Wrangell, a chemist who made breakthroughs while working in the cities of Reval (today Tallinn, Estonia) and Hohenheim near Stuttgart (Germany). After the First World War, her research caught the attention of the German agricultural and chemical industries – not to mention government offices – and thus in 1923 she was promoted to full professor and made the chair of her own academic institute. Von Wrangell was the first women ever to hold such a position (ordentliche Professorin) in Germany, which was housed at the Agricultural University in Hohenheim, and in this capacity she advised the chemical industry on the use of phosphoric acid fertilizers and used its financial resources to conduct agricultural experiments.10 Waltraud Voss has recently cited another example of newly developed instruments being used in industrial manufacturing processes. The physicist Lieselott Herforth, who was working at an institute of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, received a contract with industry because of her success in designing radiation monitoring devices. The contract was arranged between the “Laboratory of Dr. Herforth” and the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena, which produced the apparatus after the Second World War. Later, as a full professor at the Technical University of Dresden, Herforth signed contracts with other 10 As early as 1921, Margarethe von Wrangell wrote to her mother: “I am now able to earn as much as I need, but I don’t want to take any more than is necessary, even though the industry has given me this opportunity. For, in the end, I want to preserve my freedom as a scientist. […] I was recently in Ludwigshafen again, and I was able to observe the respect that I enjoy there. Above all, this is probably because I have not taken a penny for myself from this billion-Mark company.” (quoted in ANDRONIKOW 1936, p. 271). The company in question was BASF. Von Wrangel’s institute also received financial support from the Japanese industrial firm Hoshi (see ibid., p. 276). – The Agricultural University in Hohenheim (Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule) is now part of the University of Stuttgart.

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firms as well, for instance with Vakutronik in Dresden to produce a thermo-luminescence dosimeter, and with the Otto Schön Corporation in Dresden to produce new measurement technology for the field of nuclear physics.11 (5) A long-standing career in industry could lead to a permanent university position. In Germany, at least, such transitions were often determined by political change and for political reasons. To name a few, the following women scientists were appointed professors after working successfully as industrial researchers in Germany and the United States: Edith Clarke, Cäcilie Fröhlich (Cecilie Froehlich), Lieselotte Moenke-Blankenburg, Ruth Moufang, Ruth Proksch, Mina Rees, and Iris Runge.12 (6) It was also possible to move in the opposite direction, namely from a longstanding academic position to an industrial laboratory. Furthermore, the example of Ingeborg Ginzel indicates that women, like men, conducted war-related research without any scruples. After earning her doctorate at the Technical College of Dresden, Ginzel worked at the Aerodynamics Laboratory (Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt) in Göttingen until the end of the Second World War. After the Nazi defeat, she – like many male aviation specialists – had to write reports about her research for the Allied Forces, in her case for the British Army occupying Göttingen. She left Germany at the onset of the Cold War, first to work in Great Britain and then in the United States, where she became a senior researcher at the Flight Vehicles Research Department of the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore. This was a classified department in which she was the only woman design specialist among forty men. Ginzel published important articles and was honored for her expertise in rocket design. It was this department, incidentally, that was responsible for producing the bombers that would ultimately drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.13

11 Waltraud Voss, a mathematician and historian of mathematics, lectured on this subject at the annual conference of the Society of German Mathematicians (Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung), which took place in Jena in May of 2013. The contribution will soon be available in print (VOSS 2014, forthcoming). 12 Each of these women scientists and their career paths will be discussed at various points throughout the book. 13 See DOBBIN 1958; Ingeborg Ginzel, Theorie des räumlichen Tragflügels (Göttingen: Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt, 1946); idem, Die Luftschraube am Stand (Göttingen: Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt, 1946); Ingeborg Ginzel and Hans Multhopp, “Wings with Minimum Drag Due to Lift in Supersonic Flow,” Journal of the Aerospace Sciences 27 (1960), pp. 13– 20; Ingeborg Ginzel, “Two Remarks on Cones at Angle of Attack in High Supersonic Flow,” Journal of the Aerospace Sciences 29 (1962), pp. 497–98; idem, “Bodies of Revolution at Angle of Attack in High Supersonic Flow,” AIAA Journal 1 (1963), pp. 484–85. As recently as 2013, researchers from the Martin company paid tribute to the German aviation experts who had been working there since the early 1950s (see http://lockheedmartinshare. blogspot.de/2013_04_01_archive.html).

Introduction

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Thesis 4 Aside from the chemical industry, which hired academically trained experts – male and female – somewhat earlier on, other industries generally did not begin to hire women experts until immediately before and during the First World War. At this time, there was a greater need for scientists because many male scientists were conscripted and because industrial technology had become increasingly important to the war effort. It can be said in general that the positions of women researchers were highly dependent on the prevailing social conditions. Jeffrey Johnson has noted elsewhere that, before the First World War, a campaign had been introduced to prevent women from working in the chemical industry.14 During that war and in the 1920s, however, women scientists were needed in the laboratories of chemical and pharmaceutical companies. At the time, of course, there were only a few women who were qualified to contribute to such fields and who became acknowledged for their work. An interesting example is Margarete Raunert, who was employed by a pharmaceutical firm in Leipzig, where she had already directed a chemical department even before earning her doctoral degree in 1929 at the University of Jena. She had studied chemistry at the University of Leipzig and worked as an assistant for the famous professor Max Le Blanc from 1916 to 1920.15 In Chapter 8, Maria Rentetzi, who has elsewhere investigated the role of women in the radium industry,16 underscores the marginal role of female scientists at American chemical corporations. Some of them were needed during times of war, after which they were forced to leave their positions. Even the newly established cosmetics industry was largely directed by men. Rentetzi demonstrates that a hallmark of certain outstanding female researchers was their ability to adapt flexibly and quickly to new opportunities. The role of wars and military research cannot be overestimated.17 It can be said that women scientists “benefitted” from the wars in question, at least to the extent that such events provided hitherto unavailable career opportunities. Examining women scientists in several branches of industry, we found that they happened to be welcomed more quickly by the corporations founded around the First World War than by older and more established industrial enterprises. Even during the Great War, a number of women researchers, such as Ellen Lax and Isolde Ganswindt (later Hausser), became directors of their own industrial research teams.

14 See JOHNSON 1998. 15 See BISCHOF 2013, pp. xxxiv, 39. On Raunert’s later career, see also JOHNSON 1998, p. 81, which is informed by an interview with Raunert conducted in 1989. 16 See RENTETZI 2004, 2008. 17 For general discussions, see TOBIES 2008, pp. 55– 60; VOGT 2000a, 2007, pp. 108–09, 124– 25; OLDENZIEL et al. 2000.

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Before the Nazi era, science and technology were developing rapidly in Germany, perhaps more so than anywhere else. Many students from abroad were trained and educated at German universities, and foreign researchers travelled to Germany to visit scientific institutions, in part to conduct post-doctoral research. Most of these students and researchers were men, but a number of women also participated in these activities. With the rise of the Nazi regime, however, many female industrial researchers – not to mention many of their male colleagues – were forced to leave Germany and seek positions as elsewhere (see especially Chapter 2 and 6). During the Second World War, female scientific directors could be found at Telefunken’s laboratories in Berlin. Among these were Ilse Müller, who managed a chemical laboratory, and Hildegard Warrentrup, the director of a physical laboratory.18 During this same time, an example of a woman expert in the German steel industry was the mathematician Ruth Moufang. She had completed her doctorate and her Habilitation thesis at the University of Frankfurt am Main, but she could not achieve a paid position as a docent on account of the Nazi policy against women academics. In 1937, she subsequently took a position at the Iron Research Institute in Essen, which belonged to the Krupp steel corporation. After working there for some time, she became a department director in 1942.19 It was only after 1945 that she was able to secure a teaching position at her alma mater. Similarly, at aviation corporations and in the computer industry, women were granted access to high-level positions during the Second World War because of the absence of men. Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg, for instance, led her own experimental laboratory for special aircrafts (Versuchsstelle für Flugsondergeräte) as late as May 1, 1944.20 Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann were among the first scholars to approach the history of technology from the perspective of gender studies, and the scope of their investigations extended into the Cold War period.21 This same period is at the heart of Chapter 9 of the present book; in particular, it addresses the contributions of women to nuclear research in the Soviet Union and the United States. The author of the chapter, Peter Bussemer, also examined the work of 18 On the women scientists mentioned here, see Chapter 5; on Ilsolde Ganswindt-Hausser, see also Chapter 1. 19 See RADTKE 2005; PIEPER-SEIER 2008. In her autobiography, Hel Braun described the fate of Ruth Moufang during the Nazi era (see BRAUN 1990). 20 On Melitta Schiller, see BRACKE 2005. OECHTERING 2001 discusses women in computer science. On women scientists who were active in military research, see VOGT 2000a, 2007, pp. 258–60, 326–33. 21 See OLDENZIEL/ZACHMANN 1999, 2000, and 2009. On the special case of the mobilization of women engineers in East Germany, see ZACHMANN 2004. In 2013, the annual meeting of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science, and Technology [Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissemschaft und Technik] took place in Jena and was devoted to the theme of “Science during the Cold War,” and we benefited considerably from the discussions that took place. The research of one of the keynote speakers, Alexei Kojevnikov, is closely related to the studies presented in this book (see especially KOJEVNIKOV 2004).

Introduction

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German “specialists” employed in the Soviet Union after 1945, and was thus able uncover remarkable links between Russian and German research. In Chapter 11, Bussemer has examined the interactions between Russian and German developments in the field of applied optics, especially during the time just before and after the Second World War. Two additional chapters are concerned with the Cold War years, both of which provide an analysis of the working conditions for women that prevailed at the Carl Zeiss Corporation in East Germany (see Chapters 12 and 13). Thesis 5 Patronage relationships were not only crucial for women specialists to reach higher positions at industrial laboratories; they also played a significant role in many other aspects of their careers. At the time, during which only a few female scientists were able to secure positions in industrial laboratories, patrons exercised considerable influence over women’s careers. Patronage, incidentally, is a rather newly explored field in the history of science.22 At the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine a special symposium titled “Mathematics and Patronage” was organized by June Barrow-Green and Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze.23 The participants discussed patronage relationships as they existed in several countries, at different periods, and in different contexts. An influential patron to a female engineer in the United States, for example, was George A. Campbell, and not only because of his international training. Before he became an industrial researcher at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in Boston in 1897, Campbell had studied in Europe under the mathematician Felix Klein, among others, at the University of Göttingen. Even at that time, Klein was known for his support of women students and of their opportunity to pursue doctoral degrees.24 Perhaps Campbell had been influenced by this attitude; back in the United States, in any case, he became an important patron to the aforementioned Edith Clarke. Another example of patronage was the relationship between the aforementioned Margarethe von Wrangell (see Thesis 3 above), Germany’s first female full professor, and Fritz Haber, a Nobel Prize winner. He held her research in high esteem, wrote positive reviews of her articles, and offered her a position as a guest scholar at his Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin. She worked there from 1922 to 1923, and

22 For a general explanation of patronage, see SIMPSON (1988). On the role of patronage in science during the nineteenth century, see TURNER 1976. 23 See also SIEGMUND-SCHULTZE 2001, 2009. 24 In 1895, the American mathematician Mary Frances Winston and the English mathematician Grace Chisholm completed their doctoral degrees under Klein’s direction at the University of Göttingen (see TOBIES 1999).

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Haber finally arranged for Margarethe von Wrangell to become a full professor at the Agricultural University in Hohenheim.25 Chapter 5 of this book presents some findings concerning the promotion of women scientists by patrons in the electrical industry. These patrons were directors of industrial research departments who were renowned scientists, engineers, and inventors. They were shrewd enough to evaluate with accuracy the scientific capabilities of women and men alike, though it remains unclear to what extent the gender of scientists might have affected the objectivity of their judgements.26 Chapter 6 describes the eminent career of the German-American applied mathematician Cäcilie Fröhlich, a career in electrical engineering that would have been inconceivable without the patronage of a few important research directors. Thesis 6 The working conditions for women scientists varied across different sectors of industry; at their most favorable, such scientists were encouraged to produce important research findings and even to apply for patents. The topic of female inventors, especially in Great Britain and the United States, has been treated in some detail by Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek (see their books published in 1988, 1993, and 2002). In Chapter 1, Annette Vogt considers the history of patents for invention from the perspective of female patentees who had worked for some time at one of the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Germany. In Chapter 2, Brenda Winnewisser emphasizes the role of Hedwig Kohn’s patent for arc lamps filled with several inert gases, which she developed together with a female doctoral student. Chapter 5, moreover, offers a survey of female researchers in electrical corporations who earned patents in Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. These patents were occasionally earned together with male colleagues and research directors. Whereas Jeffrey Johnson has stressed that, in the chemical industry, most women chemists were busy with so-called “women’s work” – that is, with administrative or library jobs – we discovered several female researchers at different electrical and communications firms who, as early as the 1920s, were able to acquire patents for their inventions. Patents can tell a great deal about the scientific contributions of female researchers; in general, patent applications serve as an informative primary source for historical investigations.

25 See ANDRONIKOW(-WRANGELL) 1930; ANDRONIKOW 1936, pp. 242, 272, 274; VOGT 2007, pp. 138, 140, 174; VOGT 2008, p. 217–18, and OFFEREINS 2011. 26 On the notion of objectivity, see DASTON 1997, 1998; DASTON/GALISON 2007.

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Thesis 7 No particular field of industrial research can be labelled “feminine,” though women scientists with interdisciplinary training did contribute to the introduction of new sectors of industry. The title of Londa Schiebinger’s book Frauen forschen anders can be translated as “women conduct research differently” (the English version of the book is entitled Has Feminism Changed Science?). It is appropriate to wonder whether this is truly the case and, if so, why? While it is true that many women were relegated to “assistant positions” (Hilfestellungen), in which they had to perform routine tasks, 27 it must also be admitted that there were also men who occupied such positions, and that jobs of this sort allowed a number of women to advance their careers. The cosmetics industry, for example, which was established during the 1930s in the United States and Europe, would seem at first glance to be a principally “female” sector of business. However, Maria Rentetzki investigated the role of women in this industry and offered the following blunt conclusion: “Cosmetic Chemistry: A Field Closed to Women” (see Chapter 8). Although there were a few successful female researchers who contributed to the elevation of cosmetology into a scientific discipline – a highly interdisciplinary process – most of the leading positions were occupied by men. The application of mathematical methods to the problems faced in industrial laboratories likewise required interdisciplinary training. A new style of thinking, captured in the motto “calculation instead of trial and error,” became an important element of industrial research. We were able to identify calculation departments in the optical and electrical industries as early as the year 1900, but they were all led by men. However, in the newly founded corporations in the communications, aviation, and computer industries, increasingly more mathematically educated women were hired to work alongside male colleagues. On some occasions it happened that only one female researcher determined this new style of thinking within a specific industrial company. Edith Clarke, who has been mentioned above, was known as a “human computer” at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (later AT&T), which she joined in 1912. She made calculations for George Campbell, her professional mentor, who applied mathematical methods to the problems of long-distance electrical transmissions. When, in 1925, Western Electric and part of AT&T formed the Bell Telephone Laboratories, the use of mathematical methods and the participation of women researchers increased. Thornton Fry, who held a doctoral degree in mathematics, established the first mathematical research department in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1928. Later he explained: “The practical engineer got his mathematics where he could – often through self-education, sometimes by seeking the help of his long-haired colleagues.”28 Claude Shannon, 27 See BRÜGGENTHIES/DICK 2005; OECHTERING 2001. 28 FRY 1964, p. 936.

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known as the father of information theory, was for some time a member of Fry’s research department, and there he met his wife, the numerical analyst Elizabeth (Betty) Moore. During the Second World War, relatively many female mathematicians were involved in war research programs. Some of them, like Mina Rees, 29 began their careers in naval research, and others in the field of computer science. An extraordinary woman in the latter field was Grace Hopper, who was not only famous for inventing the first compiler but also worked as a mathematical consultant for several computer corporations.30 Regarding women working in the computer industry, however, it has been rightfully noted that they had the opportunity to participate at the forefront of a new science, but were later elbowed out.31 During the first decades of the twentieth century, most industrial companies employed only a few individuals as mathematical consultants, as Thornton Fry once pointed out regarding industry in America.32 In Germany, Iris Runge, who was the eldest daughter of the mathematician Carl Runge, worked as such a consultant at the OSRAM Corporation from 1923 to 1939, and at Telefunken from 1939 to 1945. It was she who introduced the catchphrase “calculation instead of trial and error” at OSRAM’s laboratories, and she brought this philosophy with her to Telefunken as well.33 Cäcilie Fröhlich was another woman with an outstanding command of mathematics. She was employed by AEG, a German electrical company in Berlin, from 1928 to 1937, at which point she had to leave Germany on account of Nazi policies. Ruth Moufang’s position as the head of a department at the Krupp Iron Institute was also possible thanks to her mathematical acumen.34 Toward the end of the 1920s, when positions at secondary schools were restricted because of the world economic crisis, trained mathematicians sought positions in other fields, especially at the newly founded research institutes associated with the aviation industry. We have identified at least six women mathematicians who made noteworthy contributions to German aviation research, much of which was conducted for the military: (1) Dora Wehage, for example, became qualified to teach mathematics, physics, and philosophy in 1920.35 As of 1925, she worked as a mathematician at the Weapons Agency of the German Army (Heereswaffenamt), and soon thereafter, in 29 On Mina Rees, see BROOME WILLIAMS 2001, 2003; SHELL-GELLASCH 2002, 2011. When Rees died in October of 1997, The New York Times published an obituary written by Wolfgang Saxon. See also her obituary in Notices of the AMS 45 (1998), pp. 866–73. 30 See OECHTERING 2001; BROOME WILLIAMS 2001. 31 See TOBIES 2008, pp. 63–66. 32 See FRY 1964. 33 See TOBIES 2013. 34 Moufang’s academic contributions to mathematics include the following articles: Ruth Moufang, “Das plastische Verhalten von dünnwandigen Rohren unter statischem Innendruck,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 20 (1940), pp. 24–37; and idem, “Das plastische Verhalten von Rohren unter statischem Innendruck bei verschwindender Längsdehnung im Bereich endlicher Verformungen,” Ingenieur-Archiv 12 (1941), pp. 265–83. See also PIEPER-SEIER 2008, p. 199. 35 See [BBF] Karteikarte.

Introduction

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1928, she completed her doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin (her thesis concerned the numerical mathematics of partial differential equations). Later, Wehage became a leading mathematician in Peenemünde, a village on the island of Usedom in the Baltic Sea where the V 2 was developed. (2) Irmgard Lotz (later Flügge-Lotz) received her doctoral degree in applied mathematics at the Technical University of Hanover in 1929. She then became an assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fluid Mechanics, where she conducted aviation research based heavily on mathematics. (3) Ingeborg Ginzel, who was mentioned above, became a colleague of Irmgard Flügge-Lotz on the strength of her doctoral dissertation, which she completed in 1930 at the Technical University of Dresden in the field of conformal mapping. (4) Marie-Luise Schluckebier, who defended her dissertation in 1935 at the University of Bonn, was one of the last doctoral students of the mathematician Otto Toeplitz, who was able to emigrate and escape the Nazi persecution. She found a job in aviation research, and after the war she received a position at a branch of AEG in Kassel. (5) Melitta Schiller (later Stauffenberg) earned a Diplom in engineering from the Technical University of Munich, where she also passed a special examination in higher mathematics. Although she was “half Jewish” according to Nazi terminology, she found a position in aviation research as a test pilot, and she cooperated with several aircraft firms in Germany until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. (6) Ruth Proksch passed examinations to become a secondary school teacher in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, after which she worked as a mathematician for Fieseler Flugzeugwerke, an aircraft manufacturer in Kassel, without having a doctoral degree. To carry out industrial research, she ultimately completed her doctorate at the Technical University of Breslau (today Wrocáaw in Poland) in 1943.36 Previous investigations have shown that social pressure was a more influential factor than gender in determining a scientist’s workplace and area of research. That said, it could also be possible that women, as relative “outsiders” in scientific disciplines, were less reliant on traditional theories and were more willing to apply innovative research methods.37 It is merely a hypothetical question whether science has developed as it has because it was essentially shaped by men and whether women, if only they had had the means and authority, would have produced a different type of science with different theories. We are thus in agreement with Londa Schiebinger, who, in an interview from 2001, qualified her deliber-

36 TOBIES 2008, pp. 115–118. On Flügge-Lotz and Ginzel, see also Chapter 1 of this book. Short biographies of these mathematicians are included in TOBIES 2006, which is available online at https://dmv.mathematik.de/m-die-dmv/m-geschichte.html. For additional information about Flügge-Lotz, see SPREITER 1975; SPREITER/FLÜGGE 1987; VOGT 2000a, pp. 199–204. 37 See ABIR-AM/OUTRAM 1989.

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ately provocative thesis – “women conduct research differently” – in the following terms: In fact, I do not at all believe that women conduct research in a different way. [...] Even the search for a specifically feminine type of knowledge is, in my opinion, a dead end. [...] We have to abandon the idea that women – as a gender – change science. [...] As a biological category, “women” often have no interest whatsoever in altering gender roles. Moreover, those men who are interested in overcoming the gendered divide between “intellectual” and “emotional” types of work in our society are our closest allies.38

Thesis 8 The increasing acknowledgement and acceptance of female inventors and female industrial researchers can be shown by studying their membership in scientific organizations, societies, and associations. The membership of women scientists in scientific societies and associations is discussed in this book as an aspect of patronage, especially in the case of membership in physical societies (see Chapter 5). The first female researchers who were members of electrical engineering institutions are also mentioned (see the Introduction to Part II). At the same time, some professional and academic societies were established exclusively by and for women scientists; Jeffrey Johnson discusses such societies devoted to chemistry in Chapter 7. Reinhard E. Schielecke has recently noted that fifteen women had joined the internationally influential Astronomical Society, which was founded in 1863 in Heidelberg, before the year 1930. Four of these female members came from the United States (among them the famous Margaret Harwood), three from Soviet Union and Germany, and one each from Denmark, France, Hungary, Sweden, and Great Britain. Four additional German women joined before 1945, two in 1935 (among them Dorothea Werner-Starke, who was closely affiliated with the Carl Zeiss Corporation), one in 1937, and one in 1940.39 Ilse Ter Meer, who will be mentioned again below, became the first female member of the Association of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure), which was established in 1856. Regarding scientific societies in Germany, women scientists were accepted earlier on by societies in the fields of mathematics, science, and engineering than they were by societies concerned with economics, history, and disciplines in the humanities. The matter worsens when we look at the most prestigious scientific organization of them all – the Academy of Sciences. With a few extraordinary exceptions, none of the Academies of Sciences in Europe and the United States elected female members before 1945. There were various reasons for this frustrating situation, and these differed from one Academy to the next. However, the argumentation against admitting female members to these organizations, which 38 SCHIEBINGER 2001, p. 30. 39 See SCHIELICKE 2013.

Introduction

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were elite by definition, resembled the nineteenth-century argumentation against allowing women to study at universities, and later that against female lecturers and professors. Some progress was made by the middle of the twentieth century, but even today the women members of Academies of Sciences represent a minority within the minority of women scientists.40 It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Mina Rees’s obituary underscores that, in 1969, she had become the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “Women remained something of a rarity at that level in the scientific community, but she – as Marie Curie, Lisa [sic] Meitner, and Dr. Margaret Mead before her – had proved that scientific creativity was not just for men.”41 Thesis 9 Female researchers in the private sector were better able to reconcile the problems of professional and family life than female scientists at universities. This was possible because certain laws, in Germany and elsewhere, restricted the number of married women scientists who could work at state institutions. In her book Women in Science, Ruth Watts illustrates how the personal circumstances of women have been an important variable in their access (or lack of access) to scientific professions. If a woman scientist intended to have a husband and children, for instance, several barriers would restrict the continuation of her scientific work. Among the careers described by Watts is that of Alice Shewart, a mother and physician who became a consultant for several hospitals in England. Her successful research enabled her to become, in 1946, the first woman elected to the Association of Physicians in Great Britain. Shewart also helped to found the British Journal of Industrial Medicine.42 Helene Pycior and her colleagues, in their 1996 book Creative Couples in the Sciences, were the first to focus on the successful careers of scientists who were spouses. The authors defined “couples in science” as those in which both partners had studied a scientific discipline, received an academic degree, worked together, and published together. Whereas this book showcased a number of highly illustrious couples in science, among them Nobel Prize winners, couples of somewhat less prominence were the focus of For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences, a 2012 anthology of articles edited by Annette Lykknes and 40 On female members of the Academies of Sciences, see VOGT 2000b and 2003. 41 Wolfgang Saxon, “Mina S. Rees, Mathematician and CUNY Leader, Dies at 95,” The New York Times (October 28, 1997). In 2012, the German Chemical Society (Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft) elected its first female president, namely Prof. Dr. Barbara Albert. In the same year, the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft) elected its first female president as well, Prof. Dr. Johanna Stachel. For interviews with these two scientists, see Renate Hoer, “Interviews with Barbara Albert and Johanna Stachel,” in Gelebte Chancengleicheit in der Chemie (Frankfurt: Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, 2013), pp. 10–13. 42 See WATTS 2007.

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others. Both of these volumes have shed light on the role of private life in the careers of women scientists.43 In the more recent of the books, Annette Lykknes and Brigitte van Tiggelen discuss the couple Ida Tacke-Noddack and Walther Noddack, two chemists who became famous for their discovery of new elements.44 After completing her doctorate in chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin in 1919, Ida Tacke worked at the electric company AEG in Berlin for two years. The couple made their most renowned findings, however, while working at the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt) in Berlin, where they enjoyed the support of Otto Berg from Siemens & Halske (see Chapter 5).45 Ida Tacke-Noddack was able to work alongside her husband, but only as an unpaid assistant, and the reason for this situation was the law, which prohibited married women from working for state institutions. If a couple wanted to work successfully in their scientific field, the husband would have to be understanding and supportive of his wife. He had to defend her ambitions and he had to arrange for her to work in his laboratory, unpaid but accepted by the institutional administration. The German provision known as Beamtinnenzölibat (celibacy for female public employees) was first introduced during the period of the German Empire, and it remained in effect until the early 1920s. After the world economic crisis of 1929, the law was reintroduced in May of 1932.46 During these years, educated women typically had to decide between remaining in a profession or starting a family, because most of the secondary schools and all universities in Germany belonged to the civil service.47 A married woman could continue to work scientifically on a freelance basis, however, if her husband was agreeable to this situation; the couple Hertha (née Mark) and William Edward Ayrton is an early example of this in Great Britain (see the Introduction to Part II).48 In the United States, Lillian Moller Gilbreth and her husband – who had twelve children together – is another example of successful scientific collaboration (see Chapter 4). In industrial laboratories and in some of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Germany, couples were likewise able to work together (see Chapter 1). We would also like to mention the physicists Isolde and Wilhelm Hausser, who had a son together. Although the two of them did not work or publish together, both enjoyed highly successful careers and were well-regarded in the scientific community. They each became department directors at different industrial laboratories, she at Telefunken and he at Siemens & Halske (from 1919 to 1929). In 1929, he became the director of the physical institute in the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, and she became the 43 44 45 46 47

See PYCIOR et al. 1996; LYKKNES et al. 2012. See their article in LYKKNES et al. 2012, pp. 103–47. See TILGNER 2000. See VOGT 2007, pp. 136–37. For further discussion of this so-called alternative, see TOBIES 1997, pp. 38–43; TOBIES 2008, pp. 42–49; VOGT 2007, pp. 216–17, 241–42. 48 On Hertha Ayrton, see BYERS/WILLIAMS 2010. On the couple’s work together, see especially JONES 2009.

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head of her own small research department at the same institute (see Chapters 1 and 5). Ilse Ter Meer, another married woman scientist, was employed at Siemens & Halske and conducted significant research. She had completed her studies of mechanical engineering in 1924 at the Technical University of Munich, where she was the first woman ever to earn the degree of Diplom-Ingenieur. A year later, she married Carl Knott, who had completed his doctorate in electrical engineering at the same university. They moved to Aachen, where she worked at her own engineering firm, which made use of her father’s patents to produce specialized machines. When her husband took over a position at Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Berlin in 1929, she was offered a position at Siemens & Halske in Berlin. In the same year, she joined the Women Engineers Society and organized the first meeting of German female engineers, which took place in 1930 at the so-called Weltkraftkonferenz (International Power Congress) in Berlin. This couple in science had two sons, born in 1932 and 1935, and after their birth Ilse Ter Meer continued her scientific work on a freelance basis.49 There were also interesting couples in science who met each other while studying at the University of Göttingen, which for many years was the international hotbed for mathematical and physical research. Among these were the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest and the Russian mathematician Tatiana Afanasieva (see Chapter 11). They married in 1904, and she was able to continue her scientific work as a wife and mother, although it was not in industry. Oskar Heil and Agnesa N. Arsenjeva completed their doctoral theses in physics in Göttingen, he in 1933 and she in 1928. They married in Leningrad in 1934 and then travelled together to England to work with Lord Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Their most influential co-authored article delineated the principles behind high-power, linear-beam microwave electron tubes.50 Later, they continued their work together in Leningrad at the Physical-Chemical Institute, where she remained (or had to remain), while he returned to Great Britain. The Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena, a famous optical company, employed a successful scientific couple beginning in the 1960s: Lieselotte Moenke-Blankenburg and her husband Horst Moenke became famous for developing, together with their team, a laser micro-spectral analyzer. This instrument, which was sold internationally, was rivaled at the time only by a similar device produced in the United States. Lieselotte Moenke carried on in her career despite being a mother of two children (see Chapter 12). The author of the autobiographical Chapter 13, the accomplished architect Gertrud Schille, designed and built planetariums for Zeiss in various countries and on several continents, and she was likewise able to balance her demanding work with the duties of family life. 49 See Klaus Mlynek, “Ilse Ter Mer,” in Stadtlexikon Hannover (Hanover: Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009), pp. 618–19. 50 Agnesa Arsenjewa-Heil and Oskar Heil, “Über eine neue Methode zur Erzeugung kurzer ungedämpfter elektromagnetischer Wellen großer Intensität,” Zeitschrift für Physik 95 (1935), pp. 752–62. See also SAKAR et al. 2006, pp. 340–42.

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Our studies reveal a complex picture of contemporary developments, for they have made it clear that many issues and problems from earlier eras remain current in our own time. Such issues include the debate about women’s role in science and society, the controversy about scientific work versus motherhood, and the question of couples in science. Thesis 10 Finally, it should be stressed that we discovered several women scientists who were engaged in social activism. It seems that it was easier for women in the private sector to participate in such engagement than it was for those working at academic institutions, which operated according to a higher degree of government regulation. Polyxeni Giannapoulu describes in detail the public activism of Greece’s pioneering women scientists, who were active in hospitals and elsewhere (Chapter 3). The applied mathematician Iris Runge became a member of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and she was active in the 1919 election campaign (this was the German first election in which women were allowed to vote). She continued her political activism as an industrial researcher, and during the Nazi era she was one of few German scientists to be engaged in resistance movements.51 Cecile Froehlich became a prominent fighter for women’s rights in education and employment; she was especially active in encouraging more female students to pursue engineering (see Chapter 6). These are just a few essential examples of the types of social and political engagement to which women scientists contributed. It is a subject that is certainly worthy of further investigation. With these ten theses in mind, we would like to state the following: The topic of women scientists in industrial research and other professional settings is a new and in many respects uncharted research field. Many questions remain to be addressed in detail. Margaret Rossiter’s ground-breaking work on women scientists in the United States is still a model for investigations of this topic in other countries. In 1995, she believed that entire industries – “such as aerospace and electronics, as well as management” – were essentially closed to women.52 However, she mentioned two solid-state physicists, Esther Conwell and Betsy Ancker-Johnson, as exceptions in leading management positions.53 Meanwhile, and thanks to case studies made by those in Rossiter’s wake, several women scientists have been identified who were employed in these very sectors. If more and more sources are examined, we are 51 For greater detail, see TOBIES 2012, Section 2.6 and Chapter 4. 52 ROSSITER 1995, p. 256. 53 On Ancker-Johnson, see also Chapter 2.

Introduction

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convinced that even more women scientists will come to light; in any case, it would be a valuable objective on the part of historians to remove the “invisibility” of women in industrial science and technology. To understand more accurately the different conditions for women scientists in various branches of industry and technology and in different countries, more investigations are needed from a comparative perspective. The following questions, in particular, seem to warrant more detailed investigations: When were female researchers first able to enter the industrial workforce in the different sectors and in different countries? We discussed that in German electrical engineering corporations, especially in newly founded communications industry, women were able to hold permanent research positions as early as the Weimar Republic. Careers in other industrial sectors, especially in chemistry, were characterized by the frequent need to change jobs and positions. How did this situation differ from one branch of industry to another and from country to country? We have identified the essential importance of interdisciplinary education and patronage relationships to the success of women’s careers in industrial research. What additional factors helped to promote or hinder a woman’s industrial career, in particular and in general? Is it possible to determine the general conditions required for female researchers to be acknowledged and accepted in various industrial fields? Career changes were often brought about by political circumstances, and this was especially the case with the career paths of women scientists who were born in Germany and had to go into exile with the rise of the Nazi regime. Such women are featured in this book (Hedwig Kohn in Chapter 2, and Cecilie Froehlich in Chapter 6). However, the status of Jews was also endangered in tsarist Russian and by Soviet anti-Semitic politics, as is clear from the example of the nuclear physicist Dora Leipunskaya (Chapter 9). By focusing on the context of Maria Romanova, Peter Bussemer has also elucidated the effects of Stalin’s politics on scientific careers (Chapter 11). It should not be forgotten, too, that female nuclear physicists were concerned about the McCarthy era in the United States (see Chapter 9). In what other ways were scientific careers altered by political events and circumstances? In the case of Germany and the United States, we can claim that it became typical for male and female industrial researchers to apply their talents later as university professors. Was this the case in other countries? Regarding women scientists, to what extent did educational opportunities and employment practices differ between the Eastern and Western countries after the Second World War? Having examined the careers of women researchers in the United States, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and West Germany, we see that one of the most decisive factors was access to university education, followed by the recognition of women’s abilities and their promotion and support by mentors and patrons, as mentioned above. An open question is whether this could be independent of different socio-political conditions. One has to take into account that the number of successful women scientists in industrial research was highly lim-

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ited in the first half of the twentieth century; nevertheless, the success of these women indicates that such careers were possible. This book does not address every sector of industry; moreover, it occasionally focuses on professional arenas beyond the industrial laboratory. We have included, for instance, a section on the history of women’s access to university education in Greece. Here the focus is on a woman scientist who, having studied in Greece and abroad in Germany, managed to achieve high positions in the field of medicine. For a long time, in many parts of the world, women’s participation in the profession of medicine (as physicians, for instance) was significantly restricted, although women’s informal practice of medicine in the role of caregivers, or in the allied health professions, was widespread. Although the history of women physicians in several countries has been written,54 we deemed it fitting here to include recent findings about one of the first women in Greece to work as a medical researcher. This provided an opportunity, moreover, to survey the history of women’s education in Greece. To study the participation of women scientists in the fields of industrial science and technology required the use of a variety of materials. Among the sources scrutinized here are patents for invention, bylines in academic journals (which might reveal industrial affiliations), doctoral dissertations (which can be revealing about industrial support), and last but not least the sources contained in industrial archives. More broadly, it is hoped that this book might help to retire the cliché that women scientists and researcher are almost exotically rare. Scientific activity and creativity have not been restricted to men alone. In 1999, Londa Schiebinger’s titular question – Has Feminism Changed Science? – was as ironic as it was provocative. In the meantime, many more women scientists have come to light, and many more young women have joined scientific disciplines. We would like to encourage even more young women to embark upon such opportunities and thus to follow the example of the bold women scientists before them. Editorial Remarks Each chapter is based on relevant sources from university and industrial archives. We were able to use papers and reports written by female industrial researchers, and we scrutinized the volumes of relevant journals as well as the books and articles edited by several corporations. Thanks to the wealth of information gathered in these publications, we were able to reach new conclusions about various themes. Industrial research often was – and is – cooperative work. We therefore identified male researchers who published together with female researchers. By determining the position of women researchers within the (occasionally opaque) structures of industrial laboratories, we were able to understand more clearly the 54 See ABRAM 1985 (on the United States); FETTE 2007 (on France); and BLEKER/SCHLEIERMACHER 2000 (on Germany).

Introduction

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scope of their scientific contributions and the esteem that they had held among their colleagues. Each chapter of this book is accompanied with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Regarding the footnotes, abbreviations of archival sources appear in [square] brackets, and the names in SMALL CAPITALS refer to secondary literature. Complete bibliographical information is provided in the footnotes for those sources – certain dissertations, for example – that are relevant only within the special context of the chapter. These works are not included in the bibliographies. In the Index of Names at the end of the book, persons are listed alongside their dates of birth and death, their nationalities, and their professions (when appropriate). Bibliography [BBF] Bibliothek für bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung, Archiv, Personaldatenbank. ABIR-AM, Pnina G.; OUTRAM, Dorinda, eds. (1989). Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1798–1979. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ABRAM, Ruth J. (1985). “Send Us a Lady Physician”: Women Doctors in America 1835–1920. New York: Norton. ANDRONIKOW, Fürstin Margarete, geb. Baronesse Wrangell (1930). Self-Portrait. In Führende Frauen Europas. Neue Folge. Ed. Elga Kern. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, pp. 141–151. ANDRONIKOW, Wladimir, ed. (1936). Margarethe von Wrangell. Das Leben einer Frau, 1876– 1932. Aus Tagebüchern, Briefen und Erinnerungen. Munich: Albert Langen/Georg Müller. BEYER, Kurt W. (2009). Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press. BISCHOF, Thomas (2013). Angewandte Mathematik und die Ansätze des mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Frauenstudiums in Thüringen. Master’s Thesis: University of Jena. BLEKER, Johanna; SCHLEIERMACHER, Sabine, eds. (2000). Ärztinnen aus dem Kaiserreich. Lebensläufe einer Generation. Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag. BOOSS-BAVNBEK, Bernhelm; HØYRUP, Jens, eds. (2003). Mathematics and War. Basel: Birkhäuser. BRACKE, Gerhard (2005). Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg. Das Leben einer Fliegerin. Cologne: Komet. BRAUN, Hel (1990). Eine Frau und die Mathematik, 1933–1940. Der Beginn einer wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn. Heidelberg: Springer. BROOME WILLIAMS, Kathleen (2001). Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. BROOME WILLIAMS, Kathleen (2003). “Improbable Warriors: Mathematicians Grace Hopper and Mina Rees in World War II.” In Mathematics and War. Ed. B. Booß-Bavnbeck and J. Hoyrup. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 108–25. BRÜGGENTHIES, Wilhelm; DICK, Wolfgang R. (2005). Biographical Index of Astronomy (Acta Historica Astronomiae 26). Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch. BYERS, Nina; WILLIAMS, Gary, eds. (2010). Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. COSTAS, Ilse (2002). “Women in Science in Germany.” Science in Context 15, pp. 557–76. — (2003). “Diskurs und gesellschaftliche Strukturen im Spannungsfeld von Geschlecht, Macht und Wissenschaft. Ein Erklärungsmodell für den Zugang von Frauen zu akademischen Kar-

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rieren im internationalen Vergleich.” In Frauen Macht Wissenschaft. Wissenschaftlerinnen gestern und heute. Ed. I. Amodeo. Königstein: Taunus, pp. 157–82. CREESE, Mary R. S.; CREESE, Thomas M. (2004). Ladies in the Laboratory II: West European Women in Science, 1800–1900. A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. DASTON, Lorraine (1997). “Die Quantifizierung der weiblichen Intelligenz.” In “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz”. Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Ed. R. Tobies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 69–82. — (1998). “Die Kultur der wissenschaftlichen Objektivität.” In Naturwissenschaft, Geisteswissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft: Einheit – Gegensatz – Komplementarität. Ed. O. G. Oexle. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 9–39. — (2003). “Die wissenschaftliche Persona. Arbeit und Berufung.” In Zwischen Vorderbühne und Hinterbühne. Beiträge zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen in der Wissenschaft vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. T. Wobbe. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 109–36. DASTON, Lorraine; SIBUM, Otto, eds. (2003). Scientific Personae (Science in Context 16.1–2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [a special issue of Science in Context]. DASTON, Lorraine; GALISON, Peter (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. DOBBIN, Muriel: “Woman Wing Designer.” The Baltimore Sun. July 13, 1958, p. 5. FETTE, Julie (2007). “Pride and Prejudice in the Professions: Women Doctors and Lawyers in Third Republic France.” Journal of Women’s History 19.3, pp. 60–86. FORSTNER, Christian; HOFFMANN, Dieter, eds. (2013). Physik im Kalten Krieg. Beiträge zur Physikgeschichte während des Ost-West-Konflikts. Wiesbaden: Springer Spektrum. FRY, Thornton C. (1964). “Mathematicians in Industry: The First 75 Years.” Science 143, pp. 934– 38. HIBNER-KOBLITZ, Ann (1983). A Convergence of Lives. Sofja Kovalevskaia: Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary. Boston: Birkhäuser. JOHNSON, Jeffrey (1998). “German Women in Chemistry, 1895–1925,” and “German Women in Chemistry, 1925–1945.” NTM-International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine 6, pp. 1–21, 65–90. JONES, Claire G. (2009). Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880–1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. KEVLES, Daniel (1979). “The Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry Communities: A Comparative Analysis.” In The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920. Ed. A. Oleson and J. Voss. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 139–72. KOJEVNIKOV, Alexei (2004). Stalin’s Great Science: The Time and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. London: Imperial College Press. LYKKNES, Annette; OPITZ, Donald L.; VAN TIGGELEN, Brigitte, eds. (2012). For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences. Basel: Springer. OECHTERING, Veronika (2001). Frauen in der Geschichte der Informatik (Booklet and CD-ROM). Bremen: Universität. OFFEREINS, Marianne (2011). “Margarete von Wrangell.” European Women in Chemistry. Ed. J. Apotheker and L. S. Sarkadi. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, pp. 55–58. OGILVIE, Marilyn; HARVEY, Joy, eds. (2000). The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century. 2 vols. New York: Routledge. OLDENZIEL, Ruth (1999). Making Technology Masculine: Women, Men, and the Machine in America, 1880–1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. OLDENZIEL, Ruth; CANEL, Annie; ZACHMANN, Karin, eds. (2000). Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s–1990s. London: Harwood. OLDENZIEL, Ruth; Zachmann, Karin, eds. (2009). Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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PIEPER-SEIER, Irene (2008). “Ruth Moufang. Mathematikerin zwischen Universität und Industrie.” In “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz”. Frauen in Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik. Ed. R. Tobies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 177–203. POKORNY, Rita (2003). Die Rationalisierungsexpertin Irene M. Witte (1894–1976): Biografie einer Grenzgängerin. Doctoral Dissertation: TU Berlin. PYCIOR, Helena M.; SLACK, Nancy G.; ABIR-AM, Pnina G., eds. (1996). Creative Couples in the Sciences. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. RADTKE, Stephanie (2005). “Ruth Moufang als Industriemathematikerin – 1937 bis 1946.” In Aus der Geschichte der Frankfurter Mathematik. Festschrift zu den 100. Geburtstagen von Ruth Moufang, Gottfried Köthe, Wolfgang Franz. Ed. W. Schwarz. Frankfurt: Universitätsarchiv, pp. 173–86. RAE, John (1979). “The Application of Science to Industry.” In The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920. Ed. A. Oleson and J. Voss. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 249–68. ROSSITER, Margaret W. (1982). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. — (1995). Women Scientists in America. Vol. 2: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. SAKAR, Tapan K.; MAILLOUX, Robert; OLINER, Arthur A.; SALAZAR-PALMA, Magdalena; SENGUPTA, Dipak L. (2006). History of Wireless. United Kingdom: Wiley-IEEE Press. SCHIEBINGER, Londa (1999). Has Feminism Changed Science? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (2000). Frauen forschen anders. Wie weiblich ist die Wissenschaft? Munich: Beck. — (2001). “Feministinnen verändern die Forschung (Interview).” natur & kosmos. April issue, p. 30. SCHIELECKE, Reinhard E. (2013). Die Astronomische Gesellschaft und ihre Mitglieder. Hamburg: Astronomische Gesellschaft. SHELL-GELLASCH, Amy (2002). “Mina Rees and the Funding of the Mathematical Sciences.” The American Mathematical Monthly 109, pp. 873–89. — (2011). In Service to Mathematics: The Life and Work of Mina Rees. Boston: Docent Press. SIEGMUND-SCHULTZE, Reinhard (2001). Rockefeller and the Internationalization of Mathematics between the Two World Wars: Documents and Studies for the Social History of Mathematics in the 20th Century. Basel: Birkhäuser. — (2009). Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact. Princeton: Princeton University Press SIMPSON, Jeffrey (1988). Spoils of Power: The Politics of Patronage. Toronto: Collins. SINGER, Sandra L. (2003). Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868–1915 (Contributions in Women’s Studies 201). London: Praeger. SPREITER, John R. et al (1975). “In Memoriam: Irmgard Flügge-Lotz, 1903–1974.” IEEE, Transactions on Automatic Control, AC-20, 2, pp. 183a–183b. SPREITER, John R.; FLÜGGE, Wilhelm (1987). “Irmgard Flügge-Lotz (1903–1974).” In Women of Mathematics: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook. Ed. L. S. Grinstein and P. J. Campbell. London: Greenwood, pp. 33–40. TILGNER, Hans-Georg (2000): Forschen – Suche und Sucht. Kein Nobelpreis für das deutsche Forscherehepaar, das Rhenium entdeckt hat. Eine Biografie von Walter Noddack und Ida Noddack-Tacke. Norderstedt: Books on Demand. TOBIES, Renate ed. (1997). “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz”. Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Campus. — (1999). “Felix Klein und David Hilbert als Förderer von Frauen in der Mathematik.” Prague Studies in the History of Science and Technology 3, pp. 69–101.

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— (2006). Biographisches Lexikon in Mathematik promovierter Personen an deutschen Universitäten und Technischen Hochschulen WS 1907/08 bis WS 1944/45 (Algorismus. Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften 58). Augsburg: Rauner. — ed. (2008). “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz”. Frauen in Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik. Frankfurt: Campus. — (2011). “Career Paths in Mathematics: A Comparison between Women and Men.” In Foundations of the Formal Sciences VII: Bringing together Philosophy and Sociology of Science (Studies in Logic 32). Ed. K. François, B. Löwe, T. Müller, and B. Van Kerkhove. Lightning Source: Milton Keynes, pp. 229–42. — (2012). Iris Runge: A Life at the Crossroads of Mathematics, Science, and Industry (Science Networks/Historical Studies 43) Trans. Valentine A. Pakis. Basel: Birkhäuser. — (2012a). “German Graduates in Mathematics in the First Half of the 20th Century: Biographies and Prosopography.” In Les uns et les autres… Biographies et prosopographies en histoire des sciences (Collection Histoire des Institutions Scientifiques). Ed. L. Rollet and P. Nabonnand. Nancy: Presses Universitaires, pp. 387–407. TOLLMIEN, Cordula (1997). “Zwei erste Promotionen. Die Mathematikerin Sofja Kowalewskaja und die Chemikerin Julia Lermontowa, mit Dokumentation der Promotionsunterlagen.” In “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz”. Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Ed. R. Tobies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 83–130. TURNER, Gerard L’E., ed. (1976). The Patronage of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Science in History 1). Leyden: Noordhoff. VARE, Ethlie Ann; PTACEK, Greg (1988). Mothers of Invention: From the Bra to the Bomb. Forgotten Women and Their Unforgettable Ideas. New York: Morrow. — (1993). Women Inventors and Their Discoveries. Minneapolis: The Oliver Press. — (2002). Patently Female: From AZT to TV Dinners, Stories of Women Inventors. New York: John Wiley & Son. VOGT, Annette (2000a). “Women in Army Research: Ambivalent Careers in Nazi Germany.” In Crossing Boundaries Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s– 1990. Ed. R. Oldenziel, A. Canel, and K. Zachmann. Amsterdam: Harwood, pp. 189–209. — (2000b). Women Members of the Academies of Science: A Comparative Study with Special Consideration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, 1912–1945 (Preprint 155). Berlin: MPI for History of Science. — (2003). “Von der Ausnahme zur Normalität? – Wissenschaftlerinnen in Akademien und in der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 1912–1945.” In Zwischen Vorderbühne und Hinterbühne. Beiträge zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen in der Wissenschaft vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. T. Wobbe. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 159–88. — (2004). “Women Scholars at German Universities – Or, Why Did this Story Start so Late?" In Women Scholars and Institutions: Proceedings of the International Conference, Prague, June 8–11, 2003. Ed. S. Strbanova, I. H. Stamhuis, and K. Mojsejova. Prague: Vyzkummne centrum pro dejiny vedy, vol. 1, pp. 159–86. — (2007). Vom Hintereingang zum Hauptportal? Lise Meitner und ihre Kolleginnen an der Berliner Universität und in der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner. — (2008). Wissenschaftlerinnen in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten A-Z. Berlin: Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. VOSS, Waltraud (2014, forthcoming). “Lieselott Herforth (1916–2010). Die bemerkenswerte Karriere einer Physikerin in der DDR. ” Mathematik und Anwendungen. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. M. Fothe, A. Jantowski, M. Schmitz, and R. Tobies. Bad Berka: Thillm. WATTS, Ruth (2007). Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History. London: Routledge. ZACHMANN, Karin (2004). Mobilisierung der Frauen. Technik, Geschlecht und Kalter Krieg in der DDR. Frankfurt: Campus.

PART I

LINKS BETWEEN ACADEMIC AND NON-ACADEMIC PROFESSIONS Renate Tobies, Annette Vogt, and Brenda Winnewisser In Thesis 3 of our introductory chapter, we mentioned the relationships that existed between academic and industrial institutions, and the various opportunities for women scientists to work in both settings. The chapters constituting Part I of this book address three fundamental aspects of this research topic. Central to Chapter 1 is the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Germany. This institution, which today is the Max Planck Society, was founded in 1911 and financed by both public and private means. Annette Vogt elucidates the working conditions and employment opportunities that women researchers had experienced at a number of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, and she compares them to the conditions and opportunities that had prevailed at private industrial laboratories. Moreover, by examining the careers of women who had earned doctorates in physics or chemistry from the University of Berlin, she is able to measure the extent to which it was possible for women researchers to move from one professional sphere to another (and sometimes back again). The chapter concludes with a historical analysis of patent procedures and applications that sheds new light on the contributions of women scientists. Chapter 2 concerns the cooperation between an academic institution and an industrial corporation in the case of Hedwig Kohn, who was one of only three women to complete a post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) in physics in Germany before the Second World War. Brenda Winnewisser, who is preparing a comprehensive biography of Kohn, analyzes newly discovered sources concerning an informal collaboration between the Department of Physics at the University of Breslau, where Kohn was employed, and the laboratories of Siemens & Halske in Berlin. An examination of archived correspondence reveals some of the essential features of the relationship between academy and industry. First, although these two sectors frequently worked together, there was also a great deal of competition between them. Second, the esteem that Kohn had earned early in her career as an industrial researcher came to her aid during troubled times. Having been expelled from her university position on account of Nazi policies, she was nevertheless

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able to continue working in her department as an external contractor for the OSRAM Corporation. Kohn’s example demonstrates that, as regards vulnerable researchers (women and men alike), industrial firms reacted more leniently to Nazi racial policies than did state-run institutions. Chapter 3, which is especially valuable for comparative purposes, is devoted to the first Greek woman to obtain a doctoral degree in medicine. Poly Giannakopoulou, who completed her doctoral thesis on this subject in 2013, provides an investigation of the professional careers of Angeliki Panagiotatou and other women scientists. She also outlines the history women’s education in Greece; regarding higher education, women were first granted access to the University of Athens in 1890. Although Panagiotatou had earned a doctoral degree, she could initially find employment only as a school teacher. It was Panagiotatou’s decision to go abroad that launched her career as a researcher. She managed to become a renowned microbiologist with positions at hospitals in Egypt and France. Because of her international success, she was ultimately able to re-enter academia as a full professor at the University of Athens.

1 WOMEN SCIENTISTS WITH DIFFERENT LABORATORY PRACTICES: TRANSITIONING FROM THE KAISER WILHELM SOCIETY TO INDUSTRIAL LABORATORIES, AND VICE VERSA Annette B. Vogt In the history of science, some progress has been made toward a deeper understanding of the role of various laboratory practices and instrument making (for instance, in chemistry and microbiology, in physics and technology) and the role of women scientists related to this development. We still have open questions about the situation of women scientists in different laboratories, in the world of academia, as well as in industrial research units. Further investigations are necessary concerning the boundaries and the various degrees of openness related to women scientists in these laboratories, on their achievements, and about the acknowledgement and recognition they received. Here my focus will be on the situation of women scientists in Germany who were employed at the scientific institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (from 1912 to 1945) and, before or after their appointment, in different laboratories of industrial research. First, I will summarize the situation of women scientists at the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) and discuss the differences and similarities of their basic working conditions in academic and industrial research. Second, I will describe the sample of the eighteen women scientists who were employed in laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society as well as in different industrial research laboratories. My primary questions will be: How open were the different types of laboratories to female colleagues? How easy or how complicated was it to move from one sphere to another, i.e., from industry to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI), and vice versa? Finally, I will discuss the practice of acquiring patents for inventions as an additional source with which to examine different laboratory practices and the role of women scientists and engineers in industrial research laboratories. 1.1 The Kaiser Wilhelm Society and Its Relative Openness to Female Scientists In 1911, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft) was founded in Berlin, and its first institutes were opened as early as 1912.1 The KWG represented a completely new type of the scientific organization in Germany. It was a research organization with independent units – the KWIs – and it was financed by governmental institutions (various ministries) and private sources. The structure was hierarchical. The society was headed by a President and the Senate, and the directors of the several KWIs and their so-called “scientific members” constituted the top-level management body. The institutes were established in 1

See VIERHAUS/VOM BROCKE 1990.

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different fields of science and quickly obtained a national and international reputation. The directors and the scientific members were able to work under outstanding conditions. The conditions for other scientific positions at the KWIs, which were mostly temporary, were in principle the same for both men and women. Furthermore, in contrast to the situation at the universities and other government (state) agencies, the salaries of women and men scientists were usually the same, at least until 1933.2 Nevertheless, men tended to advance more quickly through the ranks. In twenty-seven of the forty-one institutes of the KWG, I was able to identify 254 women scientists who were employed in a variety of positions between 1912 and 1945. From 1914 until 1945, three women scientists were official scientific members of a KWI, namely the physicist Lise Meitner, the neurologist Cécile Vogt, and the physicist Isolde Hausser.3 Altogether, thirteen women directed a department within a KWI.4 Among these were the three physicists Lise Meitner, Gerda Laski, and Isolde Hausser; four chemists and four scientists in biologicalmedical fields (three physicians and one biologist); one mathematician, Irmgard Flügge-Lotz; and one specialist in juridical science, Marguerite Wolff. Most of these women scientists, even the department directors and scientific members, have received little if any historical attention, although some of their positions were comparable to an associate (außerordentlicher) professorship at a German university or to full membership in the Academy of Science.5 The first institutes of the KWG were established as research institutes for chemistry and biology. Later, some institutes were founded for special fields with a stronger orientation toward technology; these included the Institute for Fiber Research (Faserstofforschung) in Berlin, the Institute for Silicate Research (Silikatforschung), the Institute for Leather Research (Lederforschung) in Dresden, and Institutes for Metal Research in Düsseldorf and for Coal Research in Mühlheim an der Ruhr. One could assume to find women scientists who were working in industry and later in one of the KWIs, or vice versa, especially in those KWIs with more practical research orientation, but this was not the case. Whereas women scientists are known to have worked at the institutes for fiber research, chemistry, and silicate and leather research, no women scientists were employed at the institutes for metal research and coal research until World War II. At another institute, the KWI for Fluid Mechanics (Strömungsforschung) in Göttingen, which was established in 1924, women scientists were hired with greater frequency. This institute included an aerodynamics research laboratory (Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt, AVA), which separated from the KWI in 1937, but the close connection between the lab and the KWI was able to continue. In April of 1945, this KWI 2 3 4 5

A more detailed discussion of this topic can be found in VOGT 2007. For biographical entries and secondary literature on each of these 254 women scientists, see VOGT 2008a. On Lise Meitner, see especially SIME 1997. See VOGT 2008b. See VIERHAUS/VOM BROCKE 1990 and VOM BROCKE/LAITKO 1996, in which there are no references to female department directors.

1 Women Scientists with Different Laboratory Practices

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was closed by the American allied forces. The new British allied forces took over the institute’s facilities and reopened it as a research institution in 1946. Both Ludwig Prandtl, the director of the institute and one of the few well-known specialists in fluid dynamics, and Albert Betz, the head of the aerodynamics lab and a pioneer in wind turbine technology, were welcoming to female researchers. 1.2 Academic and Industrial Research – How Different Were (Are) They? In the early twentieth century, most of the existing research laboratories were relatively small units with only a few assistants, some guests and students, and two to three people who worked as technicians, especially to construct scientific instruments for special uses. It is possible to distinguish at least five types of scientific laboratories: (1) Academic laboratories: Laboratories at universities, technical universities, and agricultural colleges. These laboratories were primarily used for all kinds of teaching activities, for practical training, and for the research of professors, Privatdozenten (non-professors holding a post-doctoral degree), and doctoral students. (2) Laboratories at state institutions outside of the university system: Such as the Imperial Institute for Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, PTR), the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, many other organization of a similar sort (especially the numerous aviation research institutes established since the 1930s), and last but not least the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Here the focus of the work was determined by research, with only minor attention paid to practical training and the preparation of dissertations; typically, these laboratories were used exclusively for research purposes. (3) Industrial laboratories: These existed at several firms, companies, enterprises, trusts, and corporations in the electrical, communications, optical, and steel industries (etc.). Needless to say, these laboratories were designed for conducting research on the main products under development at the corporations in question. (4) Private laboratories for research and teaching: In Berlin alone, more than thirty of such laboratories existed during the nineteen and early-twentieth centuries, and the research conducted at them was occasionally of great significance.6 (5) Private laboratories for special investigations and analyses: Laboratories devoted to nutrition, medical research, among other things, belong in this category. Here it is relevant to single out one of the private laboratories, because it features elsewhere in the present book (see Chapter 5). In 1891, Carl Friedheim and Arthur Rosenheim established a chemistry laboratory (Wissenschaftlich-chemisches Laboratorium), which was mostly privately funded. Both chemists were Privatdozenten at the University of Berlin. When Friedheim became a professor at the University of Bern in 1897, Richard Joseph Meyer joined as the director of the 6

On these thirty laboratories, see ENGEL 1996, pp.161–207.

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laboratory, where he and Rosenheim supervised many male and female doctoral students. It was in this laboratory that the first female doctoral student at the University of Berlin, the physicist Elsa Neumann (“Berlin’s first Miss Doctor,” as the newspapers called her in February of 1899), was given the chance to conduct independent research.7 As a woman, she had no opportunity to pursue an academic career at any state institution, but thanks to her family’s wealth she was able to become an independent scholar. The lab was highly esteemed in the world of academia, but in 1933 it was forced to close for political reasons.8 If we compare the different types of laboratories, those found in non-university academic institutions and those associated with industrial firms seem the most similar. Both types were used almost exclusively for research purposes, that is, they both had little to do with teaching and practical training. It would therefore be reasonable to hypothesize that it had been relatively easy and uncomplicated for a researcher to transfer between these two laboratory settings. Although such laboratories were housed in different types of academic and non-academic institutions, and they were financed either privately or by the state, their organizational structures were nearly the same. Both types of laboratories were hierarchical (as mentioned above with respect to the KWG), and both offered similar types of employment (for men and women alike). A typical employment structure consisted of the following positions: (1) department or lab director (usually a man); (2) research assistants, sometimes a librarian; (3) scientific researchers, typically with doctoral degrees; (4) technical or laboratory assistants; (5) doctoral students; (6) undergraduate students, at least at university laboratories; and (7) visiting researchers financed by fellowships or grants. This basic structure could be found in most of the laboratories. Of course, there were differences in employee pay, in the degree of openness to foreign and female colleagues, in publication practices, and in the initiative taken (or not taken) to receive patents for inventions. 1.3 Female Physicists and Chemists, and Their Career Opportunities As mentioned above, the physicist Elsa Neumann was the first women to receive a doctoral degree from the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Berlin. As part of a long-term study of the doctoral students at the University of Berlin’s Philosophical Faculty between 1899 and 1945, I analyzed the female doctoral students in the scientific fields.9 From 1899 to 1945, there was a total of forty-nine women students who completed a dissertation in physics (see Table 1.1).

7 8 9

See VOGT 1999. See ENGEL 1996, p. 201. VOGT 2007; on female physicists in particular, see VOGT 2000a.

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Table 1.1: Women with a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Berlin10 Period

Physics

Experimental Physics

Theoretical Physics

Geophysics

Philosophy of Physics

Faculty of Philosophy, from 1899 to 1936 (40 PhDs) 1899–1908 1909–1918 1919–1932 1933–1936 ™

1 1 1 3 6

5 19 6 30

1 1 2

1 1 1

1

Faculty of Mathematics and Sciences, from 1936 to 1945 (9 PhDs) 1936–1945

8

1

Among the forty-nine women physicists, twenty-two were able to continue to work as scientists, fourteen at universities or at a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and eight in several industrial laboratories (see Table 1.2). Five of these twenty-two scientists got married. Because of the Nazi regime, eight were forced to leave Germany; two achieved positions at universities in exile. One of the women, Marie Wreschner, became a victim of Nazi persecution.11 Table 1.2: Female Physicists from Berlin at Industrial Corporations Name Isolde Ganswindt (married Hausser)

Year of doctorate 1914

Hildegard Miething

Industrial Affiliation

Other Positions

Telefunken 1914–1929

KWI for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Scientific Member 1929–1951

Telefunken 1918–1921 Siemens & Halske 1921–1950

Ellen Lax

1919

OSRAM 1919–1936

Hildegard Salbach

1922

AEG 1917–1919

10 For further details, see VOGT 2007, 2000a. 11 See VOGT 2008a, pp. 218–20.

Springer publishing house 1937–1945, 1950–1965; (Humboldt) University of Berlin 1946–1950

32 Name Henny Cohn12

Annette B. Vogt Year of doctorate 1928

Edel-Agathe Neumann

1930

Dora Badt (Dodo Liebmann)13 married Liebmann Martha Heitzmann14

1934 1942

Industrial Affiliation

Other Positions

Dr. Erich Huth AG 1924, head of department 1928; Telefunken; Philips Eindhoven 1935; Telefunken's forced laborer AEG 1930–1932 Radio AG D.S. Loewe 1934 in Berlin and London Radio AG D.S. Loewe ca. 1934 Berlin and Great Britain 1937 Telefunken 1938

United States, 1945–1950

Techn. University Berlin, Heinrich Hertz Institute 1932–1933,

Table 1.3: Women with a Doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Berlin15 Period 1899–1908 1909–1918 1919–1932 1933–1936 1936–1945 ™

Chemistry 2 27 99 19 28 175

If we compare the field of physics with that of chemistry, we find several differences.16 Between 1899 and 1945, a total of 175 female students received a doctoral degree with a dissertation in chemistry (organic chemistry, inorganic chem12 Henriette (Henny) Cohn fled to the Netherlands in 1935 and found a job at Philips. In 1942, she became a member of the so-called SOBU group (Dutch abbreviation for Special Assignments Office, a branch of Philips’s electronics company in Eindhoven set up especially for Jewish employees). Having such a specialized position meant that, for the time being, these employees were exempt from deportation. After a period of internment in the Vught concentration camp, Cohn had to work as a forced laborer for the production of radio tubes, ultimately for the Telefunken Corporation in Reichenbach (beginning in August 1944). She survived and emigrated to the United States (see KOKER 2012, p. 332). 13 See Dodo Liebmann’s memoire, We Kept Our Heads: Personal Memories of Being Jewish in Nazi Germany and Making a New Home in England (1976/1993). This memoire is kept at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In it, Liebmann describes her life in Germany, her membership in the Communist Party, her emigration to England, her classification as a wartime alien, her internment on the Isle of Man, the end of the war, her work in physics, and the restitution she received from Germany. See also FREIDENREICH 2002, pp. 35, 61, 70, 158, 265. 14 As of February of 2013, Martha Heitzmann was still living in Braunschweig, Germany; see Physikalische Blätter 53 (2013), issue 1. 15 Based on VOGT 2007. 16 On female chemists in Germany, see also Jeffrey A. Johnson’s contribution (Chapter 7).

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istry, biochemistry, pharmaceutics, and chemical technology). Many female chemists went on to work in small laboratories, and thus in only thirty-three cases has it been possible to reconstruct their career paths. Eighteen of those thirty-three were employed by universities or at a KWI, and fifteen of them were able to join industrial research laboratories. Like female physicists, eight female chemists had to go into exile because of the Nazi regime. Table 1.4: Female Chemists from Berlin at Industrial Corporations Name Elsa Hirschberg (married Pollok) Marianne Pieck

Year of doctorate 1910

Industrial Affiliation Rütgerswerke

1916

Gertrud Wilcke (married Pietsch) Johanna Heilmann

1925

Frieda Goldschmidt

1927

Irene Neuberg (married Roberts; married Forrest) Gerda Nordon (married Hammer)

1932

1926

1935

Other Positions

Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal Kautschuk Contributor to Gmelin’s Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry, as of 1925 Schering Corporation Assistant at Chem. Institute, Univ. of Berlin; Siff institute; Weizmann institute in Rehovot (Israel) KWI Biochemistry, 1930–1933; Paris 1933; New York 1935 Her father’s factory Nordheim, 1932

Luise Holzapfel

1936

Annemarie Meyer

1941

Industrial Corporation, 1934

Elisabeth Tuschen

1945, Jan. 16

Pharmaceutical Company Boehringer, 1944

Shanghai 1939; Australia

Assistant Univ. of Berlin, post doctoral degree (Habilitation) 1943; KWI Silicate Research 1939–62, head of dept. 1942; Techn. Univ. of Berlin 1950

One can see that only a few women physicists and women chemists were working at a given time in one of the KWIs. The question that remains is why so few women physicists and chemists transferred from one research environment to another, for instance between industrial laboratories and the KWIs.

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1.4 Women Scientists in KWIs and in Industrial Laboratories: Transferring from a KWI to Industry and from Industry to a KWI There were forty-one Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes between 1912 and 1945, and fourteen of them did not employ any women at all. At the twenty-seven KWIs that did, a total of 254 women scientists was employed at various times and in various positions. Fourteen of the forty-one KWIs had no relation to industrial research. Thus there were few KWIs that afforded the possibility of transferring to an industrial laboratory and of profiting from different laboratory practices. Before we describe the sample of those women scientists who made such a transfer, we first have to discuss the basic commonalities and differences in the research that was conducted at the KWIs and in industrial settings. At least eight issues need to be considered when making such a comparison. First, there is the matter of different types of research, often described as the difference between pure and applied science. Second, one has to analyze the organization of labor; small research groups were typical, and team work was favored. Third, one has to take into account the different financial situations, for there were state-funded laboratories and privately funded laboratories in both spheres. Fourth, the state exerted only a minimal influence over the research practices both in industrial laboratories and at the KWG. Fifth, both environments were characterized by a hierarchical structure throughout the whole period. The so-called “Harnack principle” at the KWG became synonymous for this hierarchical structure and the principle of patronage. Sixth, similarities also existed in the kinds of employment available; although there were few permanent positions, in reality many assistants were employed for the long term. It can be shown that the salaries in industry were much higher than at the KWIs, and there was no social security in the sense of today. Seventh, there were some differences in publication practices; at the KWIs, scientists were expected to publish their results in the most acknowledged journals, whereas several industrial corporations had in-house journals of their own (one also has to take into account the various policies for patenting inventions). Eighth and finally, the research conducted at the KWIs was highly esteemed by the broader scientific community, far more so than that conducted in industrial laboratories, but industrial researchers were nevertheless more generously compensated for their work. Between the 1920s and 1945, eighteen women scientists moved from a KWI to an industrial laboratory, or vice versa. Two of these scientists transferred twice. The 18 women scientists in question were educated in the following disciplines: chemistry physics aerodynamics

9 3 4

chemistry & medicine biochemistry

1 1

Among these women scientists, three were department directors (Flügge-Lotz, Frölich, and Hausser). Different reasons – specific circumstances in each case – determined their change of work place from industry to a KWI or vice versa.

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Twelve women transferred from a KWI to an industrial laboratory: Bülow, Fränz, Ginzel, Herbeck, Heumann, Jagla, Deodata Krüger, Oppenheimer, Rhode, Gertrud Stein, Tolksdorf, and Johanna Weber. Six women moved in the other direction, namely Frölich, Flügge-Lotz, Gysae, I. Hausser, Knoevenagel, and Gerda von Krüger. Only one woman, the aerodynamics researcher Johanna Weber, transferred from industry to a KWI and back to industry again. A specialist in aerodynamics, Margot Herbeck, made this move in reverse, that is, from a KWI to industry and back (and later to the Max Planck Institute). Given the situation at the University of Berlin between 1899 and 1945, it is not surprising that chemistry was the field best represented; ten of these eighteen scientists were chemists. The field of aerodynamics is relatively well-represented because of the KWI for Fluid Mechanics and Ludwig Prandtl’s role as a patron of female scientists. For instance, he strongly supported the career of Irmgard Lotz, who solved an especially complex equation pertaining to wing lift distribution (called, in 1931, the Lotz Method). After that she was made the leader of a research team. In 1936, when a Handbook of the KWG was published, twenty-eight assistants were officially employed at the KWI for Fluid Mechanics. Among these there were only a few women, but they were prominent researchers, particularly the aforementioned Lotz (later named Flügge-Lotz) and Margot Herbeck.17 The mathematicians Flügge-Lotz, who had earned a doctorate in applied mathematics at the Technical University of Hanover, and Ingeborg Ginzel, who completed a doctorate in topology at the Technical University of Dresden (see Table 1.5), worked together at this institution and co-authored an article that was influential for many years.18 As mentioned above, the physicist Margot Herbeck was the only woman scientist of the eighteen to move from a KWI to industry and back to the same KWI. After completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Göttingen in 1934, she became an employee at the AVA (see Table 1.5), where she stayed until leaving for AEG in Berlin in 1937. In March of 1938, Herbeck admittedly joined a Nazi organization for women in higher education, but she never became a member of the Nazi Party.19 From 1937 until April 30, 1945, she worked in a laboratory of the electrical engineering corporation AEG in Berlin. In May of 1945, she trav17 See Handbuch der KWG (Berlin, 1936), vol. 1, p.157. I am indebted to Renate Tobies for providing me with information about Herbeck (see also VOGT 2008a). Herbeck’s doctoral thesis, “Schallgeschwindigkeit in verdünnten wässerigen Lösungen von Gasen und Säuren” [“The Speed of Sound in Diluted Aqueous Solution of Gases and Acids”], which she completed at the University of Göttingen and published in 1936, was an important contribution to the field of fluid dynamics. On the KWG during the Nazi era, see MAIER 2002, 2007; on the KWI for Fluid Mechanics during the same period, see especially EPPLE 2002. 18 Irmgard Flügge-Lotz and Ingeborg Ginzel, “Die ebene Strömung um ein geknicktes Profil mit Spalt,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Luftfahrtforschung 1 (1939), pp. 55–66; reprinted in Ingenieur-Archiv 11 (1940), pp. 268–292. For Henry Görtler’s evaluation of this article, see WALTHER 1948, pp. 20–21. 19 See the records of the “Hochschulgemeinschaft Deutscher Frauen in der NS Studentenkampfhilfe des NS-Studentenbundes der NSDAP” (dated March 1, 1938) at the [Bundesarchiv Koblenz], Außenstelle Berlin: Herbeck File.

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elled to Göttingen, where she worked from October of that year until September of 1947 for the Royal Air Force Research Branch. From 1947 until her retirement in 1974, she was employed by the KWI and the Max Planck Institute for Fluid Mechanics. Her main scientific interest was in the field of technical physics (she was a member of the German Society for Technical Physics, which was founded in 1918). She was also engaged in women’s issues; as late as 1971, for instance, she participated in the 17th Triennial Conference of the Women’s Academic Society in Philadelphia.20 Only a few women engineers were employed at the KWG between 1912 and 1945. In fact, women engineers can be considered a special minority among the minority of women scientists.21 Moreover, among the 254 women scientists who worked at a KWI during these years, only four had completed their doctorates at a Technical University, namely the chemists Deodata Krüger and Maria Heckter, the physicist Maria Heyden, and the mathematician Irmgard Flügge-Lotz. Deodata Krüger completed her doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin (Charlottenburg) in 1923.22 From 1928 until 1933 she had an unpaid position at the KWI for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin (Dahlem), the well-known institute under the leadership of Fritz Haber. She published numerous significant articles, often together with her colleagues, for example with the mathematician Helmut Grunsky or with the colloid chemist Herbert Freundlich. Their work also appeared in British and American journals.23 Diffusion problems, one of Krüger’s focuses, were important for several industrial processes. When Haber had to go into exile because of the anti-Semitic politics of the Nazi regime, the whole institute was changed, and most of the scientific assistants lost their jobs, Krüger included. In 1936, however, she was able to continue her scientific work at the KWI for Silicate Research. Two years later, Krüger joined the laboratory of “Sächsische Zellwolle” (“Saxon Rayon”), and she also maintained a professional affiliation with the Technical University of Berlin (Charlottenburg), as she noted in an article in 1941. Unfortunately, she was caught in crossfire while travelling to Berlin, and died on April 15, 1945. 20 Her participation in this conference is noted in the Chronik des Stadtarchivs Göttingen (1971). 21 On women engineers at the KWG, see VOGT 2000b. 22 See BOEDEKER 1939, No.1159. On women students at the Technical University of Berlin, see DUDEN/EBERT 1979. 23 See Helmut Grunsky and Deodata Krüger, “Über die Diffusion von Stoffen, die Abweichungen vom Fickschen Gesetz zeigen,” Zeitschrift für physikalisch Chemie (A) 150 (1930), pp. 115–34; Helmut Grunsky and Deodata Krüger, “Über einige Fälle anomaler Diffusion,” Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie (A) (1934) 170, pp. 161–71; Herbert Freundlich and Deodata Krüger, “Anomalous Diffusion in True Solution,” Transactions of the Faraday Society 31 (1935), pp. 906–13; and Herbert Freundlich and Deodata Krüger, “Anomalous Diffusion of Quinone in Salt Solutions,” The Journal of Physical Chemistry (B) 43 (1939), pp. 981–88. For additional publications by Krüger, see POGG., vols. 6 and 7. As late as 1949, Krüger published a book with Oskar Pfeiffer, namely Beiträge zur Oxydation von Cellulose mit Stickstoffdioxyd (Berlin: Verlag Chemie). On Herbeck, Krüger, and other women who contributed to military research, see also VOGT 2000b.

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Table 1.5: Women Scientists between Industry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society24 Margarete Bülow, chemist; 1928–36 DFA (KWI) Munich, 1936–67 Tropon-Werke Cologne. Irmgard Flügge-Lotz, mathematician, aerodynamist, 1929–38 KWI Fluid Mechanics Göttingen, 1938–45 consultant Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt Berlin-Adlershof; 1945–48 near Paris; 1948–74 Stanford University (USA), 1961 full professor. Ilse Fränz, physicist (diploma degree); 1940–47 KWI Physics, 1948–55 Argentina, 1956 Telefunken Germany. Anna-Charlotte Frölich, chemist, 1934–40 DEGUSSA, 1940–43 KWI, Head of department, 1943–45 University of Göttingen, later Frankfurt am Main. Ingeborg Ginzel25, mathematician, aerodynamist; 1929–1935 teacher, 1937 Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) Göttingen, 1949 Admiralty Research Laboratory Teddington near London; 1953 Senior Researcher at Glenn L. Martin Company, Baltimore (USA). Brigitte Gysae, physicist; 1931–39 OSRAM, 1939–41 AEG Berlin, 1941–50 KWI Physics. Isolde Hausser, physicist; see Table 1.2, and Chapter 5 of this book. Margot Herbeck, physicist, aerodynamicist; 1935–37 AVA Göttingen, 1937–45 AEG Berlin, 1945–74 KWI/MPI Göttingen. Frl. Heumann, chemist; 1927–28 Ph.D. student at KWI Silicate Research, 1928 Industrial Company. Elly Jagla, chemist; 1922–25 Ph.D. student KWI Chemistry, 1927–61 Research Laboratory BASF (IG Farben) Ludwigshafen. Claudia Knoevenagel, chemist, physician (two doctoral degrees, in chemistry and in medicine); 1941–44 Resaerch Dept. IG Farben, 1944–48 KWI Medical Research. Deodata Krüger, chemist; 1928–37/38 at three different KWIs; 1938–45 chemical Factory; two patents for invention. Gerda von Krüger, chemist; 1933–34 factory, 1934–36 factory, 1936–37 KWI Silicate Research. Gertrud Oppenheimer, biochemist; 1922–26 KWI Biochemistry, 1926–33 Head of a Cell Laboratory in electrical industry, 1933 into exile: Paris, Graz, 1936 in London, coming to the U.S. around 1940, worked in Pasadena, unmarried, died August 28, 1948 in Kern County, California. Irma Rhode, chemist, KWI Silicate Research, 1928 industry. Gertrud Stein, chemist; 1931–33 KWI Medical Research Heidelberg, 1933–45 IG Farben, Wolfen. Sibylle Tolksdorf, chemist; 1924–27 KWI Fibre Research, 1927–30 KWI Silicate Research, 1931/32 contributor Gmelin Handbook; 1934/35 exile in USA; 1938–41 laboratory positions, 1941 Schering Corp. Bloomfield. Johanna Weber, aerodynamist; 1935–37 teacher; 1937–39 Ballistic Laboratory at Krupp AG Essen, 1939–1945 AVA Göttingen; 1945–47 Göttingen (for the Air Force), 1947 Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in the UK.

Maria Heckter, who later married the chemist Fritz Straßmann – famous for his involvement in the discovery of nuclear fission – held a position at the KWI for Silicate Research, where relatively many women scientists were able to work. Founded in 1925 and led by the chemist Wilhelm Eitel, this institute employed eighteen women scientists from 1926 to 1945. Two of them had studied under Eitel at the Technical University of Berlin and became directors of (relatively small) laboratories at his KWI. Both laboratories dealt with the special analysis of 24 The table is based on VOGT 2008. 25 See TOBIES 2004.

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particular products, and this analysis was relevant to various industrial applications. The head of one of these laboratories, Maximiliana Bendig, had completed her doctorate in chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1925 and worked at the KWI for Silicate Research from 1927 to 1936. The other, Christel Kraft, who had earned an engineering degree with a diploma in chemistry, directed her KWI laboratory only from 1928 to 1930, the year in which she married (Andresen). From 1931 to 1937, her successor was Maria Heckter, who had studied chemistry at the Technical University of Hanover, where she was an assistant until 1930, and where she completed her doctorate in 1934. After her own marriage, she also had to leave the KWI for Silicate Research, but she became a close collaborator with her husband. 1.5 Patents for Inventions and Female Patentees At the time, patents were of course granted for inventions, but patentees did not necessarily have to be engineers or technicians. Scientists who became patentees did not necessarily have to work exclusively in an applied field. Moreover, it was not only men who were able to earn patents for their inventions. Before discussing women patentees, I would first like to describe the general role of patents in the history of science. Patent records, which are kept in various archives, are invaluable sources of information about inventors (patentees) and their work, about technical developments, and about the changing attitudes toward inventions at different times and places. The archives of patent records differ from one country to another, and these distinctions are due to the different administrative institutions that have been responsible for patent practices. To reconstruct the circumstances under which a patentee was working, however, further documents are needed. In the best-case scenario, letters and records will survive in the patentee’s private estate, and publications in journals and newspapers will shed additional light on his or her work. Historians of science will study patent records alongside the other publications of the patentee, especially when the patentee published articles on similar topics. Patents were an administrative instrument for granting privileges – such as property and titles (in the army, for example) – and in our case for guaranteeing that an invention will be protected by law. Therefore, the first (and obvious) reason why patents were sought and granted was for protecting an invention from unlicensed imitation. Then again, a patent guaranteed the patentee a monopoly on the exploitation of a given invention for a limited time (from five to fifteen or even twenty years). As an administrative instrument, patents for invention required a bureaucratic institution to register them, namely a patent office. This office would also archive all the pertinent documents. Moreover, patents also required special juridical procedures, in the form of patent laws or patent acts. Patent processes are thus closely tied to particular regions or nations and to their respective bureaucratic institutions

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and juridical systems. Therefore, patents are regarded as a measure of a given region’s productivity and economic growth. In Germany, separate patent laws were enacted by different regions in the nineteenth century: in 1815 in Prussia, in 1825 in Bavaria, in 1836 in Württemberg, and in 1853 in Saxony. The first patent law for Germany as a whole was enacted in 1877, and it was later revised in 1891, 1923, 1936, and 1968. In Germany, a patent for invention will be granted if the invention is new (in 1968, the passage was added that the invention has to imply essential progress). Yet it is hardly a trivial matter to determine what is “new” and what represents “progress.” The invention could be a new method for producing certain products, or a new producible product, or an apparatus. By definition, all of these inventions were closely linked to technical development and technical processes. Excluded by law were discoveries in the sciences, namely new scientific principles or problems. Excluded, too, were inventions of medical therapies (from 1891 until the 1980s, at least) and inventions concerned with the production of food.26 In the German Patent Law of 1923, the word new, as far as inventions were concerned, denoted something not published in German or in foreign printed media during the last one hundred years.27 The German Patent Office – the Kaiserliches Patentamt or Reichspatentamt – was established in Berlin in 1877. Its successor, the BundesPatentamt, has been in Munich since 1948.28 An inventor’s procedure for acquiring a patent was as follows: One had to apply for a patent in the Patent Office. One had to describe the invention, demonstrate its novelty and potential utilization, and pay an application fee (this was 25 Reichsmark in the late 1920s). Drawings and models could also be submitted. Then the experts in the Patent Office had to examine the relevant documents. It is obvious that the examination of all the applications was complicated and difficult work, and it is no wonder that the Patent Office grew considerably over the years. Whereas, in 1895, the German Patent Office consisted of four departments to handle applications, two departments to deal with complaints, and one department to deny applications, the number of departments increased to twelve in 1932.29 After the experts in the Patent Office – they were scientists and engineers with university degrees – made the decision to grant a patent to an inventor, this decision was published in the special journal of the Patent Office (the so-called Patentblatt). As soon as this publication appeared, the protection of the invention began, the patentee received a certified document (a Patenturkunde), and registration was made. In Germany, patents have always been protected for eighteen years. During this time, patentees had to pay an increasing sum of money for each successive year; the fee reached its height in 1932, when the cost to maintain a patent was 26 See DTV Wörterbuch 1980, vol. 14, p. 44. However, MOLÀ 2008 has described some patents for new types of food, including new kinds of bread. 27 See the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie 1933, vol. 14, p. 234. 28 Between 1949 and 1990, the East German Patent Office was located in East Berlin. 29 See Meyer’s Konversationslexikon (1896), pp. 585–87; and Brockhaus (1933), pp. 234–38.

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7,120 Reichsmark. If a patentee wished to secure foreign patents for an invention, the process had to be repeated, and fees had to be paid in these countries as well. In the 1920s, for example, a potential patentee from Germany would have to pay 350 francs in France, 6 pounds in Great Britain, 300 lire in Italy, 30 dollars in the United States, and so on. If the patentee was unable to translate the necessary documents, a specialist had to be hired, and lawyers were also needed to deal with the different components of international patent law. Because of these complications, large firms began to establish their own patent departments, and female scientists are known to have worked in them as early as the 1920s (regarding Cäcilie Fröhlich, for instance, see Chapter 6). New positions were also being created for patent lawyers, among whom a successful woman can be counted as well. In 1899, the Union of German Patent Lawyers was established, and in 1900 a special law was enacted to standardize the profession of the patent lawyer. According to this law, a patent lawyer had to be older than twenty-five, needed to hold a doctoral degree in a scientific field or an engineering degree, and needed at least three years of training in law. Of course, this type of training was already expected before 1900, as is clear from the example of the patent lawyer Allard du Bois-Reymond (a son of the famous physiologist Emile du Bois-Reymond).30 In 1909, Allard du Bois-Reymond published an article entitled “Das Weltpatent” (“The World Patent”), in which he addressed the question of whether it would ever be possible to introduce a common international patent for inventions.31 Peter Kurz has stressed the importance of this article, which managed to discuss all of the main problems that remained unresolved until the late 1970s, when the European Patent Office was established.32 Du Bois-Reymond suggested, for instance, that patent applications should be prepared in three languages – German, French, and English – and this very measure was enacted by the European Patent Office in 1978. It was in 1926 when the physicist Freda Wuesthoff became the first female patent lawyer in Germany. Together with her husband, the chemist Franz Wuesthoff, she enjoyed a successful career, working from 1927 to 1945 in Berlin and from 1949 to 1956 in Munich. During the Nazi era, she and her husband both belonged to the group around Max von Laue and his friends, who acted against the regime. Among others, Clara von Simson, who held a Ph.D. in physics, worked in the Wuesthoffs’ office from 1940 until 1945 and likewise belonged to the group associated with Max von Laue.33 In their books on female inventors, Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek have noted that, between 1905 and 1921, approximately 5,000 (5,016, to be precise) patents were granted to women.34 Among these, seventy-six were awarded for inventions of scientific instruments, i.e., laboratory tools, measuring devices, 30 Allard du Bois-Reymond was an uncle of the industrial researcher Iris Runge; for a family tree, see TOBIES 2012, p. x. 31 For a reprint of this article, see KURZ 2000, pp. 541–43. 32 See KURZ 2000. 33 See VOGT 2007, pp. 326, 403; and GALM 1984. On Freda Wuesthoff (originally Freda Herzfeld, née Hoffmann), see BERTHOLD 1982; OLBRICH 2001; RÖWEKAMP 2005, pp. 439–43. 34 See VARE/PTACEK 1988, 1995, 2002.

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clocks, scales, and optical and photographic equipment. Deborah Jaffé’s book Ingenious Women contains an appendix listing approximately 500 patents granted to women between 1637 and 1914.35 These women inventors lived in England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Germany, and Australia. Examining the patents applied for by women scientists, we see that only two of the eighteen women who moved between laboratories had been granted patents for inventions, namely Deodata Krüger and Isolde Hausser. Furthermore, there were seven other women scientists who received one or even more patents.36 In comparison to the data enumerated by Vare, Ptacek, and Jaffé, my list of women with patents is thus very small. Only nine of the 254 women scientists who were employed at a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute received one patent or more. Moreover, two of these nine, the aforementioned Deodata Krüger and Isolde Hausser, held patents for inventions developed in industrial laboratories.37 Hausser was able to contract her inventions, which concerned electron tube technology, to both Telefunken and Siemens, where her husband and one of her brothers were employed for some time.38 She was thus able to generate some income from them, an idea that was not exactly self-evident at the time (this required, among other things, close ties to industry and a clever patent attorney). At the University of Berlin, the issue of income earned from the patents of faculty members was not discussed in earnest until 1945. In 1898 and 1900, the Ministry of Culture simply requested to be informed in detail about professors who earned external income from their academic work.39 A university administrator collected this data about professors and passed it along to the Ministry. Usually, such extra income took the form of a membership in the Prussian Academy of Science or in another academic society. In the records – there are 172 entries in all – only one associate professor is mentioned for having received money from the Patent Office.40 In the 1920s, members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society deliberated over how to share the income generated by patents between the scientists who had acquired them and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes at which they were employed. The general administration of the KWG suggested a ratio of thirty to seventy, that is, thirty 35 JAFFÉ 2003. 36 For a complete list of these patents, see VOGT 2008a. 37 I was able to compile this list of nine patentees thanks to the database (with 557 total entries) assembled by Günter Hartung in 1994 and 1995 (Hartung unfortunately died in 1996). The database contains a bibliometric analysis of publications and patents granted to scientists who worked at the Institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Its findings are published in PARTHEY 1995. On other female industrial researchers earning patents, see Chapter 5 of this book. 38 See [Archive MPG] III, 3, 57, vol. 1, papers (Teil-Nachlaß) of Isolde Hausser, letters to Siemens. 39 See [Archive HUB] Kurator, UK Nr. 387 (Nebeneinnahmen und Nebenbeschäftigungen von Professoren, 1898) and UK Nr. 389 (Nebeneinnahmen und Nebenbeschäftigungen, 1900). 40 See Wilhelm Will, in [Archive HU] UK Nr. 387, p. 153: “Nichtbeständiges Mitglied des Kaiserlichen Patentamts – 2.400” Reichsmark (obviously per year), April 1898. Karl Wilhelm Will became a Privatdozent in 1883 and an associate professor of chemistry in 1891. He also directed the Royal Testing Office for Explosives.

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percent for the scientists and seventy percent for the Institute. Yet it is unclear to what extent this policy was realized. Patents were not included in the bibliographies that were published by each of the Institutes in their annual reports.41 An exception to this was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research, which was established in 1913 in Mülheim and financially supported by the mining industry. From the beginning, in any case, the KWIs had policies in place concerning the application for patents and the distribution of the income that such patents produced.42 1.6 Conclusion The focus of this chapter was the situation of women scientists in Germany who were employed at various institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (1912–1945) as well as in various industrial research laboratories. To summarize: First, women scientists were accepted much more warmly by some of the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society than they were by German universities and academies of science. Second, only eighteen women scientists are known to have worked both in the laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society as well as in different industrial laboratories. Regarding industry, they were able to work at well-known firms such as AEG and Telefunken in Berlin, IG Farben in Ludwigshafen, and Krupp in Essen. Finally, regardless of gender, patent applications can and should serve as an additional source for the historical study of laboratory practices. Bibliography [Archive HUB] Archive of the University of Berlin. [Archive MPG] Archive of Max Planck Society, Berlin. [Bundesarchiv Koblenz] Außenstelle Berlin. BERTHOLD, Günther (1982). Freda Wuesthoff. Eine Faszination. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder. BOEDEKER, Elisabeth (1939). 25 Jahre Frauenstudium in Deutschland. Verzeichnis der Doktorarbeiten von Frauen 1908–1933. 4 vols. Hanover: Trute. DUDEN, Barbara; EBERT Hans (1979). “Die Anfänge des Frauenstudiums an der Technischen Hochschule Berlin.” In Beiträge zur Geschichte der TU Berlin 1879–1979. Ed. R. Rürup. Berlin: Springer, vol. 1, pp. 403–23. ENGEL, Michael (1996). “Chemische Laboratorien in Berlin 1570 bis 1945. Topographie und Typologie.” In Fixpunkte. Wissenschaft in der Stadt und der Region. Festschrift für Hubert Laitko anläßlich seines 60. Geburtstages. Ed. H. Kant. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschafts- und Regionalgeschichte Dr. Michael Engel, pp. 161–207.

41 See [Archive MPG] I, files of the General Administration (Generalverwaltung); and the published annual reports in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften (from 1924 to 1943). 42 See [Archive MPG]. Furthermore, see MARTIN 2002, which is quite a thriller about the patent conflicts surrounding Karl Ziegler and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research.

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EPPLE, Moritz (2002). “Rechnen, Messen, Führen. Kriegsforschung am Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Strömungsforschung (1937–1945).” In Rüstungsforschung im Nationalsozialismus. Organisation, Mobilisierung und Entgrenzung der Technikwissenschaften. Ed. H. Maier. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 305–56. FREIDENREICH, Harriet Pass (2002). Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. GALM, Ulla (1984). Clara von Simson (Preußische Köpfe Politik). Berlin: Stapp. GISPEN, Kees (1999). “Die Patentgesetzgebung in der Zeit des NS und in den Anfangsjahren der Bundesrepublik.” In Patentschutz und Innovation in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Ed. R. Boch. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp.85–99. JAFFÉ, Deborah (2003). Ingenious Women: From Tincture of Saffron to Flying Machines. Gloucestershire: Sutton. JAFFÉ, Deborah; WYNARCZYK, Pooran (2011). Innovating Women: Illuminating Achievement and Success. Gloucestershire: Sutton. KOKER, David (2012). At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943–1944. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. [Originally published in Dutch in 1977]. KURZ, Peter (2000). Weltgeschichte des Erfindungsschutzes. Erfinder und Patente im Spiegel der Zeiten. Cologne: Carl Heymanns. MAIER, Helmut, ed. (2002). Rüstungsforschung im Nationalsozialismus. Organisation, Mobilisierung und Entgrenzung der Technikwissenschaften (Geschichte der KWG im Nationalsozialismus 3). Göttingen: Wallstein. — ed. (2007). Gemeinschaftsforschung, Bevollmächtigte und der Wissenstransfer. Die Rolle der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im System kriegsrelevanter Forschung des Nationalsozialismus (Geschichte der KWG im Nationalsozialismus 17). Göttingen: Wallstein. MARTIN, Heinz (2002). Polymere und Patente. Karl Ziegler, das Team, 1953–1998. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH. MOLÀ, Luca (2008). “The Patent System in Renaissance Italy: XVth and XVIth Centuries.” A paper delivered at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on December 9, 2008. OLBRICH, Hubert (2001). “Engagiert für eine Politik des Friedens. Die Physikerin Freda Wuesthoff (1896–1956). ” Berlinische Monatsschrift 4, pp. 66–70. PARTHEY, Heinrich (1995). Bibliometrische Profile von Instituten der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 1923–1943 (Veröffentlichungen aus dem Archiv zur Geschichte der MPG, vol. 7). Berlin. POGG. J. C. Poggendorffs Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch der exakten Naturwissenschaften. Vol. 6. Berlin: Verlag Chemie, 1936–40. Vols. 7a and 7b. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956–62. SIME, Ruth Lewin (1996). Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. Berkeley: University of California Press. TOBIES, Renate (2004). “Ingeborg Ginzel – eine Mathematikerin als Expertin für Wing Design.” In Form, Zahl Ordnung, Studien zur Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte. Ed. R. Seising, M. Folkerts, and U. Hashagen. Stuttgart: Steiner, pp. 711–34. VARE, Ethlie Ann; PTACEK, Greg (1988). Mothers of Invention: From the Bra to the Bomb. Forgotten Women and Their Unforgettable Ideas. New York: Morrow. — (1993). Women Inventors and Their Discoveries. Minneapolis: The Oliver Press. — (2002). Patently Female. From AZT to TV Dinners, Stories of Women Inventors. New York: John Wiley & Son. VIERHAUS, Rudolf; VOM BROCKE, Bernhard (1990). Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft. Geschichte und Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. VOGT, Annette (1999). Elsa Neumann. Berlins erstes Fräulein Doktor. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschafts- und Regionalgeschichte Dr. Michael Engel.

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— (2000a). “Die ersten Karriereschritte – Physikerinnen im Berliner Raum zwischen 1900 und 1945.” In Barrieren und Karrieren. Die Anfänge des Frauenstudiums in Deutschland. Ed. E. Dickmann and E. Schöck-Quinteros. Berlin: Trafo Verlag, pp. 195–230. — (2000b). “Women in Army Research: Ambivalent Careers in Nazi Germany.” In Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s–1990s. Ed. R. Oldenziel, A. Canel, and K. Zachmann. Amsterdam: Harwood, pp. 189–209. — (2007). Vom Hintereingang zum Hauptportal? Lise Meitner und ihre Kolleginnen an der Berliner Universität und in der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. — (2008a). Wissenschaftlerinnen in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten A – Z. Berlin: Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. — (2008b). “Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft wagte es: Frauen als Abteilungsleiterinnen.” In “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz.” Frauen in Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik. Ed. R. Tobies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 225–44. VOM BROCKE, Bernhard; LAITKO, Hubert, eds. (1996). Die Kaiser-Wilhelm/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft und ihre Institute. Das Harnack-Prinzip. Berlin: de Gruyter. WALTHER, Alwin, ed. (1948). Angewandte Mathematik. (Naturforschung und Medizin in Deutschland 1939–1946; für Deutschland bestimmte Ausgabe der FIAT Review of German Science 3). Wiesbaden: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

2 COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY: HEDWIG KOHN AND OSRAM, 1916–1938 Brenda P. Winnewisser Hedwig Kohn,1 one of three women who attained the Habilitation in physics in Germany before 1945, definitely thought of herself as an academic researcher, but her career brought her into contact with industrial and applied science from the very beginning. The most explicit component thereof was her 1916–1917 interaction with the Siemens & Halske laboratories, and later with the Research Society for Electric Lighting (Studiengesellschaft für elektrische Beleuchtung) founded within the German Gas Lighting Corporation (Deutsche Gasglühlicht A.G.). Both institutions ultimately became part of the OSRAM Corporation. 2.1 Hedwig Kohn’s Introduction into the Science and Technology of Light Intensity Growing up in Breslau, Hedwig Kohn entered the university in that city in 1907, and gravitated to the laboratory of physicist Otto Lummer. The son of a baker, Lummer’s major claim to fame still today came while he served his scientific apprenticeship, after his Ph.D., in a position at the national metrology institute, the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR), founded in Berlin in 1887. Measurements there to determine the wavelength and temperature dependence of radiation escaping from a heated cavity, as a close realization of an ideal “black (totally absorbing) body,” carried out by Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim and confirmed by Heinrich Rubens and Ferdinand Kurlbaum, established the insufficiency of classical thermodynamics to describe the emission curves of a black body. This alarming deviation from expectations led directly to Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis at the end of 1900. The project of determining the black-body curves had been undertaken at the PTR in the 1890s in response to pressure from industry, in particular the illumination industry, due to the new industry of manufacturing lightbulbs and other lamps and tubes. Thus Lummer brought to his Breslau professorship pragmatism, an openness to applied science but also awareness of and a wide-ranging curiosity about the new phenomena perplexing physicists at the turn of the twentieth century. Under Lummer’s general direction, and the day-to-day guidance of Rudolf Ladenburg, Hedwig Kohn received her Ph.D. in 1913 with a dissertation proving that Kirchhoff’s law of radiation, formulated for continuous condensed material, applies also to the poorly understood discreet line emissions of hot gases in

1

For brief biographies of Kohn, see WINNEWISSER 2003, in German, and WINNEWISSER 2005, in English.

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flames.2 This law states that a physical object or system, at thermal equilibrium with its immediate environment, must emit exactly as much radiation as it absorbs. Her work removed lingering doubts about the inclusiveness of the law and therefore about the usefulness of flame measurements for various applications. The measurements that she mastered for this dissertation taught her how to measure quantitatively the intensity of visible radiation, how to use such measurements to very accurately and reliably determine temperature in flames over a wide range of temperatures, including very high temperatures, and how to use the universality of the black-body intensity curves to select and calibrate secondary standards í which is exactly what various industries wanted to be able to do. One episode in her career resulted in intensive correspondence with colleagues in the illumination industry. Later, during the Third Reich, her relevant skills and her contacts with industry would be invaluable to her.

Figure 2.1: Assistants Hermann Senftleben, Hedwig Kohn, and Elizabeth Benedict, all former Lummer students, quantifying sunlight in the Riesengebirge, summer 1918 (Source: [ESVA] Collection of Hedwig Kohn).

2

Hedwig Kohn’s dissertation – “Über das Wesen der Emission der in Flammen leuchtenden Metalldämpfe” – was published in Annalen der Physik 44 (1914), pp. 749–82. See also [UWA] F226, on H. Kohn’s oral doctoral examination (December 17, 1913).

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2.2 Defining Strategy Criteria for Research in Illumination Otto Lummer led Kohn directly into the illumination business. She did such a good job on her dissertation that in 1914 she was promptly appointed Personal Assistant to Lummer, to help him in his research and publication work. That work, particularly because she delved into it herself intensively, together with the effect of the First World War on the university, left her no time for independent research, but the unusual responsibilities that fell upon her allowed her to mature rapidly into the role of an academic scientist. In 1915, Lummer was in the last stages of preparing a book about research into improving electrical illumination, entitled Grundlagen, Ziele und Grenzen der Leuchttechnik [Foundations, Goals and Limits of Illumination Technology],3 with which he wished to reach an audience beyond the academic world, as he did in many instances. Though begun as an expanded edition of a short book he had published in 1903, the most significant contents of the new book resulted from work performed together with Kohn in 1914 and 1915.4 The new sections define performance criteria for lightbulbs which should guide the direction of research efforts, no matter what the specify technologies might be. The measurements which she carried out and which are presented as examples refer however only to incandescent bulbs, which were economically the most important kind by that time. Lummer and Kohn found that these criteria can be reduced to three ratios of values that can be determined by measuring certain properties of candidate materials for filaments of radiant bulbs: a) “energetic economy,” defined as light intensity emitted within a the visible region of the spectrum, relative to total radiant energy (which includes infrared and heat at longer wavelengths, and ultra-violet, at shorter wavelengths); b) “photometric economy,” defined as the ratio of surface brightness to total emitted radiant energy, where the definition of surface brightness involves the sensitivity of the human eye, and thus is limited again to the visible range; c) “technical economy,” defined as Watts required per standard unit of light intensity, the standard unit being in those days, in Germany, the Hefner candle, the total intensity emitted by Mr. Hefner’s easily reproducible lamp (the corresponding SI unit today is the candela). Each of these “economies” would be called today “efficiency factors.” These were precisely the general concepts needed, and in some cases already under consideration, to help industrial researchers focus the direction of their efforts most systematically and fruitfully. Clemens Schaefer, Lummer’s successor, commented later, in his letter of support for her Habilitation, that Kohn’s 1914–1915 contribution to the formulation of these concepts represented “a series of fundamental, jointly discovered results in illumination technology […] presented scientifi-

3 4

LUMMER 1918. MCDOWELL 1947, based on information provided by Hedwig Kohn.

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cally.”5 His comment reveals not only Kohn’s role; it also emphasizes to the reader that this applied work was to be respected as an intellectual and scientific achievement. Kohn’s name does not appear on the book, which is understandable for that era, since the book was begun as an update of his earlier book, and she was clearly working on subject matter proposed by him. She is mentioned in the acknowledgements for her help in “preparing the new material.” More important, citations in the book include four references to Kohn’s dissertation, and ten references to a paper by Lummer and Kohn on work which was reported in two talks before the Silesian Society for Culture of the Fatherland, one on October 28, 1914, and the other on July 29, 1915.6 The experimental measurements, upon which the conclusions presented were based, had been carried out by Kohn. This work was published 1915 in the proceedings of the Silesian Society.7 Lummer’s book was ready by the end of 1915, including the recent work. However, the book did not appear until 1918 due to the disruptions of war.8 These dates matter, because there was competition: Studies relevant to the performance of lightbulbs attracted many research groups, mostly in industry, in the years from about 1900 up through the 1920s. Concepts similar to those formulated by Lummer and Kohn were distilling independently out of research efforts in industrial laboratories at about the same time. 2.3 Kohn–Meyer Correspondence, 1916–1917 That Kohn’s role in Lummer’s work on this subject was larger than the authorship of the book might imply is indicated by correspondence with Dr. Alfred R. Meyer, at the time head of a physical laboratory devoted to the optimization of incandescent lightbulbs in the Siemens & Halske Company in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The 1915 Lummer-Kohn paper indeed found readership in the industrial laboratories of the illumination industry. Meyer wrote to Kohn in 1916 asking for a reprint of the 1915 paper. (That letter is not preserved, so we do not know whether he wrote to Kohn or Lummer. The established courtesy would have also included his addressing the request to the first author, Lummer, unless Kohn and Meyer had met at a conference, which is very likely, and he thus knew her involvement in the work.) In any case, it was Kohn who responded, indicating a large measure of trust on Lummer’s part in his young assistant. The resulting letters cited here are each five- or six-page typed office transcriptions (double spaced) of presumably handwritten letters (at least on her part), with numerous numbers and equations.

5 6 7 8

[BODL-SPSL], File H. Kohn (phys.), pp. 283–84, C. Schaefer, Report written 1930 for the Habilitation of Hedwig Kohn, submitted to the SPSL on November 5, 1933. LUMMER 1918, p. 205. See LUMMER/KOHN 1915. LUMMER 1918, pp. ix–x; [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280, H. Kohn to A. R. Meyer (May 18, 1916).

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Figure 2.2: Last page of a transcript of the last letter from Hedwig Kohn to Alfred R. Meyer, dated June 5, 19179

In Kohn’s first letter she apologizes for the book not yet being printed due to the disruptions of war, encloses a reprint of the 1915 paper, and launches directly into a comparison of the Breslau results with those published by Meyer. She also mentions a third, overlapping treatment of the subject by Marcello Pirani and Hildegard Miething, working in another Siemens & Halske laboratory, under the title “Radiant Energy, Temperature, and Brightness of a Black Body.”10 Kohn had already looked into Meyer’s work before she received his letter, and was happy to offer the results of her comparison. Most important, “The various questions which are treated in the works [from the three laboratories], and the quantities which are defined and calculated, in order to let us recognize what has already been 9 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280 Vol. 1, Kohn to A. R. Meyer (June 5, 1917). 10 M. Pirani and H. Miething, “Strahlungsenergie, Temperatur und Helligkeit des schwarzen Körpers” [Radiant Energy, Temperature, and Brightness of a Black Body], Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft 17 (1915), pp. 219–38. For more information about Miething and Pirani, see also Chapter 5 of this book.

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achieved in illumination technology, for what one should strive, and most of all, which natural limits are set for it through the constitution of our eyes, are identical, even though we give them different names” (my emphasis). She details, first, which definitions and measured results reached by the two laboratories agree, and where discrepancies are noticeable that can easily be explained, or attributed to slightly different definitions or differing external sources of calibration. She then addresses more serious discrepancies, which she cannot explain, especially concerning the “energetic economy” (proportion of total emitted radiation lying in the visible region) of radiant elements made of various materials. She suggests possible reasons for these discrepancies, offering these and a few questions to him for comment. These are followed by a clear invitation to him to respond to her comments or to offer other questions.11 She assumes his familiarity with the other Siemens and Halske work. Note that we learn here of the presence in the second Siemens & Halske laboratory of another qualified woman, Hildegard Miething, who appears also in Renate Tobies’s biography of Iris Runge.12 Pirani, like Lummer, had no problems with employing women. What is clear, regardless of any trivial adjustments to wavelength boundaries (etc.) is that there was a full overlap in the concepts found by the three laboratories for a systematic evaluation of the processes and strategies for research needed by the industry, and a realistic effort, on the side of the academic physicists, to make themselves useful to the industry. Meyer responded a few months later, in September 1916, in corresponding detail, after checking all the numerical reference values that had gone into his calculations against Kohn’s reference values. The largest unexplained differences between the Siemens & Halske numerical results and the Breslau work are shown to be due to differences in experimental measurements of equivalent quantities. “It would be impossible to try to explain this difference, since only experiment can provide information about it.” He concludes by stating firmly “With this I would like to consider the comparison of your and my work to be completed,” but he would be happy to answer further questions.13 The curves and tables in the papers from all three laboratories concerned, on which conclusions about the theoretical or ideal limits to efficiency of lightbulbs should be based, relied on photometric methods which were on the frontier of methods in this field, so none of the three laboratories involved needed to feel insulted by such a letter, but of course must be prompted to improve the reliability of their methods. Meyer, in any case, stood by his measurements. Kohn took up the discussion again nine months later. We learn that she had had little time to pursue the subject, “since in the winter, as a result of the lack of assistants for the regular affairs of the Institute, such as lectures, problem sessions etc., there was so much to do, that often even the night had to be called upon.” It was only after the Easter vacation that she could look into the issues he had 11 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280, H. Kohn to A. R. Meyer (May 18, 1916). 12 TOBIES 2012, pp. 131–33. 13 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280 Vol. 1, A. R. Meyer to Kohn (September 9, 1916).

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raised.14 She reports that she repeated some measurements made years earlier, by another assistant, and found discrepancies between her new measurements and what she and Lummer had relied on in their 1915 paper – and she, like Meyer, trusted her own measurements! At first she could not determine the root of the problem. Finally, tipped off by a comment in his careful and detailed response to her first letter, she traced the discrepancy to a mistaken switching of labels of curves of luminosity versus temperature for two carbon filament standards (“treated” and “untreated” filament material). When she used either the older (1903) curve or her new measurements, which were consistent with one another, the large discrepancy between Lummer’s 1915 and Meyer’s results disappeared, as she demonstrated fully in the letter. She thanks him for pointing out to her that the brightness per Watt curve in Lummer’s 1903 publication is not the same as the one in the more recent paper, which allowed her to identify the error. Thus she could prove that her methods, and her precision, were not at fault, though a simple error had been made, for which she implicitly accepted responsibility, no matter who made it. Meyer’s short response has a different tone than his previous letter; it shows relief and respect, and concludes a satisfying exchange between peers. He regrets not having time to discuss as he would like some of the details: “I would like therefore to beg you to be content for now with my thanks for your kindness, and agree that I can leave the intended further discussion for a later letter.”15 In fact, this concluded the (archived) correspondence on this subject. Resulting corrections were gratefully included in Lummer’s book,16 since another year would pass until it was printed. Curious is the fact that this exchange popped up again in 1922, when Meyer forwarded the whole set of letters to Dr. N. A. Halbertsma, his counterpart at Philips Eindhoven. Halbertsma returned it with a short letter, saying that he had “taken notice of the content with interest.”17 What stimulated the loan of the letters is not archived, only the return; it is tantalizing, not knowing what would have prompted Meyer to send it to Halbertsma. But for some reason, the information in the exchange was still relevant. Was it because of the information about the efficiency of lightbulbs, or was it perhaps about Hedwig Kohn? 2.4 Meyer–Halbertsma Correspondence, 1916–1917 A separate, brief exchange between Meyer and Halbertsma, at Phillips in Eindhoven, took place in 1916, in the middle of the correspondence described above. Both were roughly the same age as Kohn, just a few years from their Ph.D. It was a friendly back and forth concerning a meeting of the German Illumination 14 15 16 17

[LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280 Vol. 1, Kohn to A. R. Meyer (June 5, 1917). [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280, Vol. 1, A. R. Meyer to Kohn (July 6, 1917). LUMMER 1918, p. 208. [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280, Vol. 1, N. A. Halbertsma to A. R. Meyer (March 14, 1922).

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Technology Society (Deutsche Beleuchtungstechnische Gesellschaft), and a superficial report about it the Berliner Tagesblatt – the meeting and the report about it indicative of the wide interest in the results of such research. Both men had been among the speakers at the meeting. Meyer’s lecture is treated by the reporter as being based on Lummer’s black-body work. Halbertsma attributes the neglect of the names of Willy Wien and Max Planck in that connection, whom he implicitly considers at least as important as Lummer, as an echo in the reporter’s mind of “the famous lectures of Lummer […] which [the reporter] perhaps heard last winter in Berlin.”18 This is probably a reference to lectures Lummer held actually in 1914, about the possibilities of liquifying carbon and even achieving in the laboratory the temperature of the surface of the sun – quite daring ambitions. These controversial subjects will be discussed briefly below. Both Halbertsma and Meyer seem to consider the newspaper report a slight against the lecture of Meyer; they both feel that they have moved beyond what Lummer was doing: “[…] I do not believe that I expressed myself so that someone could consider my lecture as a continuation of the work of Herr Lummer.”19 Obviously Lummer was the one who had succeeded in reaching a broad audience. He was after all older, an established professor, and a charismatic lecturer, while the two younger men were hidden from the public in industrial research laboratories, and they and others seem to have been more than a bit envious of Lummer’s fame.20 2.5 Small Favors Granted to Academic Laboratories by Industry In the period after the Great War, Kohn and others in the Lummer laboratory apparently continued to work on problems presented by incandescent lamps, though there are no further publications on the subject with Lummer’s name on them. In 1923, Hedwig Kohn wrote again to Meyer, hoping to obtain from the laboratory some special lamps with filaments that could withstand higher temperature than normal. The Breslau laboratory had some years earlier been able to get from OSRAM various lamps to experiment with, and she now needed a new type. The lightbulb industry had recently reorganized and concentrated itself: In 1918–1920 the branches of the German Gas Lighting Corporation, the General Electric Power Company (Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft, AEG), and of Siemens & Halske Corporation devoted to lightbulb research and production combined to form OSRAM. Kohn was not sure where to send her letter.21 It was answered by a polite letter from Meyer,22 who by then had moved up into management at OSRAM. He himself was not close enough to the laboratory 18 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 276, Vol. 1, N. A.; Halbertsma to A. R. Meyer (September 21, 1916). 19 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 276 Vol. 1, A. R. Meyer to N. A.; Halbertsma (October 2, 1916). 20 See, for example an anonymous review, littered with subtly belittling comments about Lummer's work, of the book by W. Matheisen, “Untersuchungen über den Lichtbogen,” Zeitschrift für Beleuchtungswesen 22 (1916), pp. 67–69. 21 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280, Vol. 1, Kohn to A. R. Meyer (June 30, 1923). 22 [LAB] OSRAM, Nr. 280, Vol. 1, A. R. Meyer to Kohn (July 7, 1923).

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any more to be able to help her, and referred her to Pirani. (Possible further correspondence with Pirani has not yet been explored, but we may hope that she got her bulbs!) The exchange shows, however, the readiness of the industry to provide academic research laboratories with small amounts of materials needed for research, a tradition that is still sometimes to be found, especially in the chemical industry.

Figures 2.3 and 2.4: OSRAM advertisement,23 and title page of a lab “newspaper” celebrating a new Breslau physics Ph.D.24

2.6 The Problem with Melting Carbon More important for her work by 1923 was her pursuit of issues related to carbon arc lamps, and carbon itself. This work did not bring her into direct contact with industrial research, but I will include it here because the results were of great interest to industry – it might lead to synthetic diamonds! – and ultimately to the chemical industry. There was ongoing research at OSRAM into various types of discharge lamps throughout this entire period. Experimentation with carbon arc lamps, in which a DC electrical discharge was produced between two carbon 23 Advertisement in Zeitschrift für Beleuchtungswesen 22 (1916), Issue 3/4. 24 [ESVA] Collection Hedwig Kohn, Spoof newspaper dated December 20, 1925.

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electrodes, had been going on in Lummer’s laboratory also for years. While Kohn was finishing her dissertation, Lummer was writing a slim book titled Verflüssigung der Kohle und Herstellung der Sonnentemperatur [Liquification of Carbon and Achievement of the Temperature of the Sun], published in 1914,25 another book aimed at a broad audience. It included detail and images not quite suited for peer-reviewed scientific journals. The title and his relevant results reported in two talks in Berlin in 1913 had led the press to believe he had actually reached the temperature of the sun, and melted carbon, but in the book he insists that he only had shown a path to reaching the sun’s temperature, and had observed puzzling ephemeral indications of a tiny puddle of liquid carbon; he wanted to point to new avenues and inspire further research. What he reported was, in spite of his protestations, highly controversial, because the apparent temperature of the carbon puddle was far too low to be possible in the eyes of nearly all the experts; attempts over the previous 200 years to melt carbon, which is a very special element, had all failed. Lummer’s results and interpretations were thus considered radical and were greeted with skepticism. The two lectures stamped him in the eyes of many as a showman who exaggerated the importance of his results, as is expressed above in the Meyer-Halbertsma correspondence and the cited book review. But by the time he finished the book, he had indeed reached the estimated temperature of the surface of the sun, 5900 K.26 Lummer did not pursue the melting point question. Then of course the war came, but the arc presented a variety of interesting problems, and research on the subject did continue in his laboratory. Hedwig Kohn, the new assistant, inevitably became involved in the carbon measurements, and after the war took up the subject directly by herself. She compiled some more convincing data than Lummer had had in 1914, measuring over a greater range of air pressure, and a wide range of current and measuring brightness and determining from it temperatures. One colleague at least read Lummer’s observations published in 1914 and took them seriously. In 1920 a scheme was outlined in a paper by Kasimir Fajans, a brilliant Polish-born physical chemist just Kohn’s age, working then at the university in Munich. He described how a reliable value for the heat of sublimation (vaporization directly from the solid state) of carbon atoms, when bound in the form of diamond, would provide the key to determining the heats of formation of most organic compounds, something of great interest to the burgeoning organic chemical industry. Fajans proposed that amorphous carbon, such as that used in the solid carbon electrodes of a carbon-arc lamp, could serve as an adequate substitute for crystalline diamond. Lummer had indicated in his 1914 book that the heat of sublimation of amorphous carbon could in principle be determined from the temperatures determined for the crater of the positive crater of an arc as a function of air pressure and current. In the meantime Hedwig Kohn had been working systematically on just that, and had it almost ready to publish! Fajans, apparently unaware of this, used the preliminary, 1914 published data to derive a 25 LUMMER 1914. 26 Ibid., p. 138.

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value of this important quantity. And he went further, showing explicitly how this value could be used to generate chains of thermodynamic properties of various hydrocarbon molecules, indicating possible reaction pathways.27 The sublimation and melting of carbon suddenly became a subject of intense study: Soon at least five laboratories began competing to see who could melt carbon and determine the temperature at the melting point first. Kohn rushed to publish the data she had at that point,28 which led to an improved value of the heat of sublimation. However, not really happy with these results, Kohn began further extensive measurements with carbon arcs, a project that provided also the dissertation of Margarete Guckel, the results of which were published in 1927.29 Kohn’s name on the paper indicates clearly that she played a major role in the work, because dissertations were usually published under the name of the doctoral candidate alone at this time. They were able to resolve explicitly each of several discrepancies in the literature. These unambiguous results allowed a reliable confirmation of the basic interpretation by Fajans of Lummer’s observations as representing states of thermodynamic equilibrium, confirming the feasibility of melting carbon, and yielding the determination of an even smaller and considerably more accurate value for the heat of sublimation of carbon, which they reported in a separate publication.30 However, the carbon arc electrode crater, though it gave the first correct hint about the melting of carbon, was too complex a system to ultimately allow a good determination of the temperature at the melting point. Finally it was determined in several laboratories, starting with that of Fajans, followed closely by a Swiss group and that of Pirani at OSRAM (showing the interest of industry in this subject), each of them using not a discharge, but a single carbon rod that had been machined to have a narrow waist. When a very high current was passed through the rod, the current was forced to concentrate in the narrow section, and the temperature at which it broke, suddenly and totally, gave an accurate and reproducible value of the melting point around 3700 °C.31

27 K. Fajans, “Sublimationswärme und Valenzkräfte der Kohlenstoffmodifikationen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 1 (1920), pp. 101–18. 28 H. Kohn, “Über die Sublimationswärme des Kohlenstoffs,” Zeitschrift für Physik 3 (1920), pp. 143–56. 29 H. Kohn and M. Guckel, “Untersuchungen am Kohlelichtbogen: Dampfdruckbestimmungen des Kohlenstoffs,” Zeitschrift für Physik 27 (1924), pp. 305–57. 30 H. Kohn and M. Guckel, “Über die Sublimationswärme des Kohlenstoffs,” Die Naturwissenschaften 12 (1924), pp. 139–40. 31 E. Ryschkewitsch, “Über den Schmelzpunkt und über die Verdampfung des Graphits,” Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie und Angewandte Physikalische Chemie 31 (1925) pp. 54–62; K. Fajans, “Über das Schmelzen und über die Verdampfungswärme des Graphits,” Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie und Angewandte Physikalische Chemie 31 (1925) pp. 63–70; A. Hagenbach and W. P. Lüthy, “Versuche zur Bestimmung des Schmelzpunktes der Kohle,” Die Naturwissenschaften 51 (1924) pp. 1183–86; H. Altherthum, W. Fehse, and M. Pirani, “Zur Schmelzpunktbestimmung des Kohlenstoffs,” Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie und Angewandte Physikalische Chemie 31 (1925), pp. 313–16.

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Parallel to these events, another facet of the Breslau work with electrical discharge lamps was illustrated when Kohn and Guckel were granted a patent for arc lamps filled with several rather inert gases, giving a much longer lifetime than arcs run in atmospheric air.32 This seems to have concluded Kohn’s active work with carbon arcs. 2.7 A Job with the Industry Almost twenty years after her first interactions with the illumination industry, Hedwig Kohn earnestly needed its help. In September 1933 she was dismissed from the university on the basis of the infamous Law to Restore the Civil Service; on the questionnaire for all academic personnel, she had accurately listed all four of her grandparents as being Jewish. Although by then she had a Habilitation, and had some income from students enrolled in her lecture courses, in spite of all her titles she was still just an assistant, living on a modest salary, which now ceased. The financial security in which she had grown up had been fully eroded by the war, the Great Inflation, and the Great Depression. She had only what she could earn, thus no financial reserves.33 She submitted her name to two refugee organizations, in London and Zurich, but she could not have been eager to leave her bountiful university, beautiful Breslau, her family, and Germany. In 1934, Clemens Schaefer, Director of the Institute since 1925, was sure that this madness of the Nazis would pass, and encouraged her to stay. However, it was clear that he himself, through the university, could no longer offer her any position, so he turned to industry. A major link between academia and industry in the illumination world was the Research Society for Electric Lighting (Studiengesellschaft für elektrische Beleuchtung). Originally set up as part of the German Gas Lighting Corporation, as mentioned above, it became part of OSRAM in 1918–1920. Referred to in those days as the “Stuge” (with a hard g), it conducted research that was oriented to more long-term goals than what was going on in the OSRAM or Telefunken laboratories, which worked with a perspective closer to production.34 The Pirani group melted carbon in this laboratory in 1925. By 1931, it included 156 employees, fourteen of them academics. By that time, most of their research was concerned with electric discharge lamps, leading to fluorescent light, sodium vapor lamps, and mercury lamps.35 Schaefer was able to arrange a contract for Kohn with the Studiengesellschaft, whereby she could stay in Breslau.36 She would be given space in the Physical 32 Original patent document, courtesy of Wilhelm Tappe. German patent No. 443407, granted 28.4.27 to Hedwig Kohn and Dr. Margarete Guckel, valid from February 8, 1924, for a Gasgefüllte elektrische Bogenlampe. 33 [BOD-SPSL] Curriculum Vitae 1933, p. 288. 34 BURGHART/MÜLLER/HANSEDER 2006. 35 LUXBACHER 2003, pp. 297–99. 36 See SCHAEFER 1957.

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Institute to work, and should pursue projects or conduct measurements that the “Stuge” needed but for which they were not equipped or lacked the expertise in Berlin. This contract allowed her to conduct research in the Physical Institute, the activity that was dear to her heart; to continue with Schaefer’s blessing to advise her three current doctoral students; to earn her keep; and perhaps just as important, to remain part of the familial community of the Physics Institute. The projects she pursued in this capacity were described by her generally as “problems in illuminating engineering and spectrum analysis.”37 In a draft CV after the war, she gives a bit more detail, listing “Design – development – testing in the field of spectrum analysis, photoelectric photometry, physiological optics.”38 This contract was renewed every year until Easter 1938, when the Nazi government made it impossible for any firm to employ even indirectly Jewish personnel. She was then without income. This hard fact, reinforced a few months later by the violence of the Kristallnacht, forced her to urgently seek a way to leave Germany. But at least her familiarity with the illumination industry had granted her four years of financial and moral support. 2.8 In the New World Hedwig Kohn made it, with difficulty, to America,39 taught for three semesters at the University of North Carolina Women’s College (Greensboro, NC) and then ten years at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA) in the U.S. She acquired American citizenship in 1946.40 She established contact at a few meetings with the American colleagues with whom she had corresponded or competed years earlier, in industry and at the National Bureau of Standards. She reestablished contact with other émigré physicists at General Electric in Schenectady, NY, helping at least one student, Betty Alden (Little) to obtain employment at the GE research laboratory upon graduation with a B.A. in physics. Alden went on to obtain a doctorate from MIT, and later found her true calling in anthropology. Kohn’s ultimately most prominent undergraduate student at Wellesley, Betsy Ancker (-Johnson), ended her career as a Vice President with General Motors. Inspired by Kohn, Ancker went to Tübingen to get a Ph.D. with Walther Kossel in 1953. Starting in industry with a research job at Sylvania, she moved to RCA (Radio Corporation of America) and to Boeing, from there to Bell Laboratories and back to Boeing, while being an Affiliate Professor of Electrical Engineering. She was the first woman presidential appointee in the Department of Commerce, as Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology, and later Associate 37 See MCDOWELL 1947. 38 Handwritten draft of Hedwig Kohn for an entry in American Men of Science, dated July 1948. Courtesy of Horst Meyer. 39 See WINNEWISSER 1998, 2003, 2005, and a forthcoming book about Hedwig Kohn by the author. 40 Hedwig Kohn, Handwritten draft for an entry in American Men of Science, dated July 1948. Courtesy of Horst Meyer.

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Laboratory Director for Physics Research at Argonne National Laboratory before joining General Motors in 1977.41 Kohn “retired” at age sixty-five to a position as a research associate at Duke University, where she built up a successful research program, sponsored by the Naval Research Office, around flame spectroscopy, which was enjoying a significant renaissance as part of plasma and combustion physics. She worked there for twelve years, mentoring a series of four young men, until shortly before her death in 1964. Hedwig Kohn’s interaction with industry took many forms, and was an essential feature of her life and legacy.42 Bibliography [BODL-SPSL] Bodlieian Library, AAC/SPSL Collection (Aid for Academic Refugees/Society for the Protection of Science and Learning) MS-SPSL 332. [ESVA] Center for History of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archive. [LAB] Landesarchiv Berlin, Bestand OSRAM. [UWA] Archive of the University of Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland. BURGHART, Anneliese; MÜLLER, Bernhard; HANSEDER, Wilhelm (2006). 100 Jahre OSRAM: Licht hat einen Namen. Munich: OSRAM GmbH Corporate Communications. LUMMER, Otto (1914). Verflüssigung der Kohle und Herstellung der Sonnentemperatur. Braunschweig: Vieweg. — (1918). Grundlagen, Ziele und Grenzen der Leuchttechnik. Munich/Berlin: R. Oldenbourg. LUMMER, Otto; KOHN, Hedwig (1915). “Beziehung zwischen Flächenhelligkeit und Temperatur. Ziele und Grenzen der Leuchttechnik.” Sitzungsberichte der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für vaterländische Kultur, pp. 1–18. LUXBACHER, Günther (2003). Massenproduktion im globalen Kartell. Glühlampen, Radioröhren und die Rationalisierung der Elektroindustrie bis 1945 (Aachener Beiträge zur Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts). Diepholz: GNT-Verlag. MCDOWELL, L. S. (1947). “Hedwig Kohn, First Recipient of a Grant from the Louise S. McDowell Research Fund.” The Wellesley Magazine (December), pp. 105–06. SCHAEFER, Clemens (1957). “Hedwig Kohn 70 Jahre.” Physikalische Blätter 13, pp. 224–25. TOBIES, Renate (2012). Iris Runge. A Life at the Crossroads of Mathematics, Science, and Industry. Basel: Birkhäuser. WINNEWISSER, Brenda P. (1998). “The Emigration of Hedwig Kohn, Physicist, 1940.” Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 18, pp. 41–58. — (2003). “Hedwig Kohn: Eine Physikerin des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.” Physik Journal 11, pp. 51–55. — (2005). “Hedwig Kohn 1887–1964.” In Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jerusalem: Shalvi Publishing (CD-ROM)

41 “Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics,” CWP at UCLA, http://cwp.library.ucla.edu; see also http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/33363.html. 42 More on the subject of carbon will be included in my forthcoming biography of Hedwig Kohn. I thank Renate Tobies for alerting me to the existence of correspondence relevant for this report.

3 THE BACKGROUND AND CAREER OF ANGELIKI PANAGIOTATOU: THE FIRST FEMALE PHYSICIAN IN GREECE TO HOLD A PH.D.1 Polyxeni Giannakopoulou Although industrialization is often mentioned in discussions of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Greece, the industrial development at the time was in fact rather limited. Regarding women, their work was largely restricted to the home, though a few women are known to have worked in small-scale industrial facilities.2 The enrollment of Greek women at the University of Athens, moreover, only became possible in 1890, and thus the first female graduates did not enter the professional arena until the end of the nineteenth century. It is for this reason that the case of Angeliki Panagiotatou – the first female physician to earn a Ph.D. in Greece – is presented here. Hers is a stereotypical example of the gender segregation that Greek female scientists had faced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She and her sister Alexandra enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Athens in 1892. Despite various difficulties, Angeliki graduated with distinction and, in 1897, she defended her doctoral thesis. Because a career in academia was not yet an option for women physicians in Greece, Panagiotatou chose to become a secondary school teacher. At first she taught at Arsakeion, a highly reputed “normal school” in Athens. Later she decided to move to Alexandria, Egypt, where she worked as a microbiologist in the central hospital of the city. Panagiotatou became known for her work on tropical and epidemic diseases, especially cholera and plague, and she enjoyed an international career. 3.1 Women’s Education in Greece: An Historical Overview In the nineteenth century, Greece was a newly-established state struggling to find direction according to European standards. It was founded in 1832 after the Revolution of 1821, which freed the country from the Ottoman Empire. The first king, Otto, who was a German, ruled from 1833 to 1862 and tried to organize state institutions, including the educational system, according to the German model. In 1863, after a revolt of the Greek people, George I, of Danish origin, usur1

2

ȉhis chapter is based on my dissertation, The Transmission of Scientific Ideas in Greece, 1850–1900. I would like to thank Maria Rentetzi for her support and Evi Batra, chairman of the Association of Greek Women Scientists, for providing to me with Angeliki’s Panagiotatou autobiography from the library of the Association (PANAGIOTATOU 1951). I am also endebted to Epaminondas Schizas for editing the images that have been included. I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Renate Tobies and Annette Vogt, too. The latter editor deserves special thanks for translating and making available to me the autobiographical article by Angeliki Panagiotatou (PANAGIOTATOU 1930). See AGRIANTONI 1986, pp. 15, 29.

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ped the throne after the intervention of several European countries. Yet the borders of the country were restricted, and further conflicts with Ottoman Empire culminated in the 1897 war for the possession of Crete. The Greeks were defeated in this war and placed under international financial control. However, the country did manage to maintain its borders, and Crete – after the intervention of European countries – became autonomous.3 As is evident from this historical context, the nineteenth century was an era of political, economic, and social instability in Greece. After 1860, however, the country acquired a European orientation and attempted to modernize its state institutions and rectify its finances. The influx of expatriates from abroad, the rise of trade, the urbanization of the population, and minor industrial growth contributed to the emergence of a Greek middle class, which served as the elite of the country. This sector of society, the intellectual elite, was mostly educated at the University of Athens, the graduates of which staffed the senior management positions of the state.4 In this political milieu, the educational system was gender-segregated, and its emphasis was on primary and secondary schools. Women gained access to primary education in 1834, but very few actually attended. In 1866, there were 1,067 Greek primary schools, with 44,102 male students and 8,481 female students. The percentage of illiterate women was exceptionally high: in 1879, 92.96% of women were illiterate, whereas the percentage of illiterate men was 69.20%. This situation, however, changed significantly in subsequent years.5 Secondary education for boys differed from that for girls. After primary school, which lasted four years for both sexes, boys could attend a three-year “Greek School” and then four-year high school. In contrast, secondary education for girls was private and took place at exclusive boarding schools. The percentage of boys in secondary education varied between 1855 and the end of the century, but remained relatively high. At the end of the nineteenth century, the percentage of boys enrolled in secondary education was similar to that in Western Europe.6 But it was not the same with girls. At the end of the century, the percentage of girls enrolled in primary school was relatively high, but, in 1878, the number of girls attending secondary school represented only 3.8% of the population. Even in 3

4 5 6

The area of the country was 47,516 km2 in 1833 and its population was 719,000; at the end of the century (1896), the area was 63,606 km2 and the population 2,434,000. See DERTILIS 2005, p. 399; DAKIN, 1982, pp. 104–23, 140–47, and 233–38; DERTILIS 2005, pp. 325–29, 299–03; SKOPETEA 1988, pp. 21–29; PETROPOULOS 1997, pp. 185–90, 307–19; LOUVI 2003, pp. 9–26; MAVROMOUSTAKOU 2003, pp. 27–50. BASTEA 1997, pp. 209–30; TSOUKALAS 2006, pp. 251–66, 423–48. See also TSOUKALAS 1991, pp. 215–22; DERTILIS 2005, pp. 399–400. DIMARAS 1987, pp. 45–46. See also DIMARAS 2003, pp. 184–89; DAKIN 1982, p. 381; TSOUKALAS 2006, pp. 392–97. In 1855, there were fifteen students in secondary education per one hundred students in primary schools, in 1860 11.5, in 1878 12.5, in 1895 8, and in 1901 14 (TSOUKALAS 2006, p. 399). In 1890, in Greece, there were twenty-five students in secondary education per a thousand inhabitants, in France 26, in Belgium 25, in Italy 22, in the U.S.A. 11 (TSOUKALAS 2006, p. 398, 401–03).

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the early twentieth century, the total percentage of female students in secondary education was 4.04%, and was never more than 9% of the total population. This fact alone proves that the professional positions requiring a minimum level of education were held by men.7 Schooling in private boarding schools for girls lasted for five years, and there girls studied foreign languages, music, needlework, and homemaking, the so-called “female arts.” The curriculum included only a few hours of mathematics and ancient Greek. Another option available to girls from lower classes was to enroll in vocational schools – sometimes known as Sunday School, the Poor Women’s Workshop, or Domestic and Vocational School – where the main curriculum consisted of home economics. The graduates became needlework teachers at schools or tutors, servants, and nurses in upper-class homes.8 The third and final choice was the Didaskalio, or normal school. Women who graduated from normal school could only work as schoolteachers. Among the most prestigious schools of this type was Arsakeion, which was located in the center of Athens and founded in 1837 by the Educational Society. Its ultimate aim was to train young teachers to teach in Greece and also in expatriate communities, such as those in Constantinople, Smyrna, Adrianople, and Alexandria, in order to preserve the Greek language and culture abroad.9 The University of Athens, which was established in 1837, consisted of four faculties, namely theology, philosophy, medicine, and law. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the departments of physics and mathematics were part of the Faculty of Philosophy. While boys could enroll at the university after secondary school, university education was not available to girls until 1890, when the first female student, Ioanna Stephanopoli, was admitted to the philosophical faculty.10 Despite the fact that Stephanopoli possessed all the required qualifications to be admitted, the university senate accepted her application with considerable reservation. However, the University and the Ministry of Education received pressure from two fronts: from the readers and editors of the Ladies’ Newspaper, the most influential periodical for women at the time, and from the bourgeoisie, 7 8

TSOUKALAS 2006, p. 425; DERTILIS 2005, p. 245. ZIOGOU-KARASTERGIOU 1986, pp. 69–70, 152–55; BAKALAKI/ELEGMITOU 1987, pp. 70, 78– 80, 133; FOURNARAKI 1987, pp. 16, 32; DIMARAS 2003, pp. 191–94; ANTONIOU 1989, pp. 120–23, 225–35, 238–44. For a discussion of gender biology, see REPOUSI 2003, pp. 187–96. 9 The Educational Society was founded in 1836 by Ioannis Kokkonis, an educator with great training and administrative experience; Georgios Gennadios, a teacher, scholar, and writer; and Misail Apostolidis, a priest, educator, and theologian. The schools founded by the Educational Society were named Arsakeion in honor of its most generous benefactor, Apostolos Arsakis, who was a physician, scholar, and politician. See “Historical Data: The Founders and the Benefactors of Filekpaideutiki Etaireia,” last modified July 23, 2013 (www.arsakeio.gr). See also ZIOGOU-KARASTERGIOU 1986, pp. 83–86; FOURNARAKI 1987, p. 39; KIRIAZOPOULOU 1996, pp. 64–73. 10 LAPPAS 2004, pp. 251–57. See also LAPPAS 2003, pp. 151–62; FOURNARAKI 1987, p. 59; PAPAPANOS 1970, pp. 37–38, 41–42, 119; TSOUKALAS 2006, pp. 430–48; LAMBROS 1896, pp. 183–89; KRITIKOS 1995, pp. 21–49.

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which hoped to see their daughters study at the university level. This pressure, which was reinforced by the fact that women were being admitted into several European universities, compelled the University of Athens to open its doors to women.11 3.2 The First Female Graduates from the University of Athens As already mentioned, the University of Athens first allowed women to enroll in 1890. Until then, many of the girls who wanted to study science went abroad, where they flourished. Sevasti Kallisperi was a typical case; she was a Greek student at the Sorbonne, which admitted her after an examination. Although she passed an examination administered by a board of Greek secondary school and university teachers, the government refused to give her a scholarship, its excuse being that no funding was available for female students. Her father, though hardly wealthy, paid for her tuition in France.12 Maria Kalapothaki and Irini Nafpliotou are similar cases. They both studied medicine in Paris. Kalapothaki had attended school in the U.S. in her early years. She was accepted to the Medical School of Paris in 1886, where she worked alongside great physicians and wrote her doctoral thesis on infant health. In 1894, she returned to Greece, where she practiced general medicine in several hospitals. She also taught hygiene at the Arsakeion normal school. For her part, Nafpliotou was awarded a doctoral degree in Paris for a thesis entitled Arithmic.13 11 ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 147–53. The editor-in-chief and founder of the Ladies’ Newspaper was Kallirhoe Parren, a prominent figure in the Greek feminist movement; see KONSTANTINIDOU 1990, p. 10; NIKOLAIDOU 1936, p. 94; ȂȑȖĮ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȩȞ ǺȚȠȖȡĮijȚțȩȞ ȁİȟȚțȩȞ [Expansive Greek Biographical Dictionary], s.v. “ȆĮȡȡȑȞ, ȀĮȜȜȚȡȡȩȘ”; Women in World History, s.v. “Parren, Kallirhoe”. 12 On Sevasti Kallisperi, see Kallirhoe Parren, “ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ IJĮțIJȚțȒ ijȠȚIJȒIJȡȚĮ IJȘȢ ȈȠȡȕȩȞȘȢ” [“Greek Woman a Regular Student at the Sorbonne”], Ladies’ Newspaper (February 7, 1888), pp. 3–4; idem, “ȅȚ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ țĮIJȐ IJȠ 1898” [“The Greek Women of 1898”], Ladies’ Newspaper (January 1, 1889), pp. 1–2; idem, “ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ ijȠȚIJȒIJȡȚĮ ʌĮȡȐ IJȘ țĮ ȀĮȡȞȫ” [“A Greek Female Student by Mrs. Karno”], Ladies’ Newspaper (August 13, 1889), p. 6; idem, “ȂȚĮ ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ ʌIJȣȤȚȠȪȤȠȢ IJȘȢ ȈȠȡȕȫȞȘȢ” [“A Greek Female Graduate at the Sorbonne”], Ladies’ Newspaper (August 25, 1891), pp. 3–4; A picture of Kallisperi is printed in the issue of the Ladies’ Newspaper published on September 22, 1891 (p. 1); The issue of February 9, 1892 mentions that Kallisperi took the title Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne. For additional information about Kallisperi, see XIRADAKI 1994, pp. 51, 53–54; “ǼțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȠȓ įȚįȐȟĮȞIJİȢ ıIJĮ ıȤȠȜİȓĮ IJȘȢ ĭȚȜİțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȒȢ ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮȢ” [“Ǽducators who Taught at the Schools of the Educational Society”], in 1836–1996: A Hundred and Sixty Years of Education (1996), p. 413 (Appendix 1); RIZAKI 2007, pp. 200, 209, 222, 253; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 117, 143, 304. 13 On Maria Kalapothaki and Irini Nafpliotou, see Kallirhoe Parren, “ȅȚ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ țĮIJȐ IJȠ ȑIJȠȢ 1888” [“Greek Women during the Year 1888”], Ladies’ Newspaper (January 1, 1889), pp. 1– 2; idem, “ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ İʌȚıIJȒȝȠȞİȢ” [“Greek Female Scientists”], Ladies’ Newspaper (February 9, 1892), p. 4; idem, “ǺȚȕȜȓĮ” [“Books”], Ladies’ Newspaper (May 12, 1896), p. 7; idem, “ȀĮșȘȝİȡȚȞĮȓ İȞIJȣʌȫıİȚȢ: Ș įİıʌȠȚȞȓȢ ȀĮȜĮʌȠșȐțȘ” [“Daily Impressions: Ms. Kalapotha-

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Florentia Fountoukli also went to Paris to study mathematics, but she returned after her father’s illness. Later, she went to Germany to study pedagogy with a scholarship from Arsakeion, which she won on the strength of her exams. Having returned to Greece, she enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Athens to study mathematics and thus fulfilled her wishes.14 After the University of Athens had admitted its first female student, many articles about women academics began to appear in the Ladies’ Newspaper. Most of these were written by Kallirhoe Parren, and they showcased a number of women who had entered the university with great difficulty and had worked assiduously for their success. Such students included Thiresia Roka, who earned a Ph.D. in Greek literature; Polymnia Panagiotidou, the first Greek woman to study pharmaceutics at the University of Athens and the first to operate her own drugstore; as well as the physicians Eleni Antoniadou, Anna Katsigra, Anthi Vasiliadou, and the sisters Angeliki and Alexandra Panagiotatou, who studied medicine at the University of Athens.15 ki”], Ladies’ Newspaper (September 22, 1896), pp. 2–3; idem, “ĭȚȜȠȜȠȖȚțȒ țȓȞȘıȚȢ” [“Literary Activity”], Ladies’ Newspaper (November 22, 1898), p. 8; idem, “Ǿ įȡȐıȚȢ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ țĮIJȐ IJȠ 1898 [“The Accomplishments of Greek Women in 1898”], Ladies’ Newspaper (January 1, 1899), pp. 2–3. For additional information about Maria Kalapothaki, see XIRADAKI 1994, pp. 47, 59, 65, 72; ATSAVE 1996, pp. 175, 177; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 143, 152, 201, 203; Who’s Who in Greece: Biographical Dictionary, s.v. “ȂĮȡȓĮ ȀĮȜĮʌȠșȐțȘ” [“Maria Kalapothaki”]. 14 The mathematics department was part of the Faculty of Philosophy until 1904 (see KRITIKOS 1995, p. 34; and STEFANIDIS 1948, pp. 25–26). On Florentia Fountoukli, who was also a poet, see Kallirhoe Parren, “ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ țȐIJȠȤȠȢ IJȠȣ İȞ īĮȜȜȓĮ Brevet Superieur” [“A Greek Woman Earns the French Brevet Superieur”], Ladies’ Newspaper (July 31, 1888), pp. 3–4; idem, “ȅȚ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ țĮIJȐ IJȠ ȑIJȠȢ 1888” [“Greek Women during the Year 1888”], Ladies’ Newspaper (January 1, 1889), pp. 1–2; idem, “ĭȜȦȡİȞIJȓĮ ĭȠȣȞIJȠȣțȜȒ ijȠȚIJȒIJȡȚĮ IJȘȢ ȂĮșȘȝĮIJȚțȒȢ ȈȤȠȜȒȢ” [“Florentia Fountoukli, a Student in the Faculty of Mathematics”], Ladies’ Newspaper (October 25, 1892), p. 5. See also FOUNTOUKLI 1949; XIRADAKI 1994, p. 77; “ǼțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȠȓ įȚįȐȟĮȞIJİȢ ıIJĮ ıȤȠȜİȓĮ IJȘȢ ĭȚȜİțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȒȢ ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮȢ” [“Ǽducators who Taught at the Schools of the Educational Society”], in 1836–1996: A Hundred and Sixty Years of Education (1996), p. 414 (Appendix 1); RIZAKI 2007, p. 69; VARIKA 2004, pp. 282, 367; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 150–51, 167. 15 The articles in the Ladies’ Newspaper concerned with Ioanna Stephanopoli and other female students at the University of Athens are too numerous to mention in full. For indicative examples, see Kallirhoe Parren, “Ǿ įİıʌȠȚȞȓȢ ȈIJİijĮȞȩʌȠȜȚ” [“Ms. Stephanopoli”], Ladies’ Newspaper (October 7, 1890), p. 4; idem, “Ǿ įİıʌȠȚȞȓȢ ȈIJİijĮȞȩʌȠȜȚ ȖİȞȠȝȑȞȘ įİțIJȒ İȞ IJȦ ǼșȞȚțȫ ȆĮȞİʌȚıIJȘȝİȓȦ” [“Ms. Stephanopoli was Accepted by the National University”], Ladies’ Newspaper (October 14, 1890), pp. 2–3; idem, “ȀĮȚ ȐȜȜȘ ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ ijȠȚIJȒIJȡȚĮ ĬȘȡİıȓĮ ȇȠțȐ” [“Another Greek Student: Thiresia Roka”], Ladies’ Newspaper (September 27, 1892), p. 5; idem, “Ǿ ǻȚȢ ǹȞșȒ ǺĮıȚȜİȚȐįȠȣ ȞȑĮ ȚĮIJȡȩȢ” [“Ms. Anthi Vasiliadou, a Young Doctor”], Ladies’ Newspaper (December 13, 1898), pp. 4–5; idem, “Ǿ įȡȐıȚȢ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ țĮIJȐ IJȠ 1898” [“The Accomplishments of Greek Women in 1898”], Ladies’ Newspaper (January 1, 1899), pp. 2–3; idem, “ǹȚ ĮȡȚıIJİȪıĮıĮȚ ȞȑĮȚ ijȠȚIJȒIJȡȚĮȓ ȝĮȢ” [“Our New and Excelling Female Students”], Ladies’ Newspaper (November 28, 1899), p. 6. On Ioanna Stephanopoli, see also LAPPAS 2004, pp. 251–57; RIZAKI 2007, pp. 146–47; VARIKA 2004, p. 140; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 59, 147–48. On Thiresia Roka, see the anonymously authored article “ĬȘ-

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Figure 3.1: From the left: Polymnia Panagiotidou (Skokos Journal 1900, issue 15); Ioanna Stephanopoli (Attikon Mousion 1890, vol.3, issue 14); Anthi Vasiliadou (Skokos Journal 1903, issue 18); Thiresia Roka (Skokos Journal 1899, issue 14).

Although these women were well-known female scientists at the turn of twentieth-century Greece, almost none of them went on to have an academic career. Many were physicians; Anna Katsigra, for example, studied medicine at the University of Athens and Paris. She entered the medical profession in 1902, and from 1903 to 1905 she directed the State Maternity Hospital of Athens. In 1905 she established her own practice. During the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, and the First World War, she worked on the front.16 Anthi Vasiliadou also studied medicine at the University of Athens. After her graduation she went to Paris, where she worked as an assistant clinical physician in the maternity clinic known simply as “Maternites,” the most famous gynecological institute in Paris. She was very active in Greece, too, where she participated as a physician in nursing courses during the wars of 1897 and 1912–1913. She ȡİıȓĮ ȇȠțȐ. Ǿ ʌȡȫIJȘ ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ įȚįȐțIJȦȡ IJȘȢ ijȚȜȠȜȠȖȓĮȢ” [“Thiresia Roka: The First Greek Woman with a Ph.D. in Literature”], Skokos Journal (1899), p. 32; “ǼțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȠȓ įȚįȐȟĮȞIJİȢ ıIJĮ ıȤȠȜİȓĮ IJȘȢ ĭȚȜİțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȒȢ ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮȢ” [“Ǽducators who Taught at the Schools of the Educational Society”], in 1836–1996: A Hundred and Sixty Years of Education (1996), p. 414 (Appendix 1); VARIKA 2004, pp. 333–34; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 149, 249. On Polymnia Panagiotidou, see VARIKA 2004, pp. 258, 335; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, p. 153; “ȆȠȜȪȝȞȚĮ ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȓįȠȣ. Ǿ ʌȡȫIJȘ ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ įȚįȐțIJȦȡ IJȘȢ ĭĮȡȝĮțİȣIJȚțȒȢ” [Polymnia Panagiotidou: The first Greek Woman with a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics”], Skokos Journal (1900), p. 224 (anonymous); Greek Biographical Dictionary, s.v. “ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȓįȠȣ ȆȠȜȪȝȞȚĮ” [Panagiotidou, Polymnia]. On Eleni Antoniadou, see XIRADAKI 1994, p. 72; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 152–53. 16 On Anna Katsigra, see Who’s Who in Greece: Biographical Dictionary, s.v. “ȀĮIJıȓȖȡĮ DZȞȞĮ” [Katsigra, Anna]; XIRADAKI 1994, p. 72; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 152–53, 214. See also Kallirhoe Parren, “ǹȚ ȚĮIJȡȠȓ ț.ț. ǹȖȖİȜȚțȒ ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȐIJȠȣ țĮȚ DZȞȞĮ ȀĮIJıȓȖȡĮ” [“The Physicians Mrs. Angelique Panagiotatou and Anna Katsigra”], Ladies’ Newspaper (May 1– 15, 1908), p. 215.

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also had numerous patients as a gynecologist, and she was the first female physician to work at the women’s prison in Athens.17 3.3 The Case of Angeliki Panagiotatou Angeliki Panagiotatou, the first woman to graduate from the Faculty of Medicine in Greece, was born around 1874 in Cephalonia, Greece, and died in 1954 in Alexandria, Egypt. She descended from an upper-class family, the children of which were expected to enter academia. Her parents supported her, just as they likewise supported her sister and brother. Angeliki graduated with distinction from the University of Athens, and in 1897 she defended her Ph.D. thesis. She and her sister Alexandra faced a good deal of adversity from their fellow students, who would greet them by shouting “To the kitchen! To the kitchen!” whenever they appeared in class, at least in the beginning.18

Figure 3.2: Angeliki and her sister Alexandra Panagiotatou (Source: PANAGǿOTATOU 1951).

17 “ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ įȚįȐțIJȠȡİȢ: ǹȞșȒ ǺĮıȚȜİȚȐįȠȣ” [“Greek Women with a Ph.D.: Anthi Vasiliadou”], Skokos Journal (1903), pp. 97–99 (anonymous); XIRADAKI 1994, p. 72; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 129, 143, 152, 214; RIZAKI 2007, p. 68; VARIKA 2004, pp. 282, 367. 18 See POULAKOU-REBELAKOU 2008, pp. 677–78; XIRADAKI 1972, vol. 2, pp. 124–25. On the historical procedure for earning a Ph.D. at the University of Athens, see KRITIKOS 1995, p. 41.

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However, both managed to complete their degrees at the University of Athens, and both went abroad to continue their studies. Unfortunately, Alexandra Panagiotatou died very young, while specializing in gynecology and pediatrics in Vienna.19 After her graduation, Angeliki Panagiotatou worked for a while as a French teacher at the Arsakeion normal school in Athens. As she notes in her autobiography, she was married once but soon divorced on account of her husband’s jealousy of her. She moved to Alexandria in 1900, where she worked briefly at the Averofion normal school. After passing an examination, Angeliki was ultimately appointed to be a physician-hygienist at the State Hospital and Health Department in Alexandria. There she devoted her efforts to the systematic microbiological study of major tropical and epidemic diseases, including cholera and plague.20 Having returned to Greece after a long period of scientific activity, Angeliki became, in 1908, a university assistant in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Athens. Her doctoral thesis, which she defended with success, was entitled “On Plague.” In her first tutorial, she faced with stoicism the disapproval of the male students, who stomped loudly on the floor whenever she entered the class. Angeliki’s strategy for survival was to excel in her scientific work.21 In 1921, Panagiotatou continued her training at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where she had the opportunity to work alongside the distinguished professor Alphonse Laveran. During that same year she was invited to teach courses at the Sorbonne, an invitation she had to decline on account of her responsibilities at the Pasteur Institute and at various Parisian hospitals. Instead, she gave a lecture at the Sorbonne, in front of a large audience, entitled “On the Gymnastics of the Ancient Greeks.” The lecture was a resounding success, a fact that she referred to emotionally in her autobiography.22 19 On Alexandra Panagiotatou, see the anonymously authored article “Alexandra Panagiotatou,” Noumas (January 16, 1903), p. 8; and the anonymously written obituary, “ȃİțȡȠȜȠȖȓĮ ǹȜİȟȐȞįȡĮ ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȐIJȠȣ” [“Obituary for Alexandra Panagiotatou”], Skokos Journal (1904), pp. 31–32. 20 On Angeliki’s career as a teacher, see KAIRI 1936, pp. 105–06; PAPANIKOLAOU 1996, pp. 319–21; XIRADAKI 1972, vol. 2, pp. 124–25. See also PANAGIOTATOU 1951, pp. 3–6. 21 The articles on Angeliki Panagiotatou in the Ladies’ Newspaper are too numerous to mention. Indicative examples include E. Georgiadou, “ȃȑĮȚ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ İʌȚıIJȒȝȠȞİȢ” [“New Greek Women Scientists”], Ladies’ Newspaper (July 12, 1892), p. 7; Kallirhoe Parren, “ǼȜȜȘȞȓȢ ȚĮIJȡȩȢ İȚȢ ǺȚȑȞȞȘȞ” [“A Greek Female Physician in Vienna”], Ladies’ Newspaper (April 5, 1898), p. 7; idem, “īȣȞĮȚțİȓĮ țȓȞȘıȚȢ” [“Women’s Movement”], Ladies’ Newspaper (April 15–30, 1908), p. 190; idem, “ǹȚ ȚĮIJȡȠȓ ț.ț. ǹȖȖİȜȚțȒ ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȐIJȠȣ țĮȚ DZȞȞĮ ȀĮIJıȓȖȡĮ” [“The Physicians Angelique Panagiotatou and Anna Katsigra”], Ladies’ Newspaper (May 1– 15, 1908), p. 215; idem, “Ǿ ʌȡȫIJȘ ȣijȘȖȒIJȡȚĮ IJȠȣ ȆĮȞİʌȚıIJȘȝȓȠȣ ǹșȘȞȫȞ” [“The First Female Assistant Professor at the University of Athens”], Ladies’ Newspaper (June 1–15, 1908), p. 251. See also PANAGIOTATOU 1951; DERVOU-POTAMIANOU 1954; ANASTASOPOULOU 2003, pp. 151–52, 158; VARIKA 2004, p. 248. Angeliki Panagiotatou also edited literary work; see, for example, A. Panagiotatou, “ȈȠȞȐIJĮ ʌȩȞȠȢ” [“Sonata Pain”], Skokos Journal (1908), pp. 141–48; and idem, “ȅıȝȫȞ IJȩȞȠȚ” [“Odor’s Sounds”], Skokos Journal (1901), pp. 355–58. 22 PANAGIOTATOU 1951, pp. 21–22.

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Figure 3.3: Angeliki Panagiotatou (Source: PANAGǿOTATOU 1951).

While in Paris, Angeliki also took part in the Second International Congress of the History of Medicine, where she was lauded for her paper “On the Famine as it was Described by Thucydides.” She participated in many other conferences and congresses, and she received awards for her work from the Academy of Medicine in Paris and from several other international institutions.23 Despite her international career, it was not until 1938 that Panagiotatou managed to become a temporary professor of epidemiology at the University of Athens. Nine years later she would become the first female ordinary professor in the Faculty of Medicine. The Medical Society of Athens elected her as one of its members in 1946, and four years before her death, in 1950, Panagiotatou was named a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens.24 In addition to her scientific achievements, she engaged in remarkable national and social activity. Her salon in Alexandria was an active intellectual center, frequented by leading representatives of the arts and sciences. The intelligentsia of Alexandria and visitors from Greece rushed to visit her home to exchange ideas with their peers. Panagiotatou also founded many social institutions that greatly helped the Greek and the native population of the city. Her efforts were significant and often acknowledged by her contemporaries. In the book Führende Frauen Europas, which was published in 1930, Elga Kern numbered her among the twenty-five most important European women of her time.25

23 Ibid., pp. 24–25, 71–73. 24 DERVOU-POTAMIANOU 1954, pp. 11–13; PANAGIOTATOU 1951, pp. 106–07. 25 PANAGIOTATOU 1930, pp. 194–99.

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3.4 The Public Activism of Greece’s First Women Physicians The first generation of women to earn graduate degrees from the University of Athens was, for the most part, unable to enter academia. Instead, they worked as school teachers or, if they were physicians, in hospitals; most of them had to move abroad, because professional opportunities in their own country were lacking. It should be stressed, however, that these pioneering women scientists had a notable presence in Greek public life. The first female physicians participated in the founding of the Association of Greek Women in 1896. This was an initiative of Kallirhoe Parren, the editor of the Ladies’ Newspaper, and the president of the association was none other than Queen Olga of Greece. Its stated purpose was to work for national needs and to promote the education of women, but its most remarkable achievement was its contribution to the needs that arose in the wake of the 1897 Greco-Turkish war.26 The aforementioned physician Maria Kalapothaki, for example, served in several field hospitals, and her assistance in training volunteer nurses during the war of 1897 – as well as during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 – was crucial. Kalapothaki was the leader of one of the most laudable initiatives, namely that of the establishment of the field hospital in Volos in 1897. Anna Katsigra and Eleni Antoniadou, both students at the time in the Faculty of Medicine, and thereafter physicians, also worked as assistant surgeons in the field hospital of Volos.27 The first Greek female scientists, especially the physicians, also contributed significantly to the undertakings of the Lyceum of Greek Women, which Parren had founded on December 10, 1910. According to its founder, it was established in accordance with the standards of Lyceum Societies in Europe and America, and its purpose was to bring together women from the arts and sciences and generally to promote the advancement of women’s place in society.28 During first few years after the establishment of the Lyceum, numerous lectures, mainly on hygiene, were organized by Greek female physicians. Most were addressed to mothers who had to care for their families. Thus, in the 1911 volume of the Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women, we can see that courses on hygiene were organized in primary schools by female physicians in cooperation with 26 On the social activism of the Union of Greek Women, see Kallirhoe Parren, “ǼșȞȚțȩȞ IJȝȒȝĮ ǼȞȫıİȦȢ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ” [“The National Branch of the Union of Greek Women”], Ladies’ Newspaper (February 16, 1897), pp. 6–7; idem, “ȀĮșȘȝİȡȚȞĮȓ İȞIJȣʌȫıİȚȢ: Ș įİıʌȠȚȞȓȢ ȀĮȜĮʌȠșȐțȘ” [“Daily Impressions: Ms. Kalapothaki”], Ladies’ Newspaper (April 20, 1897), pp. 4–5; idem, “ȉİȜİIJȒ İȖțĮȚȞȓȦȞ IJȘȢ țȜȚȞȚțȒȢ IJȠȣ ȞȠıȘȜİȣIJȚțȠȪ IJȝȒȝĮIJȠȢ IJȘȢ ǼȞȫıİȦȢ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ” [“The Inauguration of the Healthcare Clinic of the Union of Greek Women”], Ladies’ Newspaper (January 1, 1898), p. 5. See also XIRADAKI 1994, pp. 55–56, 58, 65, 72; PARREN 1899, pp. 3–84. 27 PARREN 1899, pp. 94–96. 28 Kallirhoe Parren discussed the purpose and goals of the Lyceum of Greek Women in a lecture to the Literary Society Parnassus. Her lecture was published in the Ladies’ Newspaper; see Kallirhoe Parren, “Ǿ įȚȐȜİȟȚȢ IJȘȢ țȣȡȓĮȢ ȀĮȜȜȚȡȡȩȘȢ ȆĮȡȡȑȞ İȚȢ IJȠȞ ȆĮȡȞĮııȩȞ” [“The Lecture of Mrs. Kallirhoe Parren in Parnassus”], Ladies’ Newspaper (March 15–31, 1911), pp. 1548–50. See also ANDRIOTIS/ PROTOPAPPA 2010, p. 22.

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the Ministry of Education. These classes were also attended by parents. Anna Katsigra gave lectures on nursing infants, on school hygiene, and on germs. Maria Kalapothaki reported on preventive health measures for children’s spines. Anthi Vasiliadou talked about clothing and the care of infants and adolescents.29 Ahead of the Balkan wars, in 1912, the doctors Anthi Vasiliadou and Maria Kalapothaki organized courses for wartime nurses, and 350 female students enrolled. Their lectures resumed in 1913 with courses for working-class women. The aim of these courses was to allow female students to fulfill their duties to their families.30 From 1914 to 1921, according to the Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women, Anthi Vasiliadou, Maria Kalapothaki, and other female scientists held lectures on several issues related to their specialties. There are records of courses on hygiene, preventative health, and infectious diseases, but also on mathematics, chemistry, and pedagogy. From 1921 onward, the Lyceum of Greek Women was devoted to national and charitable activities, with some interventions in important feminist issues. During this time, the number of scientific lectures was significantly reduced.31 3.5 Epilogue Although, by working briefly as a teacher, Angeliki Panagiotatou began her career in a somewhat stereotypical manner, she overcame several obstacles, lived alone abroad, and was ultimately able to dedicate her life to science. For her intensive efforts, which were acknowledged by international awards, she was made a member of the Academy of Athens just before the Second World War. Even with the assistance of her parents, Angeliki’s career path was a difficult one; most of her contemporary female scientists in Greece, despite their university educations, did not have the opportunity to pursue an academic career. Instead, a number of them assumed leading roles in the public sphere, as is clear from the intense activity of Greek female physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their contribution to the improvement of public health, which was a great concern of the state at that time, together with their contribution to the modernization of the Greek society, is evidence enough of their multifaceted activity.32

29 Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1911), pp. 14–15. 30 Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1912), pp. 6–7; Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1913), pp. 4–5. 31 Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1914), p. 13; Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1915), p. 11; Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1920), pp. 8–9; Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women (1921), pp. 8–9. See also PSARRA 2010, p. 28. 32 On the issue of the link between public health and the modernization of the state, see PAPASTEFANAKI 2011.

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Bibliography ǼijȘȝİȡȓȢ IJȦȞ ȀȣȡȚȫȞ [Ladies’ Newspaper], 1887–1917. ǾȝİȡȠȜȩȖȚȠȞ ȈțȩțȠȣ [Skokos Journal], 1899–1908. ȅ ȃȠȣȝȐȢ [Noumas], 1903. ȁȠȖȠįȠıȓĮ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ 1911–1921 [Records of the Lyceum of Greek Women, 1911– 1921]. H EȜȜȐȢ țĮIJȐ IJȠȣȢ ȅȜȣȝʌȚĮțȠȪȢ ĮȖȫȞĮȢ IJȠȣ 1896 [Greece during the Olympic Games of 1896]. Athens: Estia. PARREN, Kallirhoe (1899). DzțșİıȚȢ IJȦȞ ʌİʌȡĮȖȝȑȞȦȞ ȣʌȩ IJȘȢ ǼȞȫıİȦȢ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ1897– 1898 [Report on the Activities of the Union of Greek Women, 1897–1898]. Athens. STEFANIDIS, Michael (1948). ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȘȢ ĭȣıȚțȠȝĮșȘȝĮIJȚțȒȢ ȈȤȠȜȒȢ. ǼțĮIJȠȞIJĮİIJȘȡȓȢ 1837– 1937 [History of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics: One Hundredth Anniversary, 1837–1937]. Vol. 5. Issue 1. Athens: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Biographical Dictionary (1958). Who’s Who in Greece. 1st ed. Athens. Expansive Greek Biographical Dictionary (1959). Ed. Spiros Vovolinis and Konstantinos Vovolinis. Athens: Industrial Inspection. Women in World History (1999–2002). Ed. Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer. Waterford, CT: York Publications. AGRIANTONI, Christina (1986). ȅȚ ĮʌĮȡȤȑȢ IJȘȢ İțȕȚȠȝȘȤȐȞȚıȘȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ IJȠ 19Ƞ ĮȚȫȞĮ [The Beginnings of Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Greece]. Athens: Historical Archive of Commercial Bank of Greece. ANASTASOPOULOU, Maria (2003). ȀĮȜȜȚȡȡȩȘ ȆĮȡȡȑȞ [Kallirhoe Parren]. Athens: Heliodromion. ANDRIOTIS, Nikos; PROTOPAPPA, Eleni (2010). “ǹȞĮįȡȠȝȒ ıIJȘȞ ȚıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ” [“A Return to the History of the Lyceum of Greek Women”]. In ȁȪțİȚȠȞ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ 100 ȤȡȩȞȚĮ [Lyceum of Greek Women: 100 Years]. Athens: Piraeus Bank Cultural Foundation, pp. 19–85. ANTONIOU, David (1989). ȉĮ ʌȡȠȖȡȐȝȝĮIJĮ IJȘȢ ȂȑıȘȢ ǼțʌĮȓįİȣıȘȢ 1833–1929 [The Secondary School Curriculum, 1833–1929]. Athens: Historic Archive of Greek Youth. ATSAVE, Panagiota (1996). “ȉĮ ıȤȠȜİȓĮ IJȘȢ ĭȚȜİțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȒȢ ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ” [“The Schools of the Greek Educational Society”]. In 1836–1996: A Hundred and Sixty Years of Education. Ed. G. Babiniotis. Athens: Athens Educational Society, pp. 149–98. BAKALAKI, Alexandra; ELEGMITOU, Eleni (1987). Ǿ ǼțʌĮȓįİȣıȘ İȚȢ IJĮ IJȠȣ ȠȓțȠȣ țĮȚ IJĮ ȖȣȞĮȚțİȓĮ țĮșȒțȠȞIJĮ [Teaching Homemaking and Women’s Duties]. Athens: Historic Archive of Greek Youth. BASTEA, Eleni (1997). “Regularization and Resistance: Urban Transformations in Late Nineteenth-Century Greece.” In Greek Society in the Making (1863–1913). Ed. Philip Carabott. London: Centre for Hellenic Studies, pp. 209–30. DAKIN Douglas (1982). Ǿ İȞȠʌȠȓȘıȘ IJȘȢ ǼȜȜȐįĮȢ 1770–1923 [The Unification of Greece, 1770– 1923]. Athens: Greek Cultural Foundation of the National Bank. DERTILIS G.B. (2005). ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȠȣ İȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ țȡȐIJȠȣȢ 1830–1920 [History of the Greek State, 1830–1920]. Vol. 1. Athens: Bookstore of Estia. DERVOU-POTAMIANOU, Thalia (1954). Ǿ ȗȦȒ țĮȚ IJȠ ȑȡȖȠȞ IJȘȢ ǹȖȖİȜȚțȒȢ ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȐIJȠȣ [The Life and Work of Angeliki Panagiotatou]. (A lecture delivered forty days after the death of Angeliki Panagiotatou to the Association of Greek Women Scientists. DIMARAS, Alexis (1987). Ǿ ȝİIJĮȡȡȪșȝȚıȘ ʌȠȣ įİȞ ȑȖȚȞİ [The Reformation that Never Ended]. Vol. 1. Athens: New Greek Library, pp. 45–46. ʊ (2003). “ǼțʌĮȓįİȣıȘ 1830-1871” (“Education, 1830–1871”). In History of Modern Hellenism. Vol. 4. Athens: Greek Letters, pp. 184–89.

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FOUNTOUKLI, Marianna (1949). Florentia Fountoukli. Athens: Marianna Fountoukli. FOURNARAKI, Eleni (1987). ǼțʌĮȓįİȣıȘ țĮȚ ǹȖȦȖȒ IJȦȞ țȠȡȚIJıȚȫȞ [The Education and Upbringing of Women]. Athens: Historic Archive of Greek Youth. KAIRI, Penelope (1936). “ǹȖȖİȜȚțȒ ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦIJȐIJȠȣ” [Angeliki Panagiotatou]. In Women figures of Arsakeion. Athens: Athens Educational Society, pp. 105–06. KIRIAZOPOULOU, Eugenia (1996). “ǴįȡȣıȘ IJȘȢ ĭȚȜİțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȒȢ ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮȢ” [The Establishment of the Educational Society]. In 1836–1996 ǼțĮIJȩȞ İȟȒȞIJĮ ȤȡȩȞȚĮ ʌĮȚįİȓĮȢ [1836–1996: A Hundred and Sixty Years of Education]. Ed. G. Babiniotis. Athens: Athens Educational Society, pp. 64–73. KONSTANTINIDOU, Loula (1990). Kallirhoe Parren, 50 Years After Her Death. Athens. KRITIKOS, Theodoros (1995). Ǿ ʌȡȩıȜȘȥȘ IJȘȢ İʌȚıIJȘȝȠȞȚțȒȢ ıțȑȥȘȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ [The Importation of Scientific Thought in Greece]. Athens: Papazisis. LAPPAS, Kostas (2003). “ȆĮȞİʌȚıIJȒȝȚȠ ǹșȘȞȫȞ” [“The University of Athens”]. In History of Modern Hellenism. Vol. 4. Athens: Greek Letters, pp. 151–62. ʊ (2004). ȆĮȞİʌȚıIJȒȝȚȠ țĮȚ ijȠȚIJȘIJȑȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ țĮIJȐ IJȠ 19Ƞ ĮȚȫȞĮ [The University and its Students in Nineteenth-Century Greece]. Athens: Institute of Neohellenic Research. LOUVI, Lina (2003). “ȉȠ İȜȜȘȞȚțȩ țȡȐIJȠȢ 1833–1871” [“The Greek State, 1833–1871”]. In History of Modern Hellenism. Vol. 4. Athens: Greek Letters, pp. 9–26. MAVROMOUSTAKOU, Ivy (2003). “ȉȠ İȜȜȘȞȚțȩ țȡȐIJȠȢ 1833–1871” [“The Greek State, 1833– 1871”]. In History of Modern Hellenism. Vol. 4. Athens: Greek Letters, pp. 27–50. NIKOLAIDOU, Irini (1936). “Kallirhoe Parren.” In ĭȣıȚȠȖȞȦȝȓĮȚ IJȚȞȑȢ ǹȡıĮțİȚȐįȦȞ. Ǽʌ’ İȣțĮȚȡȓĮ IJȘȢ İțĮIJȠȞIJĮİIJȘȡȓįȠȢ IJȘȢ ĭȚȜİțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȒȢ ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮȢ 1836–1936 [Women Figures of Arsakeion: On the Occasion of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Educational Society, 1836–1936]. Athens: Educational Society. PANAGIOTATOU, Angelique (1930). “Angelique Panagiotatou”. In Führende Frauen Europas. Ed. Elga Kern. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, pp. 194–99. ʊ (1951). ȅ ĮȖȫȞ IJȘȢ ȗȦȒȢ ȝȠȣ [The Struggle of My Life]. Alexandria. PAPANIKOLAOU, Nina (1996). “Ǿ įȡĮıIJȘȡȚȩIJȘIJĮ IJȦȞ ǹȡıĮțİȚȐįȦȞ” [“The Activity of the Women of Arsakeion”]. In 1836–1996 ǼțĮIJȩȞ İȟȒȞIJĮ ȤȡȩȞȚĮ ʌĮȚįİȓĮȢ [1836–1996, A Hundred and Sixty Years of Education]. Ed. G. Babiniotis. Athens: Athens Educational Society, pp. 309–41. PAPAPANOS, Kostas (1970). ȋȡȠȞȚțȩ-ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȘȢ ǹȞȦIJȐIJȘȢ ȝĮȢ ǼțʌĮȚįİȪıİȦȢ [A History of our Higher Education]. Athens: Pierce College. PAPASTEFANAKI, Leda (2011). “Politics, Modernization and Public Health in Greece: The Case of Occupational Health, 1900–1940.” In Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945. Ed. C. Promitzer et al. Budapest: Central European University Press. PETROPOULOS, John (1997). ȆȠȜȚIJȚțȒ țĮȚ ıȣȖțȡȩIJȘıȘ țȡȐIJȠȣȢ ıIJȠ İȜȜȘȞȚțȩ ȕĮıȓȜİȚȠ1833–1843 [Policy and State-Formation in the Greek Kingdom, 1833–1843]. Athens: National Bank Cultural Foundation. POULAKOU-REBELAKOU, Eleftheria (2008). “ȊʌĮȡțIJȠȓ țĮȚ ȝȣșȚıIJȠȡȘȝĮIJȚțȠȓ ijȠȚIJȘIJȑȢ IJȘȢ ǿĮIJȡȚțȒȢ ıIJȚȢ ıİȜȓįİȢ IJȘȢ ĮıIJȚțȒȢ ȜȠȖȠIJİȤȞȓĮȢ 1850–1910” [“Real and Fictional Medical Students in the Pages of Civil Literature, 1850–1910”]. Archives of Hellenic Medicine 25, pp. 673–84. PSARRA, Angelika (2010). “Kallirhoe Parren.” In Lyceum of Greek Women: 100 Years. Athens: Piraeus Bank Cultural Foundation, pp. 26–29. REPOUSI, Maria (2003). “ȉȠ ijȪȜȠ IJȦȞ ȖȣȞĮȚțȫȞ” [“The Gender of Women”]. In History of Modern Hellenism. Vol. 5. Athens: Greek Letters, pp. 187–96. RIZAKI, Irini (2007). ȅȚ «ȖȡȐijȠȣıİȢ» ǼȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ [“Literary” Greek Women]. Athens: Katarti. SKOPETEA, Elli (1988). ȉȠ ʌȡȩIJȣʌȠ ȕĮıȓȜİȚȠ țĮȚ Ș ȂİȖȐȜȘ ǿįȑĮ [The Model Kingdom and the Grand Idea]. Athens: Polytypo.

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Konstantinos (1991). “ȀȡȐIJȠȢ țĮȚ țȠȚȞȦȞȓĮ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ IJȠȣ 19Ƞȣ ĮȚȫȞĮ” [“State and Society in Nineteenth-Century Greece”]. In Issues in Modern Greek History. Ed. G. B. Dertilis and K. Kostis. Athens: Ant. Sakkoulas, pp. 215–22. ʊ (2006). ǼȟȐȡIJȘıȘ țĮȚ AȞĮʌĮȡĮȖȦȖȒ. ȅ țȠȚȞȦȞȚțȩȢ ȡȩȜȠȢ IJȦȞ İțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȫȞ ȝȘȤĮȞȚıȝȫȞ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ 1830–1922 [Dependence and Reproduction: The Social Role of Educational Mechanisms in Greece, 1830–1922]. Athens: Themelio. VARIKA, Eleni (2004). Ǿ İȟȑȖİȡıȘ IJȦȞ ȀȣȡȚȫȞ [The Ladies’ Uprising]. Athens: Katarti. XIRADAKI, Koula (1972). ȆĮȡșİȞĮȖȦȖİȓĮ țĮȚ įĮıțȐȜİȢ IJȠȣ ȣʌȩįȠȣȜȠȣ İȜȜȘȞȚıȝȠȪ [Girls’ Boarding Schools and the Female Teachers of the Greek Diaspora]. 2 vols. Athens. ʊ (1994). ȅȚ ȖȣȞĮȓțİȢ ıIJȠȞ ĮIJȣȤȒ ʌȩȜİȝȠ IJȠȣ 1897 [Women in the Failed War of 1897]. Athens: Filippotis. ZIOGOU-KARASTERGIOU, Sidiroula (1986). Ǿ ȂȑıȘ ǼțʌĮȓįİȣıȘ IJȦȞ țȠȡȚIJıȚȫȞ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ 1830–1893 [The Secondary Education of Girls in Greece, 1830–1893]. Athens: Historic Archive of Greek Youth. TSOUKALAS,

PART II

THE ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING INDUSTRY Renate Tobies Electrical engineering dealt and deals with the study and application of electricity, electromagnetism, and later also with electronics. Beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century, electrical engineering corporations underwent an enormous development. This expansion was based on the commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, and the distribution of electric power. Practical applications and advances in such fields created an increasing need for standardized units of measurement, a standardization that was achieved in 1893 at an international conference in Chicago. At that time, the study of electricity was largely considered to be a subfield of physics. In 1882, the first department of electrical engineering was founded at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, and in the same year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Cornell University, the first degree program for electrical engineering was initiated in the physics department. The first professorship of electrical engineering in Great Britain was created at University College London in 1885. No women were able to study the subject formally then, but there were some female inventors and specialists at several corporations as early as the 1880s. Sarah Bagley, for example, was one of the earliest women to work as a telegraph operator. In the 1860s, Mathilde Fibinger became the first woman to be employed as a telegraph operator in Denmark. Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer and inventor who helped to develop electric arc lighting. She studied mathematics at Cambridge in 1880, but was denied a degree, for women were only granted certificates of completion at the time. Ayrton constructed a sphygmomanometer (pulse recorder) as a student, and patented a line-divider in 1884. This was a drafting instrument for engineering applications, which could divide a line into any number of equal parts and enlarge or reduce figures. Her invention was shown at the Exhibition of Women’s Industries and received significant attention from the press. Ayrton would become the first woman to be made a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers on the basis of her research.1 1

See MASON 1991; JONES 2009.

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At the Technical University of Darmstadt, women were first allowed to take part in lecture courses as “visitors” (Hospitantinnen) in 1896, and the first official female student began her studies in October of 1908. They favored the departments of chemistry and architecture. The first woman in the electrical engineering department, Irene Rischowski from Breslau, started in 1919, and completed an intermediate examination in 1921.2 Altogether there were only a few women who studied electrical engineering in Darmstadt and at other technical universities in Germany. As was the case in other disciplines, the enrollment of foreign women paved the way. Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu is known as the first woman engineer in Europe. Born in Romania, she began her studies at the Technical University of Berlin in 1909, when Prussian technical universities were first open to women. Ultimately, Zamfirescu became the first woman member of the General Association of Romanian Engineers. Elsbeth Steinheil, the daughter of an executive at the optical and astronomical firm A. Steinheil & Sons in Munich, earned a diploma in machine construction at the Technical University of Munich in 1917. Incidentally, her sister Hedwig Steinheil received a doctorate in physics at the University of Gießen in 1920. Altogether, a number of women in Germany went on to enjoy successful careers as engineers. Meanwhile, the first woman to graduate with an engineering degree in the United States was Nora Stanton Blatch, who completed her studies at Cornell University in 1905. In 1920, Olive Dennis became the second woman to earn an engineering degree there. Blatch, who was married to the inventor Lee de Forest, could have had a promising career in the communications industry if her husband not had insisted that she stay at home as a housewife. After divorcing, she worked as a structural-steel designer and architect, even despite having a child. Dennis, who had a solid training in mathematics, designed bridges for the B & O Railroad and became the first female member of the American Railway Engineering Association. The focus of the following sections will be on some of the outstanding female researchers in electrical engineering corporations during the first decades of the twentieth century and on the support they received from scientific and industrial patrons. The majority of the women in question had academic training in science and mathematics. However, there are also interesting examples of women working in industrial psychology and management. Chapter 4 concerns the first American engineer ever to create a synthesis of psychology and scientific management and her influence on a German woman in the same field. It is noteworthy here that the American woman Lillian Gilbreth was able to combine her work with being a wife and a mother of twelve children. Her management work included collaboration with the corporations IBM (International Business Machines) and Auergesellschaft, which was founded in 1892 with headquaters in Berlin.

2

See ZYBELL/KÜMMEL 2008. Later she lived in London until 1965.

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As an example of a woman’s career in electrical engineering grounded in mathematics and science, Edith Clarke must be mentioned.3 She was the first female electrical engineer in the United States and the first female professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. After completing a degree in mathematics and astronomy in 1908, she continued to study civil engineering independently and became a “Computer Assistant” at the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation in 1911. In 1918, Clarke earned an M.S. in electrical engineering from nearby MIT. As a supervisor in the Turbine Engineering Department at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., she invented the “Clarke calculator,” a graphical device patented in 1921. There are additional women who enjoyed careers at electrical corporations and whose interdisciplinary training resulted in doctorates in mathematics, physics, or chemistry. Chapter 5 concerns female researchers and their supporters at German industrial laboratories for electrical engineering (see also Figure 4.0). Chapter 6 presents the career of a Jewish woman who completed a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Bonn and became a mathematical consultant at prominent electrical engineering corporations in Germany, Belgium, and finally in the United States, where she also became a professor and chair of an electrical engineering department. Bibliography [STB] Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung, Runge – du Bois –Reymond Estate, Despositum 5. BRITTAIN, James E. (1985). “From Computer to Electrical Engineer: The Remarkable Career of Edith Clarke.” IEEE Transactions on Education E28, No. 4 (November), pp. 184–89. BYERS, Nina; WILLIAMS, Gary, eds. (2006). Out of the Shadows: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jewish Women (2005): A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jerusalem: Shalvi Publishing (CD-ROM). JOHNS, Claire G. (2009). Femininity, Mathematics and Science, c. 1880–1914. Basingstoke (Hampshire): Palgrave. MASON, Joan (1991). “Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923) and the Admission of Women to the Royal Society of London.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 45, pp. 201–20. STANLEY, Autumn (1993). Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Invention. London: Scarecrow Press. ZYBELL, Uta; KÜMMEL, Verena, eds. (2008). 100 Jahre Studium von Frauen an der TU Darmstadt (Dokumentation einer Ausstellung). Darmstadt: Technische Universität.

3

Her career has been studied in detail; see BRITTAIN 1985, from which all later biographical sketches derive.

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Figure 4.0: Researchers at the experimental laboratory of OSRAM’s Factory A, in Berlin (1924). Sitting in the middle: Dr. Iris Runge, with laboratory assistants sitting to her left and right. Standing (from left to right): Dr. Walter Heinze, Dr. Magdalene Hüninger, (unknown), Dr. Ilse Müller, Dipl.-Ing. H. Lutterbeck (Source: [STB] 754, p. 7v).

4 LILLIAN GILBRETH AND IRENE WITTE – WOMEN OF EFFICIENCY Herbert Mehrtens During the first third of the twentieth century and beyond, the two women at the heart of the present chapter were both involved in a research field that would now be called “management science.” “Scientific management” and “motion-time studies” were the earlier labels, and these mark a historical divide. The Principles of Scientific Management is the title of a small book by Frederick W. Taylor that, in 1911, introduced so-called “Taylorism” to the industrialized world.1 The concept acquired a depreciatory sound over time and was eventually replaced by methods-time measurement (MTM), the origins of which are usually associated with the name of Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Last but not least, the name Ford also has to be mentioned: In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the mass production of automobiles (the Ford Model T) with the assembly line and, after a bad experience with his initial workforce, he paid a wage that attracted the best workers to his factory. “Fordism” is a somewhat ambivalent term associated with monotonous labor on the assembly line and with the mass production of goods at affordable prices. Lillian Evelyn Moller Gilbreth was Frank Gilbreth’s spouse and collaborator as well as the mother of their twelve children (she was ten years his junior). The popular image is that of Cheaper by the Dozen (1948), a book written by two of her children, upon which a film of the same title was based (1950).2 The myth of the “twelve” was perpetuated by both Lillian and her children; it is a myth because the second child, Anne, died in 1912, so there were never twelve children together. It appears as if, within the family, the loss of the child left a deep emotional scar. Of course, it is also true that a “dozen” sounds much better than “eleven” to the public’s ear. The myth also overstates her role as a mother and underplays her professional life both as Frank’s collaborator and as a busy and multifaceted consultant after his death. Her portrait is on display at the U.S. National Gallery, and she was even pictured on a postage stamp in 1984. After Frank’s death in 1924, she attempted to continue his work, but she failed to master its main component, which involved the industrial shop floor. Despite her efforts, she ultimately turned to writing and lecturing and began to earn success only after she launched her career as a consumer consultant. The ensuing career included a role as a presidential advisor, and in 1965 she became the first women to be made a member of the National Academy of Engineering. 1 2

TAYLOR 1911. By 1915, the book had been translated into eight languages. GILBRETH/CAREY 1948. The 1950 film Cheaper by the Dozen, which was directed by Walter Lang and distributed by 20th Century Fox, starred Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy. The success of the book and the film inspired sequels of both, namely Belles on Their Toes (GILBRETH/ CAREY 1950) and a film of the same title released in 1952. The second film enjoyed half the box-office success of the first. Later remakes of both films are not worth mentioning.

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Irene M. Witte, in contrast, is not well known. There is no entry for her on German Wikipedia; the entries under her name in the National German Bibliography note only that she was a proficient writer; and the National Biography lists only her name and biographical dates. However, one doctoral dissertation on Witte exists, though it remains unpublished.3 Irene Witte had an unstable, bilingual youth. She was raised in Germany and the United States, and at the age of nineteen she was employed by the planning department of the Auergesellschaft (one of OSRAM’s parent companies in Berlin), which mainly produced lighting devices. Witte met Frank Gilbreth in 1914, and she served as his interpreter while he worked for the Auergesellschaft. She left the position and became a proficient translator and writer in the field and tradition of Taylor-Gilbreth-Ford, as one of her books is titled.4 When Gilbreth had to leave Germany, she remained in contact with him until his death, and long after that she maintained correspondence with Lillian. Witte was later employed by a consulting agency, and she eventually worked for a department store and as a designer of kitchens. Like Lillian Gilbreth, Witte had her gender trouble with her German colleagues, but she nevertheless enjoyed a successful career. 4.1 Lillian Gilbreth Lillie Evelyn Moller was born in Oakland, California,5 and she later changed her name to Lillian. Her parents were a wealthy, upper-middle-class couple with ten children. Having several younger brothers, Lillie learned to care for children at an early age. She was first taught at home and she learned German from her father, who also provided her with books to read, so that she acquired her own little library. She went to school at the age of nine, and she reportedly loved it. She graduated from high school in 1896 and, against the will of her father, attended to the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in English and was interested in philosophy and psychology (at the time, psychology was still taught by the philosophy department). She was a serious and successful student and was asked to be the undergraduate commencement speaker. Her next step was to pursue a master’s degree, for which she chose Columbia University in New York. Despite her father’s resistance, she persisted in academia long enough to complete two doctoral dissertations. While preparing for a trip to Europe in 1902, she met Frank Gilbreth in Boston and was obviously fascinated by the older man, who was so much different from her other male acquaintances. At the time, Frank Gilbreth was a successful building contractor. His interest in Lillian was such that he

3 4 5

POKORNY 2003, 2003a. WITTE 1924. The literature on Lillian Gilbreth is vast. For detailed biographical studies, see LANCASTER 1998, 2004. These works mainly treat the time up to the 1940s. Other important works are YOST 1949 and GRAHAM 1998.

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waited on the pier for her and her chaperones to return from their trip. They married in the following year.

Figure 4.1: Lillian Moller Gilbreth (Source: Wikipedia Commons, Repository: Repository Smithsonian Institution Archives, Science Service Records 1902–1965, Record Unit 7091).

After a time of crisis in Frank’s business and a necessary period of adaptation, they became an almost perfect team. From the beginning, Lillian was the scribe. She introduced Frank to psychological literature concerned with advertising and eventually assumed the role of psychologist. As mentioned above, she wrote two doctoral dissertations, the first at Berkley and the second at Brown University in Providence, where the couple received their first big contract as a management consulting firm from the New England Butt Company, a producer of braiding machines.6 Until then they had been living in New Jersey, and Frank had become a 6

See LANCASTER 1997, 2004.

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successful building contractor. Both of them had been applying Frederick W. Taylor’s concept of scientific management, but the work with the Butt Company led them to abandon his methods and to a split with him. In simple terms, Taylor can be said to have introduced the study of time studies, Frank Gilbreth to have introduced motion study, and Lillian to have added industrial psychology and along with it the “human element”. Meanwhile, Lillian Gilbreth’s dissertation at Berkeley was rejected because of her absence. However, she published it serially in the 1912 and 1913 issues of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Digest and as a book in 1914 under the title The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste.7 It was around this time that the Gilbreths moved to Providence. Their cooperation on the job with the Butt Company was very close and their new psychological orientation was more and more obvious.8 Despite this work, Lillian still managed to find time to complete her second dissertation at Brown: “On Wednesday, June 16, 1915, Lillian became the first of the scientific management pioneers to earn a doctorate.”9 She conducted field work in schools to determine whether methods of scientific management might be applicable there, and on the basis of this research she wrote a thesis titled Some Aspects of Eliminating Waste in Teaching, which remains unpublished.10 While working with the Butt Company, the Gilbreths developed a unique set of methods that departed from orthodox Taylorism. They developed tools for motion studies with various techniques, especially high-speed cameras and highspeed clocks, which were used for what was called micro-motion study. Moreover, they attempted to entice the company’s management and workforce to collaborate for their own best interests, e.g., by treating workers as specialists for the description of their own work, by giving them their photographs to take home, and by showing their films to the “actors,” so that they felt like movie stars.11 To improve their command of language, workers were also given access to books and magazines. Numerous additional measures were taken outside of the factory itself. In the following years, Frank was frequently abroad, and Lillian accompanied him at least once. When Frank worked at the Auergesellschaft, however, she was not with him, and Irene Witte became his bilingual aid. With their work together at the Butt Company, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s collaboration was firmly established, and it carried on until Frank’s sudden death in 1924. He had problems with his heart, and the couple had discussed how life and work should continue in the event of his death. After a family vote, Lillian decided to keep running the business and she realized the plan to go to conferences in London and Prague.12 By that point, Lillian had given birth to twelve children, one of which had died, and 7 8 9 10

Lillian GILBRETH 1914. See LANCASTER 1997. Ibid., p. 159. Lillian GILBRETH 1915. According to WorldCat, this book is available only at the Brown University Library. 11 See LINDSTROM 2000; and LANCASTER 2004, Chapter 12. 12 LANCASTER 2004, p. 15.

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she had had one miscarriage. The couple had produced a considerable number of articles and books together, including Fatigue Study (1916), Applied Motion Study (1917), and Motion Study for the Handicapped (1920).13 The first task she set for herself after Frank’s death was to write his biography, The Quest for the One Best Way (1924). Although Lillian was well known to the general public and to their clients, the clientele was Frank’s. After his death, it thus turned out to be difficult to maintain business relations and to acquire new contracts as a consultant for Scientific Management. Yet she had to earn an income, and she wanted to work. She completed one of their consulting jobs in Europe, but back in the United States she realized the difficulties of running an industrial consulting firm as a woman. At first she decided to offer courses for managers, and later she took over Frank’s lecture assignments and gave lectures of her own, but such work did not generate the necessary income. Her name, however, became well known. Jane Lancaster has written: “In the two years following Frank’s death, Lillian tried many types of work, hoping that some of them would pay off. She used her gender to advantage when it meant visibility as the only woman, or suggesting that her insight was somehow dependent on her sex, yet she performed in other circumstances as a male industrial engineer might.”14 Through her management courses she came to know helpful acquaintances, above all the head of research at Macy’s, the department store. By turning to consult department stores like Macy’s, Lillian made a further step in the direction of “women’s work,” given that her analysis was mainly of female workers and their work place. This was not a profitable job, but it afforded quite a few important new perspectives. One of the next projects was again “women-oriented,” for it involved research concerning the merchandising of sanitary napkins, a technology that was at an early stage of development. This work proved to be quite profitable, though it was not a field in which Lillian wished to stay.15 To her it became clear that her most promising projects involved the household, and so she started to write The Home Maker and Her Job (1927). Next she devoted her efforts to a project known as “Kitchen Practical,” which was an efficient kitchen design based on her studies of motion.16 This was followed in 1928 by her book Living with Our Children, a household guide book that drew upon her own story. She travelled widely and lectured on her interests, and at Purdue University in Indiana she held a teaching position that ultimately became a full professorship. As a professor, she taught home economics as well as courses on industrial engineering and industrial psychology. She retired in 1943, but later held additional teaching appointments at various colleges and universities. From her years in California, Lillian had known Herbert Hoover and his wife since the 1890s. He served as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1928 13 14 15 16

GILBRETHT/GILBRETH 1916; GILBRETHT/GILBRETH 1917; GILBRETHT/GILBRETH 1920. LANCASTER 2004, p. 231. See LANCASTER 2004, pp. 244–47. On Lillian’s kitchen design, see GRAHAM 1975.

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and as President from 1929 to 1933. According to Lancaster, Lillian’s political life began in 1928, when she became “president of the Women’s Branch and the only woman among the twenty-two honorary vice presidents of the Engineers’ Hoover for President campaign.”17 The campaign was successful, and her relation to the White House was soon well established. The Great Depression had begun at that time, and in 1930 Lillian became the head of the women’s section of President Hoover’s Emergency Committee for Employment. The number of committees and organizations in which she was involved continued to grow, and they mainly concerned women’s issues. In the field of engineering, however, she was recognized for her work beyond the women’s sphere. Despite her success, she still had to work to secure an adequate income. Her worldwide travels were not always funded by others. During the Second World War, she received new advisory assignments from the federal government. With women having to work in what had been men’s jobs, there was a considerable need for management advice (separate restrooms, for instance, had to be installed in shipyards).18 Lillian Gilbreth was extremely active during the war, and she remained busy throughout the remainder of her long life. She taught courses on scientific management as her on-site work in industrial settings became ever scarcer. Hers was an extremely fulfilling life with much success and many honors. In a way, however, most of her many roles were of a “female” sort. And this was, as Lancaster writes, indeed a sort of role playing: “Lillian […] believed she won allies by appearing womanly and eschewing confrontation.”19 She became a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1926 and she was made, in 1965, the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Engineering. By that point, at least, women engineers were no longer such a rarity. 4.2 Irene M. Witte In 1924, the Gilbreths had planned to attend the First World Power Conference in London and then the Prague International Scientific Management Conference (PIMCO). Frank died suddenly before these events, but Lillian took it as his will that she should plan a swift funeral and take the trip on her own. She presented a paper in London and then travelled to Germany to meet Irene Witte, after which she went on to the conference in Prague. Both women spoke German and English. As mentioned above, Witte had been Frank Gilbreth’s guide while he worked for the Auergesellschaft in 1914. By 1924, she had translated Applied Motion Studies and Fatigue Study and Lillian’s Psychology of Management into German, each with both Frank and Lillian credited as authors. As mentioned in my introduction,

17 LANCASTER 2004, p. 273. 18 Ibid., p. 311. 19 LANCASTER 2004, p. 234.

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there is no literature on Witte beyond Rita Pokorny’s doctoral dissertation, on which I have relied heavily in this chapter.20 Born in 1894 in Brussels, Witte was given the full name Irene Marguerite Fatma Witte, and it seems as though she herself discarded the name Fatma from use. Her father Emil was a journalist of highly problematic character, both personally and politically. In 1899, he became a press attaché at the German embassy in Washington, D.C., but was fired after one year. He then published a provocative pamphlet on the basis of his experience there, which was the reason that he never found a formal position again, neither in the United States nor in Germany.21 His mental health decayed and he died in 1918, leaving Irene and her mother to tend to their family. Because of her father’s occupation and her welleducated mother, Irene learned to type and to write, and together with her mother she cared for a family of six. Then again, she is also known to have turned her back on family life; according to her obituary, her desk was her home, and organizing and writing became her profession.22 It is somewhat unclear how and when the family returned to Germany. Pokorny notes that a German trial against Emil Witte was discontinued 1914 on account of his mental incapacity. In the same year, the nineteen-year-old Irene Witte was hired by the planning department of the Auergesellschaft, and in this capacity she became Frank Gilbreth’s guide and interpreter. As she wrote decades later, this meeting determined the rest of her professional life.23 After Gilbreth had left Germany in 1915, they communicated and collaborated by mail until the United States entered the war, after which they recommenced their communication. In 1915, Witte left the Auergesellschaft, took a position as a secretary, and then was employed by the German Engineering Association (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure), where she was responsible for the acquisition and translation of English scholarship and where she edited one of the organization’s periodicals. As of 1921, she worked simultaneously for the Orga-Institut in Berlin, which was a department of the Institut für Industrielle Psychotechnik.24 Here, it seems, she was also engaged with the practical work of scientific management. She left the OrgaInstitut in 1924, and in 1927 she founded – along with Russ Allen, who had worked with Frank Gilbreth – a consulting firm that appears to have been quite successful, at least in its early years. Between 1920 and 1922, she translated the Gilbreths’ books and also Christine Frederick’s The New Housekeeping: Effi20 POKORNY 2003a. Witte’s papers are presently being digitalized at the Technoseum in Mannheim; see http://www.technoseum.de/sammlungen/archiv/ (last accessed on October 27, 2013). 21 WITTE 1907/1916. 22 POKORNY 2003a, p. 20. 23 WITTE 1969, p. 287 24 Orga obviously stands for Organization. The translation of German concepts in this field is somewhat problematic. In German, the “efficiency movement” would be rendered as Rationalisierungsbewegung. Psychotechnik can be translated as “psychotechnics,” but this term is hardly ever used in English. However it is translated, it was nevertheless part of what the Gilbreths had practiced.

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ciency Studies in Home Management, which had appeared in 1913. While at the Orga-Institut, she started to work for the director of the German Engineering Association, Conrad Matschoß, by writing short biographies for the encyclopedia Männer der Technik [Men of Engineering], which appeared in 1925. Franz Maria Feldhaus, an author of popular books on technology, criticized the book for including sloppy entries written by unacknowledged young women (versteckte Fräulein).25 Jobless as of 1924, Witte produced a series of articles and two books, one on the American organization of work and the other on the American organization of sales. The latter represented a novel area of research and led to her next position.26 In 1927, she became the head of the planning department at Israel’s Department Store in Berlin. This is a parallel to Lillian Gilbreth’s career. According to Pokorny, Witte might have been motivated to leave the field of industrial scientific management by the critique and defamation she experienced from some of her male colleagues and competitors.27 In her new position, Witte installed a counseling office for consumers and she imported Lillian Gilbreth’s “Kitchen Practical” for an exhibition. Witte changed positions in 1935 and went to Hertie, another department store that had already been “Aryanized.” Although “Israel” was obviously a Jewish name, the ownership remained untouched until 1937. It remains unclear whether Witte’s change of places had anything to do with antiSemitism. She left the position in 1938 but remained an adviser to the company. Witte published relatively few papers during the years of the Nazi regime. Of interest is her article on the “Roosevelt Revolution” (1934), in which she compared the economic situation in the United States and Germany and suggested that Roosevelt’s national and socialist measures would be appropriate for Germany. The Nazi leadership, however, turned out to be something completely different from the American administration.28 Little is known about her activity during the war. After the war, in any case, her role as an expert was quickly reestablished; she began to publish again in 1951, and she also held a university teaching appointment. Though Irene Witte had been – and remained – active and influential, she was nevertheless compelled to write the following to Lillian Gilbreth: “But everybody who is working along these fields has forgotten or wants to forget the part I played in starting this development. They give it new names they copy everything I did and then say they are the big pioneers” (sic).29 She did not say that “they” were all male. Witte had a male partner, Rudolf Lellek. She met him in 1923, but they did not marry until in 1956, and he died six years later. It was a painful loss. She had used a hyphenated name only when necessary, and her final will was signed Irene Lellek, born Witte.30 25 26 27 28

POKORNY 2003, p. 70. WITTE 1925; WITTE 1926. POKORNY 2003, p. 71. WITTE 1934. For an intriguing book on these parallel political developments, see SCHIVELBUSCH 2006. 29 Quoted from POKORNY 2003, p. 189 (note 289). 30 See POKORNY 2003, pp. 43–46.

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4.3 Conclusion This chapter is merely a brief sketch of the life and work of two exceptional twentieth-century women who knew and respected one another. Their social background, their education, and their family life were different to the extreme. In their work and attitude, however, they were kindred spirits. The two stories demonstrate the political, social, and cultural differences between the United States and Germany and the gender relations that existed in each country. Both stories, moreover, should be understood as part of the history of (social) technology. Bibliography FREDERICK, Christine (1913/1921). The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management. New York: Doubleday. [German translation by Irene Witte: Die rationelle Haushaltsführung. Betriebswissenschaftliche Studien (1922).] GILBRETH, Frank Bunker jr; CAREY, Ernestine G. (1950). Cheaper by the Dozen. New York: Crowell. — (1952). Belles on Their Toes. New York: Crowell. GILBRETH, Frank Bunker jr; GILBRETH, Lillian (1916). Fatigue Study. New York: Sturgis & Walton. [German translation by Irene Margarete Witte: Ermüdungsstudium (1921).] GILBRETH, Frank Bunker; GILBRETH, Lillian (1917). Applied Motion Study. New York: Sturgis & Walton. [German translation by Irene Margarete Witte: Angewandte Bewegungsstudien (1921).] — (1920). Motion Study for the Handicapped. New York: The MacMillan Co. GILBRETH, Lillian (1914). Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste. New York: E-book available at Gutenberg.org/ebooks/16256 (last accessed October 13, 2013). [German translation by Irene Witte: Verwaltungspsychologie (1922).] — (1915). Some Aspects of Eliminating Waste in Teaching. Doctoral Dissertation: Brown University. — (1924). The Quest of the One Best Way: A Sketch of the Life of Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Chicago: Society of Industrial Engineers. — (1927). The Home Maker and Her Job. New York: Appleton & Co. — (1928). Living with Our Children. New York: Norton & Co. GRAHAM, Laurel D. (1998). Managing On Her Own: Dr. Lillian Gilbreth and Women’s Work in the Interwar Era. Norcross: Engineering & Management Press. — (1999). “Domesticating Efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth’s Scientific Management of Homemakers, 1924–1930.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, pp. 633–75. LANCASTER, Jane (2004). Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth, A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen”. Boston: Northeastern University Press. LINDSTROM, Richard (2000). “They All Believed They Are Undiscovered Mary Pickfords: Workers, Photography and Scientific Management.” Technology and Culture 42, pp. 725–51. POKORNY, Rita (2003a). Die Rationalisierungsexpertin Irene M. Witte (1894–1876), Biografie einer Grenzgängerin. Doctoral Dissertation: Technische Universität Berlin. [Online publication available at opus4.kobv.de/opus4-tuberlin/files/584/pokorny_rita.pdf (last access Oct 27, 2013).] — (2003b). “Taylor – Gilbreth – Ford aus der Sicht der Rationalisierungsexpertin Irene Witte (1894–1976).” Technikgeschichte 70, H. 3, pp. 153–84.

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SCHIVELBUSCH, Wolfgang (2006). Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939. New York: Henry Holt and Company. [Originally published in German as Entfernte Verwandte. Faschismus, Nationalsozalismus, New Deal; 1933–1939. Munich: Hanser, 2005.] TAYLOR, Frederick Winslow (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. London: Harper & Brothers. WITTE, Emil (1907/1916). Aus einer deutschen Botschaft – zehn Jahre deutsch-amerikanischer Diplomatie. Leipzig: Zeitbilder Verlag. [In English: Revelations of a German Attaché: Ten Years of German-American Diplomacy. Trans. F. C. Taylor. New York: Doran, 1916.] WITTE, Irene M. (1969). “Zur 100-Jahr-Feier für Frank B. Gilbreth.” Rationalisierung 20, pp. 278–80. — (1925). Amerikanische Büroorganisation. Munich: Oldenbourg. — (1926). Amerikanische Verkaufsorganisation. Munich: Oldenbourg. — (1934). “Die ‘Roosevelt Revolution’ im Jahre 1933 und ihre Vorgeschichte.” Zeitschrift für Organisation 8, pp. 11–17. YOST, Edna (1949). Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Partners for Life. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press.

5 FEMALE SCIENTISTS AT GERMAN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING CORPORATIONS AND THEIR PATRONAGE RELATIONSHIPS1 Renate Tobies In Germany, three parent companies were largely responsible for developments in the areas of electrical and communications engineering: the Siemens & Halske Corporation, which was established in 1847 as a telegraph construction company; the General Electric Power Company known as AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft), which was founded in 1887; and the German Gas Lighting Corporation (Deutsche Gasglühlicht Gesellschaft) or Auer Company, which was founded in 1892. Each of these businesses owned several distinct factories for their various branches, some of which were later established as subsidiary companies. Noteworthy are the Company for Wireless Telegraphy Ltd. – Telefunken System (Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie m.b.H. System Telefunken) founded in 1903, and OSRAM, which was formed after the First World War by combining the incandescent light bulb factories of the three parent companies mentioned above. These parent and daughter companies were headquartered in Berlin, where they quickly developed into international conglomerates. Representatives from General Electrical, for example, belonged to AEG’s executive board, and the important department for calculation and design at AEG’s machine factory on Brunnenstraße was directed, even before the First World War, by the American-born scientist Lionel Fleischmann (see Chapter 6). In Berlin, moreover, specialized firms in the field of communications were founded at the time when the radio market was booming; these included, among others, the Dr. Erich F. Huth Corporation, the Society for Radio Telegraphy (Gesellschaft für Funkentelegrafie), and the Radio Loewe Corporation, each with its own subsidiaries. These corporations have been mentioned, in particular, because women researchers had begun to work there during the First World War or afterwards, in the case of those firms that were established during the 1920s. Before, throughout, and after the war, these companies expanded their research laboratories from what had been one-man operations into larger divisions. After the German defeat, when science was recognized to be a powerful factor in its own right, they placed an even greater emphasis on using mathematical methods for solving technological tasks. Advances in electrical and communications engineering, products for telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless radio, and vacuum electronics – including the mass production of such goods as light bulbs and electron tubes – required an ever more accurate scientific understanding of production and assembly processes. Not only were more men hired to work in industrial research laboratories, but women were given positions as well. At least ten female scientists, after earning doctoral degrees in physics, chemistry, or mathematics, received research jobs and leading positions at electrical 1

This Chapter is based on TOBIES 2008, 2012, 2013.

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engineering corporations in Berlin: Cäcilie Fröhlich, Isolde Ganswindt, Magdalene Hüniger, Annemarie Katsch, Ellen Lax, Hildegard Miething, Ilse Müller, Edel-Agathe Neumann, Iris Runge, and Hildegard Warrentrup.2 The discussion below will concentrate on the special conditions that enabled these careers and on the important patrons who supported them. The study of patronage and its influence is a recent research field in the history of science. For example, the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Medicine and Technology, which took place in Manchester in July of 2013, included a symposium on mathematics and patronage, as already mentioned in our introduction (see Thesis 5 in the introductory Chapter). Inspired by this line of inquiry, I have investigated the effects of patronage relationships on the careers of women who were employed at industrial laboratories. 5.1 Patronage As late as the 1920s, some branches of the electrical engineering industry employed few if any theoretical scientists, as Max Steenbeck reported about Siemens-Schuckertwerke and as Wilhelm Runge noted about Telefunken. For their research departments, these companies preferred electrical engineers trained at technical universities.3 Special conditions were required for industrial laboratories to be made accessible to women employees. First of all, the (male) director of a department had to be unbiased toward women; he had to know how to evaluate accomplishments regardless of gender; and he had to be committed to promoting and supporting women and men on an equal basis. Insight into the patronage relationships at the OSRAM Corporation can be gained by investigating the biography of Iris Runge, who had completed her doctorate in physical chemistry at the University in Göttingen in 1922 and who began to work at OSRAM on March 1, 1923. In her correspondence, much of which has been preserved, she provided detailed depictions of her patrons, who are also known to have supported other female researchers. In what follows, I will underscore some of the features of patronage that were beneficial to women’s careers. First, for a woman to be hired by an industrial laboratory, it was helpful if respected university faculty members supported her application. When a university professor wrote a letter of recommendation, the application would of course be more successful. We know that Richard Courant, a professor of mathematics, recommended Iris Runge to the Siemens & Halske electron tube laboratory in Berlin. Moreover, the professor of physics Max Born wrote a letter of reference for her 2

3

For short biographies of these ten women (in German), see TOBIES 2008, pp. 323–30. On Iris Runge, see TOBIES 2012. Fröhlich is discussed in Chapter 6. Short biographies of seven women who were employed before the Nazi dictatorship are included below in Section 5.2. For a survey of women who did their doctorate in physics in Berlin and held industrial positions there, see Table 1.2 in this book. See TOBIES 2012, pp. 146–47.

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application to OSRAM. Such letters, however, did not guarantee success. Iris Runge received no response from Siemens. Research directors were also able to learn about her abilities from her (unpaid) teaching and research positions at the Technical University of Berlin and from her own private contacts with laboratory personnel. Second, a department director had to be able to identify the special abilities of a scientific employee. In November of 1922, when Iris Runge applied for a job at the research laboratory for incandescent light bulbs at OSRAM, the director Richard Jacoby responded kindly and with high expectations for her (he wrote that she certainly possessed all of the necessary qualifications for the job). It should be stressed that, unlike Siemens & Halske, Jacoby, who held a doctorate in physical chemistry, responded to her application right away, noting that, should she accept the position, she “would have the opportunity to apply [her] expertise in chemistry, metallography, physical chemistry, and mathematics.”4 Born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Jacoby (like many others, women included) had conducted research for his doctoral thesis at the private chemistry laboratory run by Dr. Richard Joseph Meyer, who was then only a Privatdozent at the University.5 Jacoby’s thesis and his knowledge were highly esteemed by the full professor of chemistry at the time, but he did not pursue a university career. Initially, working at AEG’s light bulb factory, he produced significant results, and ultimately, after the First World War, he became a research director at the newly founded OSRAM Corporation. He was able to keep this position until 1938, despite Nazi politics, but after three years of retirement he lost his life in the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. From the beginning of his time at OSRAM, Jacoby made efforts to hire women scientists. It is perhaps remarkable that two female chemists, who both had conducted doctoral research at the private scientific laboratory led by Arthur Rosenheim und Richard Joseph Meyer, numbered among the first employees in Jacoby’s research laboratory. Ilse Müller joined the newly founded OSRAM Corporation on April 4, 1918, and she had been a member of the private laboratory from January of 1914 to February of the next year. Her thesis, which was instigated by Rosenheim, concerned the alkalinity of a special phosphoric acid and was published in the Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie in 1916. Although her work received the mere grade of good from the university, she became a long-

4 5

Jacoby’s letter, dated November 16, 1922, is reproduced in TOBIES 2012, pp. 155–57. The Jewish chemists Richard Joseph Meyer, born in 1865 in Berlin, and Arthur Rosenheim, born in the same year in the United States, became associate professors at the University of Berlin in 1921. On the founding of the private Wissenschaftlich–chemisches Laboratorium Berlin, which they directed, and on the work of Elsa Neumann there, see Section 1.2 in this book. A number of other women who conducted research at this private laboratory will be mentioned below. From 1925 until his death in 1939, Meyer was also the chief editor of the eighth edition of the standard work Gmelins Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie, a project that also involved several female scientists. For the female contributors to Gmelins Handbuch, see also Tables 1.4 and 1.5 in this book.

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term successful researcher at OSRAM.6 The other female chemist was Magdalene Hüniger. On April 1, 1920, she became part of the same OSRAM laboratory as Ilse Müller (Iris Runge would join this laboratory three years later). Hüniger, who had been an assistant to Richard Joseph Meyer, completed her doctoral thesis in inorganic chemistry. After working under Meyer from November of 1917 to September of 1918, she was awarded a doctoral degree from the University of Berlin (her grade, too, was good). Thus, it stands to reason that Jacoby was better able to appreciate the talents of potential employees like Müller and Hüniger than were the universities themselves. A third criterion is to appoint the right person for the right job, and thus to ensure that employees are satisfied and that objectives are accomplished efficiently. Jacoby recognized that Iris Runge’s strongest ability was to solve problems mathematically, even though she had completed her doctoral degree in physical chemistry. As early as March 4, 1923, after just a few days on the job, Iris Runge wrote enthusiastically to her parents: The job is thus extremely enjoyable to me. […] Things are going splendidly at work, and in the meantime I have survived through the probationary period of my employment. Jacoby is very kind […]; he has already told me what I need to do next, and I have begun to think about the theoretical aspects of this new assignment. It is all very lovely; he has managed to figure out precisely what I am good at and he applies my talents to such ends. […] Tomorrow I will begin to make the calculation that Jacoby has requested, and I already have an approximate idea of how it will turn out. I can hardly wait to sit down to it.7

Iris Runge became an important mathematical consultant at OSRAM, and later also at Telefunken. Her talent was extremely rare, so much so that she was the only employee with such mathematical abilities not only within her laboratory at OSRAM, but also at the whole OSRAM Corporation in Berlin. Jacoby, her direct supervisor, was thus not the only person to make use of her knowledge to decide which new ideas could be realized on the basis of theoretical calculations. Higherranking research directors at OSRAM, who were working in other factories, likewise relied on her expertise. Marcello Pirani, for instance, a physicist with patents and the director of OSRAM’s main research department, consulted her on several occasions for solving problems numerically or graphically. About such interactions, Iris Runge reported: “Professor Pirani says that I should stick to making calculations and leave the experiments to those who are better at them. My talent, as he put it, is far less common.”8 In other words, she was the right person at the right job, and she was highly satisfied because of her opportunities to make calculations. She exclaimed: “How great it feels to be treated as a mathematical authority!” – and she further rhapsodized about the inspiring work environment

6 7 8

See her short biography in Section 5.2 below. A letter from Iris Runge to her parents dated March 4, 1923 [Private Estate]. This letter is quoted at greater length in TOBIES 2012, p. 160. A letter from Iris Runge to Carl Runge dated August 29, 1924 [Private Estate]; see TOBIES 2012, p. 277–82.

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under Jacoby and Pirani. In a similar manner, Cäcilie Fröhlich was appreciated as mathematical consultant by the board members of AEG (see Chapter 6). A fourth aspect of patronage involved (and still involves) including women researchers in scientific circles and societies. It is noteworthy in this regard that Jacoby invited Iris Runge to take part in a scientific colloquium as early as her second day at OSRAM. It was a lecture on the latest research concerning X-ray crystallography, and it was hosted by the Physical Society in Berlin. The results of this research happened to be important to OSRAM’s research teams.9 In this way, Iris Runge became acquainted not only with most of the famous scientists (especially physicists) in Berlin, but also with the few established female physicists of the time, including Lise Meitner and Gerda Laski from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Iris Runge also participated in a number of private intellectual circles, and with such acquaintances she co-authored scientific studies, prepared lecture courses, and so on. At the center of such circles, for instance, were the electrical engineer Reinhold Rüdenberg, who led the research department at Siemens-Schuckertwerke; the physicist Richard Becker, an employee at Osram and a professor of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Berlin, who sponsored Iris Runge’s membership to the German Physical Society in 1924, wrote a book with her, and organized a lecture course with her; and the radiation specialist Otto Berg from Siemens & Halske, who invited Iris Runge to meet the newly employed female physicist at his laboratory, Ilse Jessen. Jessen’s research prepared her to work alongside Berg, Ida Tacke (later Noddack), and Walter Noddack during their 1925 discovery of the element rhenium.10 Iris Runge and the OSRAM physicist Ellen Lax were regular presences among the established physicists in Berlin. Both became members of the theoretically oriented German Physical Society, where Marcello Pirani had taken over some administrative functions. Hildegard Miething, who was supported by Pirani as well (see below), is also listed, at least in 1932, as a member of the German Physical Society, as is Clara von Simson.11 There was also a younger association, the German Society for Technical Physics, which had been founded by industrial researchers in 1919. As of 1938, Ellen Lax was a member of this society, as was the engineer Brigitte Gysae, who was a researcher at Jacoby’s laboratory at least since 1936, and the physicist Margot Herbeck, who worked at AEG from 1937 to 1945.12 OSRAM is known to have financed the attendance of female researchers 9

See Tobies 2012, Chapter 3.3 (“Scientific Communication at the Local, National, and International Level”), pp. 177–87. 10 See a letter from Iris Runge to her mother dated February 10, 1924 [Private Estate]. In 1923, Jessen had finished her thesis “Spektroheliographische Untersuchungen am Kohlelichtbogen im Zusammenhang mit der Atomtheorie,” which was supervised by Max Reich, a professor of applied electricity; see [UAG]. On Ida and Walter Noddack, see, among other works, LYKKNESS/OPITZ/VAN TIGGELEN 2012. 11 See the list of members (“Mitgliederliste”), in the Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft 13 (1932) pp. 39–87. On Clara von Simson, see Chapter 1. 12 See Table 1.5 in Chapter 1. I am indebted to Dieter Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute of History of Science for providing me with copies of the membership lists of both societies.

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in important scientific conferences even outside of Berlin, where they occasionally presented the results of their own research. Like Brigitte Gysae, other women were able to conduct research at industrial laboratories, where they were encouraged to write a doctoral thesis and other scientific studies outside of their special duties at work.13 This can be counted as a fifth feature of patronage. In March of 1920, Lieselotte Sittig became an employee at the OSRAM chemical laboratory directed by Ernst Friederich, who encouraged her doctoral thesis and with whom she co-authored several academic articles.14 Elisabeth Materne, who worked under Friederich’s supervision at the OSRAM chemical laboratory from October 1, 1922 to April 4, 1923, later completed her doctorate with Rosenheim. Hildegard Salbach was working at the AEG amplifier laboratory as early as 1917, and she went on to earn a doctorate in physics, directed by Wehnelt and Planck, at the University of Berlin in 1922.15 Writing articles and books outside of their duties on the job did much to give women researchers a name of their own. In 1931, for example, Iris Runge published what she called her book on graphical methods, at least in a letter to her mother. She completed the book in question, which was a new edition of Pirani’s Graphische Darstellung in Wissenschaft und Technik [Graphical Representation in Science and Technology], during her free time and also during her holidays.16 With such a contribution, she became a known expert in graphical methods beyond the walls of OSRAM and Telefunken. Several institutions requested her expertise, not only in graphical methods but also concerning the quality control of mass production. As early as the 1920s, she was asked by the highest research director and member of the OSRAM advisory board, the chemist Fritz Blau, to write a textbook on the application of mathematical statistics to mass production.17 It was by completing requested work of this sort that she was able, after the Second World War, to become a professor at the University of Berlin. The new edition of Pirani’s book can be called a joint effort because, although Iris Runge was solely responsible for the revisions, she made them while keeping 13 Brigitte Gysae earned her doctoral degree from the Technical University of Berlin in 1938, while employed at OSRAM (see also Table 1.5 of this book). The title of her dissertation is: “Über die Temperaturabhängigkeit der Austrittsarbeit bei Oxydkathoden” [On the Temperature Dependence of Electron Emission in Oxide Cathodes] (38 pp.). For similar examples of women at the Carl Zeiss Corporation, see Chapter 10. 14 Four of their co-authored articles were published in 1925 in the Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie (see vols. 143, 144, and the two articles in vol. 145). Exemplary among these is Ernst Friederich and Lieselotte Sittig, “Über die Schmelzpunkte anorganischer Verbindungen und die der Elemente,” Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie 145 (1925), pp. 251–76. 15 The title of Salbach’s thesis was “Das Schwärzungsgesetz für Į- und ȕ- Strahlen”; see [UAB] No. 611, pp. 117–26. 16 A full bibliographical reference to this book is: Marcello Pirani, Graphische Darstellung in Wissenschaft und Technik, 2nd ed., rev. Iris Runge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1931). The first edition had appeared in 1914. 17 Along with two other researchers at OSRAM, Iris Runge produced the first international textbook in this field; see Richard Becker, Hubert Plaut, and Iris Runge, Anwendungen der mathematischen Statistik auf Probleme der Massenfabrikation (Berlin: Springer, 1928, 21930).

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a steady dialogue with Pirani. Sixth, however, there were other types of collaborative work and co-authored articles, published by women researchers together with their scientific patrons, which were beneficial to women’s careers. The collaborative articles by Friederich and Sittig, for instance, have already been mentioned. As is clear from a more recent study, these two scientists long remained in contact with one another.18 As is clear by now, Marcello Pirani was another outstanding patron to women scientists. After studying physics, mathematics, chemistry, and philosophy, he earned a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Berlin (1903).19 He briefly held a position as a research assistant at the Technical University in Aachen, but then decided to work at an industrial laboratory. Pirani joined Siemens & Halske, where he was quickly put in charge of his own laboratory. He is famous for several patents, and managed to complete his Habilitation at the Technical University in Berlin in 1911. Alongside his permanent industrial position, he lectured on his main research fields: the production, application, and measurement of high temperatures; and the application of graphical methods in the fields of physics, chemistry, and engineering. In 1918, he received the title of professor, and in 1922 he held an unpaid professorship for physics and lighting technology. In 1932, moreover, he became the director of the Institute for Lighting Technology at the Technical University. He lost this position after the enactment of Nazi racial laws (he was “half Jewish,” according Nazi terminology). At OSRAM, Pirani became a full member of the executive board in 1934, but two years later he decided to leave for Great Britain. With his positions at the Technical University of Berlin and at OSRAM, Pirani had ample opportunity to evaluate the talent of women researchers, and thus to promote and support them. He was supportive not only of Iris Runge;20 he coauthored books and articles with other women as well. Having published with Pirani while still a student, Hildegard Miething completed her doctoral thesis in the field of Pirani’s Habilitation, and received research positions in Berlin’s electrical industry (see below). Together with the physicist Ellen Lax, Pirani wrote an important textbook chapter on Tungsten research.21 Beginning in 1930, they co-organized the Technisch-wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen aus dem OSRAM-Konzern, a newly founded series of books published with Julius Springer. In this way, Ellen Lax established close connections with the Springer publishing house, where she would work after Pirani had been forced to leave Nazi Germany. 18 See F. L. Boschke, Ernst Friederich und Lieselotte Sittig. Die Herkunft des Lebens. Wissenschaftler auf den Spuren der letzten Rätsel, Das Moderne Sachbuch 93 (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1970). 19 See my short biography of Pirani in JÄGER/HEILBRONNER 2010; and TOBIES 2012, p. 152. 20 Beyond the book on graphical methods, Pirani also encouraged Iris Runge to approach materials research mathematically. Runge wrote about this subject in a detailed paper of her own, and also in shorter version with Pirani; see Marcello Pirani and Iris Runge, “Elektrizitätsleitung in metallischen Aggregaten,” Zeitschrift für Metallkunde 16 (1924), pp. 183–85. 21 Ellen Lax and Marcello Pirani, “Wolfram,” in Physik der Stoffe, ed. G. Gehlhoff, Lehrbuch der Technischen Physik 3 (Leipzig: Barth, 1929), pp. 317–41.

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A seventh aspect of industrial patronage involved enabling women researchers to acquire patents. The history of female patentees is discussed by Annette Vogt in Chapter 1 of the present book. Here I would like to add that the female industrial researchers presented in the next section below achieved important patents in materials research, in light bulb research, and in the fields of electron tube and television research. It is only in the case of Ilse Müller that no patents could be found. A final and eighth feature of patronage was simply to support women by giving them important positions. At the time, positions in industrial laboratories were more or less permanent (at least until 1933). At OSRAM, Ilse Müller, Magdalene Hüniger, and Iris Runge each became Oberbeamte (senior officers). Ellen Lax also held an important senior position (Hauptbeamtin) as Pirani’s general secretary at OSRAM’s main research department. Isolde Ganswindt, who was promoted by Hans Rukop at Telefunken, became the director of an electron tube laboratory somewhat early in her career. Additional laboratory directors included Lisa Honigmann at OSRAM and the metals researcher Hildegard Warrentrup at Telefunken.22 5.2 Women in the Electrical Engineering Industry: Seven Case Studies Isolde Ganswindt (later Hausser) (b. 7.12.1889 in Berlin; ob. 5.10.1951 in Heidelberg)23 This important female researcher at the Telefunken Corporation later became a department director at a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (see Table 1.2). Here I would like underscore Ganswindt’s difficult path to earning a doctoral degree and the strong support that she received from the physicist Hans Rukop at Telefunken. Ganswindt, the second child of a brilliant inventor, had twenty-two siblings, among them Gerlind Ganswindt, who later became an engineer and worked with her at Telefunken. After completing her Abitur at the Chamisso secondary school for girls in Berlin-Schöneberg, Isolde Ganswindt commenced with her study of physics, mathematics, and philosophy at the University of Berlin in March of 1909. She intended to obtain a doctorate, but the professor of physics at the University of Berlin declined to give her a topic for a doctoral thesis, apparently because of negative experiences he had had with other female candidates. In the end, Ganswindt’s dissertation – “Erzeugung und Empfang kurzer elektrischer Wellen” [The Generation and Reception of Short Electrical Waves] (1914) – was not su22 Dr. Lisa Honigmann led the Glass Development Laboratory, where she authored laboratory reports and articles (see [DTMB] 6645, 6646, 6647). After marrying Dr. Werner Hubmann in 1936, she left the company. Hildegard Warrentrup (whose later name was Schwiemann) completed a doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Göttingen in 1935. She became an employee at Telefunken and directed a laboratory for materials research as late as 1943. 22 See TOBIES 2012, pp. 146–47 23 See TOBIES 2008, p. 323.

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pervised at the university but rather in a laboratory of the so-called Handelshochschule [business college] by the physicist Friedrich Franz Martens. Yet this institution did not have the authority to award doctoral degrees, and thus Ganswindt had to submit her thesis to the University of Berlin, where Heinrich Rubens and Max Planck gave it the worst possible grade. She took her oral doctoral examination on July 20, 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Rubens evaluated her knowledge of physics, which was her main subject, as “altogether good” (im Ganzen gute Kenntnisse), and Planck wrote highly of her diligence and general understanding (viel Fleiß und meistens auch Verständnis). Hermann Amandus Schwarz likewise evaluated her knowledge of mathematics, one of her minor subjects, as “altogether good,” and for her exam in philosophy, her other minor field, she received the grade “satisfactory” (genügend) from Benno Erdmann. Ganswindt joined Telefunken’s newly-founded electron tube laboratory on August 1, 1914, and there her talents were greatly valued by Hans Rukop. Rukop, who became one of the most important electron tube researchers, had studied physics, mathematics, and chemistry. Only two years earlier, he had passed his doctorate in physics with distinction at the University of Greifswald. As early as 1917, he arranged for Isolde Ganswindt to become a director within his research department, which specialized in electron tubes for radio transmitters and amplifiers. He also praised Ganswindt’s and her sister’s research in articles, and thus we can justifiably call him a patron who supported women’s careers. Isolde Ganswindt, who married the physicist Karl Wilhelm Hausser in 1918 and gave birth to a son in 1919, was able to continue in her position as an industrial researcher even as a wife and mother. This arrangement was agreed upon by her husband, by the Telefunken Corporation, and later by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society as well. Scientific Achievements: At Telefunken, Isolde Ganswindt-Hauser developed vacuum-based measurement methods for electron tubes, and special devices (circuits) for producing oscillation by means of high-vacuum tubes. She received several patents in the field of high-frequency technology, and these were so important that Telefunken continued to purchase their rights in 1937, when she was employed at a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg. 24 Ilse Müller (b. 19.11.1887 in Liegnitz)25 Ilse Müller became a researcher at OSRAM and ultimately a laboratory director at Telefunken. Beginning in October of 1904, her parents enrolled her in special courses for girls to prepare her for the Abitur examination. In the fall of 1911, she passed this test, which was a prerequisite for university admission, at a secondary school for boys in Berlin, the so-called Königstädtisches Realgymnasium. She then studied chemistry, physics, and philosophy for eight semesters at the Univer24 See [DTMB] No. 2926. 25 See TOBIES 2008, p. 324.

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sity of Berlin, and her main subject was inorganic chemistry. Like Isolde Ganswindt, however, she did not go on to conduct her doctoral research at a university, but rather at a private chemistry laboratory in Berlin. From January 1914 to February 1915, Müller conducted research at the aforementioned private laboratory run by Arthur Rosenheim und Richard Joseph Meyer. As mentioned above, her thesis, which was suggested to her by Rosenheim, concerned the alkalinity of a special phosphoric acid (“Über die Basizität der Unterphosphorsäure”), and was published in the Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie in 1916. To earn the degree, she had to submit her thesis to the University, where the chemistry professors Ernst Beckmann und Siegmund Gabriel gave it the grade of laudabile. She passed her oral doctoral examination on March 2, 1916. Her main subject was chemistry (graded satisfactory by Beckmann), and her minor subjects were physics (Rubens: very good), technology (good), and philosophy (good).

Figure 5.1: Ilse Müller at OSRAM (1929) (Source: [DTMB] Photo album for Dr. Karl Mey).

Hired on April 4, 1918, Müller was one of earliest employees at the newlyfounded OSRAM Corporation. Her long-term position there was in the Research Laboratory for Incandescent Light Bulbs (Glühlampen-Versuchslaboratorium) at OSRAM’s Factory A (formerly part of AEG), which was directed by Richard Jacoby until 1938. By 1929, her job title was Oberbeamtin (senior officer). On July 1, 1939, she was transferred, along with the OSRAM’s entire electron tube factory, to the Telefunken Corporation, where she directed her own chemistry laboratory.

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Scientific Achievements: Ilse Müller published Articles and wrote laboratory reports on inorganic chemistry, particularly on the development of glass for electron tubes. Hildegard Miething (b. 7.8.1889 in Berlin; ob. 14.11.1972 in Berlin)26 Miething followed in her father’s footsteps and initially became a teacher. After finishing at a girls’ school, she passed an examination to teach at a similar institution in 1909; she then worked for four years as a private teacher in England and in Silesia. In July of 1913, however, she returned to her education and passed the Abitur at a Realgymnasium in Baden-Baden. Beginning in the winter semester of 1913/14, she enrolled at the University of Berlin, where her main subjects were physics, chemistry, and mathematics. She studied not only at the University of Berlin but also for some time at the Technical University, where she gained some renown for her work with Marcello Pirani, who was then a Privatdozent there (a lecturer with a post-doctoral degree). While still a student, Miething published a significant article together with Pirani, as has already been mentioned by Brenda Winnewisser in Chapter 2.27 Like Ilse Müller and Isolde Ganswindt, Hildegard Miething applied for a doctoral degree at the University of Berlin in 1917. The full professor of physical chemistry, Walther Nernst, wrote the review on her thesis, which was titled “Tabellen zur Berechnung des gesamten und freien Wärmeinhalts fester Körper” [Tables for Calculating of the Total and Free Heat Capacity of Solid Bodies] and, in 1920, was published in the Abhandlungen der Deutschen BunsenGesellschaft für angewandte physikalische Chemie. Together with Max Planck, Nernst evaluated the dissertation as laudabile. Regarding her oral doctoral examination, which was held on January 31, 1918, Nernst considered her knowledge of physics, her main subject, to be “excellent” (vortrefflich); Planck considered her grasp of theoretical physics to be “highly satisfactory” (recht befriedigend); Beckmann gave her the grade of very good in chemistry, and she received the same grade in philosophy. Her overall performance was thus evaluated as magna cum laude. From 1918 to 1921, Miething worked as a researcher in Telefunken’s electron tube laboratory. In 1921, she took a new position at Siemens & Halske, first at the company’s heat laboratory (Wärmelaboratorium) and later at its laboratory for measurement instruments. Scientific Achievements: Miething published many articles, especially on methods of temperature measurement. On May 16, 1933, she and three colleagues from Siemens received a patent for an important measurement instrument, namely

26 See TOBIES 2008, pp. 324–25. 27 Hildegard Miething and Marcello Pirani, “Strahlungsenergie, Temperatur und Helligkeit des schwarzen Körpers,” Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft 17 (1915), pp. 219–39.

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an “Optical pyrometer with two filaments heated by the same source of current” (United States Patent 1908977). Magdalene Hüniger (b. 26.7.1896 in Eisenberg)28

Figure 5.2: Magdalene Hüniger at OSRAM (1929) (Source: [DTMB] Photo album for Dr. Karl Mey).

Hüniger’s parents – her father was a secondary school teacher – enabled her to have a good education. After attending girls’ schools in Halle and Berlin-Charlottenburg, she passed her Abitur at the Realgymnasium of the Auguste-Viktoria Secondary School in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1915, and afterwards studied chemistry, physics, and philosophy at the University of Berlin. From November of 1917 to September of the following year, she was able to work as an assistant to Richard Joseph Meyer, who (together with Rosenheim) directed the aforementioned private chemistry laboratory. Under Meyer’s supervision at the laboratory, Hüniger completed a doctoral thesis titled “Die quantitative Bestimmung des Zirkoniums” [The Quantitative Determination of Zirconium]. The full professors at the University of Berlin, Beckmann and Gabriel, judged this work to be laudabile. Moreover, the final grade for her oral examination, which was taken on January 1, 1919 in the field s of chemistry, physics, technology, and philosophy, was good.

28 See TOBIES 2008, p. 325.

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On April 1, 1920, she joined the same laboratory at OSRAM as Ilse Müller, and by 1929 she had been made a senior officer at the company (Oberbeamtin). In 1936, she was still a member of the laboratory directed Richard Jacoby. We can only assume that it was around this time that Hüniger (Huniger) left Germany for Canada, where she continued her research and earned Canadian patents for special luminescent materials (CA 408801; CA 447145). These patents were acquired with Hans Panke on November 24, 1942 and on March 9, 1948 for the Canadian General Electric Company and for the General Electric Company of the United States, respectively.29 Scientific Achievements: Articles on inorganic chemistry, on crystallization at tungsten sintering rods, published especially in the Technisch-Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen aus dem Osram-Konzern; patents in the field of luminescent materials. Ellen Lax (b. 27.8.1885 in Minden, Westphalia; ob. 29.9.1977 in Munich)30 A daughter of a factory owner, Lax received a good education, passed her Abitur at the boys’ Andreas-Realgymnasium in Berlin in the fall of 1910, and then started her studies at the University of Berlin. Although, for two semesters, she began as a student of art history, she devoted her next nine semesters to physics, mathematics, and chemistry. However, these studies were interrupted by the First World War, during which she worked as a nurse, a surgical assistant, and as a bacteriologist (in the latter capacity she even directed a laboratory). In 1919, she submitted a doctoral thesis entitled “Über die Änderung des Widerstandes in Drähten durch Dehnung” [On the Alteration of the Resistance of Wires by Their Elongation]. Walther Nernst and Max Planck graded this work as laudabile, and she passed her oral examinations, which were held on June 5, 1919 in experimental physics, theoretical physics, chemistry, and philosophy, with a final grade of good. During this same year, she accepted a research position at OSRAM, and after six years there she was made Marcello Pirani’s general secretary at the company’s main research department. In 1936, when Pirani left Germany for Great Britain, Lax left OSRAM to work at the headquarters of the Springer publishing house in Berlin, for which she had already edited some articles, books, and book series while still an employee at OSRAM. Scientific Achievements: Studies of lighting technology, especially radiation physics; numerous article and contributions to textbooks and handbooks. Ellen Lax and Pirani held at least four patents together. Toward the end of 1925, they invented two methods for coating the inner surface of light bulbs. These procedures are the subject of patents 444428 und 444429, granted to OSRAM in 1927. Beginning in 1926, their methods were developed further by employees of Gen29 See http://brevets-patents.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/patent/408801/summary.html; http://brevets-patents.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/patent/447145/summary.html. 30 See TOBIES 2008, pp. 325–26; LORENZ 1975.

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eral Electric Company in the United States.31 Lax and Pirani also received two Canadian patents together, one in 1928 for a process of coloring light bulbs (CA 280348), and one in 1929 for a light bulb manufacturing method (CA 289809). Together with Jean D’Ans, Lax supervised the edition of the frequently-used Taschenbuch für Chemiker und Physiker (2 vols., Berlin: Springer, 1943). Anne Marie (Annemarie) Katsch (b. 20.9.1897 in Charlottenburg)32 Anne Marie Katsch was born to a famous family. Her father, who died young, was the painter and writer Hermann Katsch, and her brother Gerhardt Katsch became, in 1928, a professor of medicine at the University of Greifswald, where he also served as the university Rektor from 1954 to 1957. Anne Marie began her studies in 1917 at the University of Marburg – while her brother was senior physician there – and she spent the winter semester of 1918/19 in Munich. After passing her secondary teacher examination in mathematics, physics, and philosophy in Marburg in May of 1922, she did not have enough money to pursue doctoral research. In January of 1923, she joined the laboratory of the Erich F. Huth Corporation’s Society for Radio Telegraphy (Gesellschaft für Funkentelegrafie) in Berlin,33 where she quickly made important and publishable findings in the field of electron tube research.34 She was ultimately able to complete her doctorate at the University of Marburg on April 19, 1927, and her thesis bore the title “Über den Einfluß eines Kontaktpotentials bei verschiedenen Gittermaterialien in Glühkathodenlampen” [On the Influence of Contact Potential in Various Grid Materials of Hot-Cathode Lamps]. Clemens Schaefer, the full professor of experimental physics there – and a supporter of women scientists (see Chapter 2) – valued her research. Anne Marie Katsch stayed at the Huth firm, which later belonged to the C. Lorenz Corporation. Scientific Achievements: Katsch’s research focused on electron tubes for radio broadcasting and other devices. The Huth firm was able to produce specialized electron tubes based on Katsch’s experimental studies of the mechanical composition of electrodes. Katsch received several patents, including some Canadian 31 See B. Duschnitz, “Die Erfindung der innenmattierten Glühlampen,” Polytechnisches Journal 345 (1930), pp. 187–88. 32 See TOBIES 2008, p. 328–29. 33 In 1924, the physicist Henny Cohn also received a research position at the Huth firm (see Table 1.2). She earned several patents in the field of amplifier tubes and electron charge devices, having designed, for instance, the special electron tube PL AV 9 (also called Plation). Her first application for a German patent was on October 30, 1922; and her first for a U.S. patent was on October 27, 1923 (1775588, granted Sept. 30, 1930). Her additional patents include U.S. Patent 2088231 (July 27, 1937) and U.S. Patent 2325664 (March 3, 1943). 34 See Anne Marie Katsch, “Über eine experimentelle Untersuchungsmethode der Vorgänge in Glühkathodenlampen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 32 (1925), pp. 287–97; idem, “Bemerkung zu der Arbeit des Herrn H. Rothe ‘Austrittsarbeit bei Oxydkathoden’,” Zeitschrift für Physik 38 (1926), pp. 407–09.

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patents in the 1940s (CA 397890, “Electric Discharge Device,” 1941; CA 424879, “Electric Discharge Tube,” 1945). She also published a survey article on the patents in this field.35 Edel-Agathe Neumann (b. 19.1.1906 in Berlin-Charlottenburg)36 Neumann was born to a Jewish family, and her father was an engineer. She passed her Abitur on March 17, 1925 and went on to study mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Berlin for nine semesters. Her doctoral thesis, “Über die Absorption der Resonanzlinie im Quecksilberdampf bei Zumischung von Fremdgasen” [On the Absorption of the Resonance Line in Mercury when Mixed with Foreign Gases], which was published in volume 62 of the Zeitschrift für Physik (1930), was supervised by the physicist Peter Pringsheim. Pringsheim had just become a full professor at the University of Berlin in 1930 (a position that he lost in 1933 because of Nazi politics), and thus he was able to examine his doctoral student in the same year. Neumann received grades of very good in experimental physics (Pringsheim), very good in theoretical physics (Erwin Schrödinger), and good in mathematics (Issai Schur). Her thesis, which was evaluated by Arthur Wehnelt and Walther Nernst, received the grade laudabile. From 1931 to 1933, Neumann was employed at the Research Institute of the General Electricity Company (AEG) in Berlin-Reinickendorf. A report, “Die elektrolytische Erzeugung von Eisenblechen und ihre Eignung als Elektrobleche” [The Electrolytic Generation of Sheet Iron and Its Suitability as a Magnetic Sheet], written by Neumann and Franz Pawlek, has survived in an archive.37 In 1933, while still working for AEG, she also contributed the article “Magnetische Hysteresis bei Wechselstrommagnetisierung” [Magnetic Hysteresis during Alternating Current Magnetization] to volume 83 of the Zeitschrift für Physik. Her next publication, however, appeared without any information regarding her professional affiliation.38 Other sources mention that, in 1932 and 1933, she was active at the Heinrich-Hertz Institute of Oscillation Research, which was part of the Technical University of Berlin.39 She ultimately joined the Loewe radio manufacturing company in Berlin. As early as 1929, the Loewe Corporation had turned to the development of television, to which Neumann, later on, would make essential contributions as a Loewe employee. Like the Jewish owners of the company, she left Germany and continued her research abroad.

35 J. Herz and Anne Marie Katsch, “Die Elektronenröhre im Spiegel der Patente,” Jahrbuch des elektrischen Fernmeldewesens (1941/42), pp. 294–316. 36 See TOBIES 2008, p. 329. 37 [DTMB] TB 0221. 38 Edel-Agathe Neumann, “Zur Frage der reversiblen magnetischen Zustandsänderungen und der magnetischen Nachwirkung,” Zeitschrift für Physik 89 (1934), pp. 308–16. 39 See the exhibition catalogue 200 Years of the Technical University of Berlin, and Table 1.2 in this book.

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Scientific Achievements: Studies of the magnetic effect of materials; patents in the field of television transmission in Great Britain and the United States, for example GB520531 (together with Hanns-Heinz Wolff), and a U.S. patent for a television transmission station. 5.3 The Situation after 1933 In 1933, a period of fruitful development came to an end in Germany. Up until this time, particularly in Berlin, the booming electrical and communications industries had made many positions available to female scientists. Since the time of the Weimar Republic, women with doctoral degrees in physics, chemistry, or mathematics had success finding positions as industrial researchers at Berlinbased corporations. Directors of research departments had created a welcoming atmosphere in several firms and laboratories, and they acted as patrons toward the women scientists under their supervision, many of whom held permanent positions. Most of them, or at least those untouched by Nazi politics, remained in their laboratories throughout the 1930s. They were able to stay because of their value as scientists and because, during the Nazi era, their place in industry was less politically vulnerable than were positions at state institutions. Several outstanding female researchers at electrical engineering corporations, including Magdalene Hüniger, Edel-Agathe Neumann, and Cäcilie Fröhlich (see Chapter 6), maintained the support of industrial patrons and were able to continue their work overseas. Bibliography [DTMB] Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Firmenarchiv AEG-Telefunken, Bestand 1.2.060 C. [Private Estate] Private Estate of Mrs. Anna-Maria Elstner (née Runge), Ulm. [UAB] Archive of the Humboldt University of Berlin. [UAG] Archive of the University of Göttingen. JÄGER, Kurt; HEILBRONNER, Friedrich, eds. (2010). Lexikon der Elektrotechniker. Berlin: VDEVerlag. LORENZ, Hermann (1975). “Dr. phil. Ellen Lax 90 Jahr.” Physikalische Blätter 31, pp. 366–68. LUXBACHER, Günther (2003). Massenproduktion im globalen Kartell. Rationalisierung in der Glühlampen- und Radioröhrenindustrie bis 1945. Berlin: GNT-Verlag. LYKKNES, Annette; OPITZ, Donald L.; VAN TIGGELEN, Brigitte, eds. (2012). For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences. Basel: Springer. TOBIES, Renate (2008). “Transdisziplinarität – Forscher/innen in der elektrotechnischen Industrie vor 1945.” In “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz.” Frauen in Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik. Ed. Renate Tobies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 307–34. — (2012). Iris Runge: A Life at the Crossroads of Mathematics, Science, and Industry (Science Networks, Historical Studies 43). Trans. Valentine A. Pakis. Basel: Birkhäuser. — (2013). “Chemikerinnen in der elektrotechnischen Industrieforschung vor 1945.” In Akademische Karrieren von Naturwissenschaftlerinnen gestern und heute. Ed. Ute Pascher and Petra Stein. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 71–103.

6 FROM THE GERMAN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING INDUSTRY TO THE UNITED STATES: THE CASE OF CECILIE FROEHLICH Renate Tobies Cäcilie Fröhlich (later Cecilie Froehlich), who held a doctorate in mathematics, worked as a mathematical consultant in the German electrical engineering industry. After her (forced) emigration from Nazi Germany in 1937, she continued this kind of work at a Belgian corporation for some years, before having to leave Europe altogether. She arrived in the U.S.A. in 1941 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1946. There, too, she was able to maintain her career as a mathematical consultant in several areas of industry. Perhaps most significantly, it was on Froehlich’s account that applied mathematics achieved an academic status in the United States.1 She was not only an accomplished researcher but also a vocal advocate for women entering the fields of science and engineering, which were traditionally dominated by men. Although Froehlich’s remarkable life and achievments have been sketched,2 they have yet to be profiled in detail. The goal of the present chapter is to provide a fuller picture of her biography. 6.1 Education in Germany Born to a Jewish family on November 21, 1900, in Cologne, Germany, Cäcilie Fröhlich received a sound education. In this regard she was following the footsteps of her father Alfred Fröhlich, who was a civil engineer. Her mother was Martha Meyer. After attending a secondary school for girls in her home town, where she earned her Abitur (the prerequisite diploma for university admission) in 1919, she studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin (one semester), Bonn (four semester), Cologne (one semester), and once more in Bonn for four semesters. In Bonn she completed a doctorate in mathematics on February 27, 1926, and then took her examinations to qualify as a secondary school teacher. She wrote her doctoral thesis – “Die konformen Transformationen im dreidimensionalen Raum” [“The Conformal Transformations in Three-Dimensional Space”] – under the direction of Hans Beck, a geometrician who supervised the doctoral research of four other women and ten men at the

1

2

On the late arrival of academic applied mathematics in the United States, see SIEGMUNDSCHULTZE 2003. On the mathematicians who fled from Nazi Germany, see SIEGMUNDSCHULTZE 2009. Thanks go to Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze who informed me about the existence of a file on Froehlich in the Courant Papers. See my article in JÄGER/HEILBRONNER 2010, pp. 148–49. Froehlich was profiled in Who’s Who in Engineering as early as 1966; in Who’s Who of American Women (7th ed., 1971); and in American Men and Women of Science: A Biographical Directory of Today’s Leaders in Physical, Biological and Related Sciences (12th ed., 1971–73; 14th ed., 1979).

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University of Bonn.3 Although her dissertation was considered merely “sufficient” (genügend), her oral examination was evaluated as “good” (gut).4 The main subject of her orals, which she took on May 20, 1925, was mathematics, and her secondary subjects were theoretical physics and philosophy. Her doctoral thesis found itself in the crosshairs of a theoretical dispute that had arisen between Hans Beck and his fellow geometrician Eduard Study, whose lectures she had also attended in Bonn.5 Another of Fröhlich’s teachers was the famous Jewish mathematician Felix Hausdorff; during the summer semester of 1923, for instance, she attended his course on probability theory.6 Interestingly enough, Hausdorff – whose (tragically unsuccessful) emigration from Germany she later attempted to assist7 – had tried to reconcile the dispute between his feuding colleagues Beck and Study.8 Whereas all of Beck’s other doctoral students went on to become long-term teachers at secondary schools, Fröhlich taught mathematics and the natural sciences for only one school year at this level (1926–27). Her brief career as a schoolteacher took place at a secondary school for girls in the town of Wiesdorf, which is today an incorporated district of Leverkusen, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia. After this one year she took a new position in the electrical engineering industry. A career move of this sort was rare even among men with doctorates in mathematics, let alone women.9 6.2 A Mathematical Consultant in the German Electrical Industry Fröhlich’s early contracts in the industrial sector were facilitated by her father, at first in the Rhineland area. Over the next two years she delivered courses and lectures on higher mathematics, especially vector analysis and nomography, to practical engineers. This she did in the service of the Society for Technical-Scientific Training (Gesellschaft für Technisch-Wissenschaftliche Fortbildung), which was founded in 1921 in Cologne,10 and for the Consortium of German Factory Engineers (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Betriebsingenieure), which was a branch of the longstanding Association of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure). The Consortium of German Factory Engineers had been publishing its own journal, Mitteilungen, since 1920. When Fröhlich held lectures in these training 3 4 5

See FRÖHLICH 1925; TOBIES 2006. [UA Bonn] Promotionsalbum. During the winter semester of 1923-24, Fröhlich attended Eduard Study’s course on higher mathematics (see [UA Bonn] Exmatrikulationsakte). On the theoretical dispute between Study and Hans Beck, see STUDY 1926, p. 296; and BECK 1927, p. 181. 6 See HOCHKIRCHEN 1998 (doctoral thesis), p. 209. 7 See the letter from George Pólya to Otto Toeplitz dated May 29, 1939 (cited in WIEGAND 1999, p. 26). 8 I am indebted to Professor Egbert Brieskorn, who provided me with this information in a personal letter dated August 20, 2004. 9 See ABELE/NEUNZERT/TOBIES 2004, pp. 89–120. 10 See http://www.gtwf-koeln.de/.

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courses, she devised calculating tables and other tools for various factories at the same time. She also gave private lessons and courses on mathematics and physics. On January 15, 1929, Fröhlich became an employee at the AEG machine factory Brunnenstraße in Berlin. AEG – the Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft, or General Electric Power Company – was founded in 1887 by the Jewish industrialist Emil Rathenau, a leading figure in the early European electrical industry. In 1937, the AEG executives Waldemar Petersen and Hans Heyne, who were both educated as electrical engineers, wrote a laudatory testimonial on her behalf. This document, which is dated June 30, 1937, explains that she had worked as a mathematician and technical assistant until May 31, 1933 in the aforementioned machine factory, and then as a mathematical consultant to AEG’s board of directors until her forced resignation in June of 1937. Petersen and Heyne also noted that Fröhlich’s main task had been to examine and solve mathematical and technical problems for the sake of their practical application. The problems in question were chiefly in the fields of electrical engineering and mechanics; her calculations concerned “Foucault currents, switching procedures, rectifiers, mechanical vibrations, balancing, critical numbers of revolution, gyroscopic action, etc.”11 The letter itself, which survives only in an English translation, states further: Apart from her special work, Miss Froehlich has been a valuable mathematical adviser to our engineers and scientists. She not only possesses a versatile knowledge of mathematics, but also a deep insight in (sic) technical problems and a special gift for understanding and applying other people ideas (sic). On the basis of her thorough knowledge of foreign languages and of branch literature, as well as her keen judgment, she has been able to render valuable services in patent questions and similar matters. In several cases we have applied for patents based on her ideas.12

Fröhlich developed new calculating methods using Fourier series, partial differential equations, and other means of analysis. Her mathematical modeling and calculations of eddy current losses in iron plates and in the support rings of electric machines, whose calculated approximations agreed closely with measureable results,13 aroused international attention. This acclaim would facilitate her emigration from Nazi Germany in 1937. In the student newspaper of the City College of New York (October 1, 1942), a columnist noted: Of the nine busy years spent before she was forced to leave Germany, five were spent in an electrical machine factory, and four in the management office. It was at this time that Dr. Froehlich published her work on “Eddy Currents,” dealing with the losses due to these in electrical machinery. For this she received world recognition in engineering circles.14

In the first footnote of the article in question, Fröhlich mentioned that her investigation had been instigated by Dr. L. Fleischmann. Fleischmann was interested in knowing the extent of current losses that could occur in the end plates and supporting rings of electrical machines. Froehlich approached the problem mathe11 12 13 14

[Courant papers] Testimonial for C. Froehlich (dated June 30, 1937). Ibid. FRÖHLICH 1932. GOLDSTEIN 1942.

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matically, developed a formula, and articulated a new method for calculating such losses – by means of a Fourier series expansion – for the case of sinusoidal and other current distributions. Lionel Fleischmann had been a deputy member of the AEG’s executive board since 1924; he was born in New York in 1873, and went on to study mathematics, physics, and engineering in Lausanne, Berlin, and Zurich, where he ultimately completed his doctorate in electrical engineering. After working at different electrical companies, including two years at the General Electric Company in Schenectady (1897–99), he was transferred to AEG’s machine factory Brunnenstraße in Berlin, where he directed the departments for calculation and design.15 Fleischmann understood the value of Fröhlich skills, and he was able to put them to good use. On account of his religion, he was later forced to leave Germany for the United States, and he died in New York in 1962. Fleischmann’s recommendations, incidentally, helped Cäcilie Fröhlich to find professional positions outside of Germany. 6.3 An Interlude in Belgium Almost immediately after her emigration, Cäcilie Fröhlich was able to continue her work as a mathematical consultant, now for an electrical engineering company in Belgium. In a curriculum vitae from April 1941, she stated: “Since August 1937 I have been working as a mathematician with ‘Ateliers de Constructions Electriques de Charleroi’ (ACEC), Charleroi, Belgium, chiefly entrusted with special problems in the electromagnetic field and electrical engineering.”16 The ACEC was a manufacturer of electrical generators, transmitters, lighting, and industrial equipment, with origins dating to the late nineteenth century. Similar to AEG in Berlin, ACEC produced large electrical machines, included dynamos, elevators, carbon arc lamps, electric traction motors for trams, drilling equipment, motor vehicles, vacuum-based electronics, and so on. About her experience in Belgium, Fröhlich remarked in a later interview: “It was worse there. They hadn’t even employed women as clerks before I marched in. For a while they seemed to think they had bought a talking horse: everybody came around just to have a look at me.”17 In Belgium she indeed managed to create an opportunity for herself. However, when the German army invaded Belgium in 1940, Froehlich was once again in jeopardy. She described the situation in her own words: The factories were closed in May 1940 when the Germans invaded Belgium; on German order they were reopened in July. I was reengaged by the Belgian director on August 1st. I still gave lectures on “the application of complex functions in electrical engineering problems” for the engineers of the firm and was also occupied with difficult technical translations (French to 15 See the article “Wir stellen vor: Dr. phil. Lionel Fleischmann. Stellvertretendes Vorstandsmitglied,” Spannung. Die AEG-Umschau (June 1928), pp. 277–78 (archived in [DTMB]). I am indebted to Jörg Schmalfuß, the director of the archive, for kindly placing this material at my disposal. 16 Archived in the [Courant papers], which have not yet been fully catalogued. 17 FIELDS 1956.

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German and German to French). However, as soon as I had an opportunity to leave Belgium, I asked for holidays and obtained them and thereby left the country (January 15th 1941).18

Later she added that, when she wasn’t hiding, she was working on a farm.19 Fröhlich fled first to France, then to Portugal, and after harrowing experiences to the United States, from which she never returned.20 Her father, brother, and other relatives also managed to escape to America. After she had left Europe, it is clear that she did not care to speak about the Nazi era. While working on his edition of Felix Hausdorff’s papers, the mathematician Walter Purkert learned from Froehlich’s former colleagues that she had avoided discussing the Holocaust whenever inquiries were made about it.21 6.4 Her Career as a Professor in the United States At the latest, Cecilie Froehlich (as her name would be spelled in North America) had arrived in the United States by April of 1941, at which time she composed the curriculum vitae cited above and interviewed with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars.22 She lived at 330 East 56th Street, and wrote that Mr. Dannie Heineman (Suite 1700, 50 Broadway, New York City), had allowed her to give his name as a reference for further information. An American electrical engineer, Heineman was educated at the Technical University of Hanover,23 and had worked at AEG, at electric companies in Belgium, and elsewhere. He thus knew and appreciated Froehlich’s achievements and circumstances. It was the mathematician Richard Courant, a Jewish-German emigrant who had arrived in New York as early as 1934, who recommended her and other German mathematicians and physicists to the Executive Board of the Emergency Committee. By that time, Courant was the chair of the mathematics department at New York University. Betty Drury, the executive secretary, wrote the following to Courant on July 20, 1942: “On the chance that Dr. Caecilie Froehlich’s papers would interest the institution, I have sent copies of them along and am enclosing the originals herewith so that you may have them back for own files.”24 18 19 20 21

[Courant papers]. See FIELDS 1956. “Faculty Profiles,” The City College Vector (November 1947), n.p. This information was made known to Walter Purkert in a letter to him from Miller A. F. Ritchie, President Emeritus at Pacific University, and Josephine B. Ritchie (dated July 21, 1998). They also informed him that there was now a Holocaust Center at Pacific University (see [UB Bonn] Hausdorff papers). 22 [EC], her file is dated 29 July, 1942, and was closed on 15 October, 1943. 23 From 1928 to 1933, when its activities were suspended, a Minna-James-Heineman Foundation existed in Hanover (in honor of Dannie Heineman’s Jewish parents). In 1940, the Heineman family moved from war-torn Europe to New York, where Dannie Heineman and his wife Hettie would establish the Heineman Foundation for Research, Educational, Charitable and Scientific Purposes, Inc. In Germany, the Heineman Foundation was reestablished in 1951. 24 [Courant papers].

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It took more than one year for her to receive an academic position. In the meantime, she was able to work as a mathematical consultant (see Section 6.5), but first she attended the Julia Richman High School in New York to learn Engish. Although her education in Germany had included Greek, Latin, and French, English had not been part of the curriculum.25 In October of 1942, Froehlich was given an emergency appointment at the City College of New York, at first a minor instructorship in the department of electrical engineering. Regardless of the position’s prestige, she was nevertheless the first female member of the faculty in the twenty-five-year history of the department. Here she rose through the ranks: She became an assistant professor in December of 1946, the year in which she also received U.S. citizenship and a driving license, an associate professor in 1950, and a full professor of mathematics in 1954. She was the first woman to attain the rank of full professor at City College and the first to be made the chair of any department there. At the time when she was elected chair of the electrical engineering department, for a threeyear term beginning on September 1, 1955,26 the departmental faculty consisted of thirty-nine male professors and only one other woman. Moreover, the department had nearly 1,500 students, only nine of whom were women.27 Altogether, Cecilie Froehlich taught for twenty-three years at City College.

Figure 6.1: Cecilie Froehlich and Students at City College New York, 1955 (Source: [UB Bonn]).

In 1966, having retired as professor emerita from City College, Froehlich moved to Oregon, where she was hired as a full professor and chair of the mathematics department at Pacific University in Forest Grove. She purchased a house in Forest 25 See CRAENER 1956. 26 “CCNY’S New Department Head,” New York Times (Sunday, August 28, 1955). 27 See FIELDS 1956.

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Grove and found herself at an institution whose total enrollment was less than that of the single department that she had led in New York City. She adapted easily to the small campus and soon became an active member of the Forest Grove community. Her many contacts enabled her to place her students in good jobs throughout the country. She retired from Pacific University in 1972, after which she spent several years teaching, on a voluntary basis, German language and culture both to adults and elementary school children.28 Froehlich became one of the first female members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), which was founded in 1884 to promote the arts and sciences associated with the production and utilization of electricity and the welfare of those employed in these industries.29 The first female fellow of AIEE was Edith Clarke, who had joined the organization in 1948. Having held several industrial and academic positions, Clarke became, in 1947, the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country, at the University of Texas at Austin. Froehlich recalled her first experiences with AIEE as follows: “When I was finally accepted (to the Institute), they sent me a letter which said that the main advantage of being a member was that from now on I could have close and frequent relationships with fellow members. Apparently, they didn’t know I was a woman.30 Froehlich later became a senior and life-time member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).31 In 1952, she was inducted as “a brother” into Eta Kappa Nu, an electrical engineering fraternity. This fraternity, which is essentially an honors society for electrical and computer engineering, was founded in 1904 and is now affiliated with IEEE. On May 6, 1961, the Eta Kappa Nu Award went to Cecilie Froehlich “for her outstanding service and development to the City College and its students” as the first woman to chair a department of electrical engineering in the United States.32 Tau Beta Pi, another male-dominated honors society, did not exactly award Froehlich with full membership, but rather with a woman’s badge.33 At that time there were approximately 4,000 members in the Society of Women Engineers, and approximately 400,000 male engineers in the United States as a whole.34 It should be noted that Froehlich also belonged to the American Society for Engineering Education, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Association of University Women (see Section 6.6).

28 This information derives from Cecilie Froehlich’s obituary in The Sunday Oregonian (November 15, 1992). 29 On January 1, 1963, AIEE merged with the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 30 “Members Bid farewell,” The City College Vector (March 8, 1966), n.p. 31 WAGLER 1990. 32 WAXMAN 1961, p. 1. 33 See CRAENER 1956. 34 Ibid.

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6.5 Relations to Industry in the United States In an interview conducted in 1956, Froehlich made the following remark about her first time in America: “[I]t was hard to get a job because I was considered an enemy alien here, and I was an enemy in my own country.”35 For a short time, however, she was able to work as a mathematical consultant at Westinghouse Electric International, thus continuing in her familiar profession.36 Yet her industrial position was not secure; the United States entered the Second World War in December of 1941, and Froehlich was not yet a U.S. citizen. Whereas, in 1942, an article mentioned that she “is also at present a consulting engineer on mathematical analysis for Westinghouse,”37 her faculty profile from the subsequent year noted that, as a woman and a new arrival to the country, she had found it difficult to obtain employment at any industrial firm.38 When Richard Courant recommended Froehlich for a position writing a letter to the Executive Secretary of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Scholars, on July 10, 1942, he described her industrial position less conveniently: Finally I should like to mention Dr. Caecilie Froehlich. She is a mathematical physicist formerly employed by the German chemical industry and now employed as a kind of clerk or librarian by the Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh. I am enclosing a few documents that you might return to me at your convenience.39

Froehlich was awarded sabbatical leave from City College during the 1951-52 academic year, and she used this time to renew her contacts in the field of industrial research. She worked part-time as a technical research consultant at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratories, a branch of International Telephone and Telegraph in Nutley, New Jersey. There she was active for one year, and the nature of her work was classified.40 According to The International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés, Froehlich was also employed, in 1969 and 1970, as a consultant by the Computer Science Corporation in Falls Church, Virginia. There she specialized in systems design.41 She is known to have used her connections in industry to promote the careers of her female (and male) students.

35 36 37 38 39 40

FIELDS 1956. See the Bronx Press-Review (March 24, 1966), p. 16. Goldstein 1942. See the faculty profiles in The City College Vector (November 1947). [EC] “Precedent Set,” Tech News: The City College of New York School of Technology (September 22, 1955), p. 1. 41 STRAUSS/RÖDER 1983, p. 344.

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6.6 Supporting Women in Engineering While in the United States, one of Froehlich’s persistent goals was to demonstrate that engineering was not a field for men and men alone. As early as 1942, when she joined the all-male faculty of at City College, she became a member of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She was instrumental, in fact, in establishing a new chapter of this association, its first at City College in New York. It was purported that she epitomized the highly-educated professional woman, believing as she did that women should have equal rights in education and employment.42 When, in November of 1947, the City College Vector published a profile of Froehlich, then a freshly-appointed assistant professor, it was underscored that “she has always been interested in the establishment of more social contacts between women in engineering and is now in a position to accomplish this to some extent.” In order to bring female students of engineering together to exchange ideas, she helped to arrange a meeting between the women at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (a privately funded college in Lower Manhattan) and the women tech students at City College. The meeting took place November 30, 1947 at Cooper Union. Froehlich stated in an interview that she had a deep desire to see more favorable publicity and understanding accorded to women in all branches of engineering and science. After her sabbatical leave (see Section 6.5), she increased her efforts to promote women in engineering. Since the City College School of Technology first opened to female students in 1919, women had made up less than one per cent of its enrollment, at least until the beginning of the 1950s.43 While working in industry, Froehlich observed that women with engineering degrees experienced few difficulties in finding employment after graduation. She learned that industrial companies were eager to have them, sometimes signing them to contracts even before they had their degrees. Thus Froehlich decided, in 1951, to write a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was known as an advocate for the expanded role of women in the workplace, for the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and for the rights of World War II refugees. Froehlich pointed out that training more female engineers would be an ideal way to ease the engineering shortage. The former First Lady was impressed by Froehlich’s letter and discussed the problems on television; the story was subsequently reported by the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune.44 Froehlich continued to encourage women to pursue engineering careers. She was active, for instance, in forming the Society of Women Engineers at City College. During the summer of 1964, she served as curriculum coordinator for the 42 “Pacific, Community Friends Fete Dr. Froehlich on 89th,” Forest Grove News-Times (November 26, 1980). 43 See the New York Times (November 2, 1952). 44 See “Girls are Invited into Engineering,” New York Times (November 2, 1952); “Make Way for Women Engineers,” New York Herald Tribune (November 30, 1952); and “Dr. Froehlich, Female EE Prof., Retires,” Tech News of the City College of New York, School of Technology (March 8, 1966), p. 3.

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experimental Mathematics Enrichment Summer Program at City College. This was jointly sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women and the Heineman Foundation. The program was part of a nation-wide campaign to recruit more people of color, particularly women, into science, engineering, and mathematics careers. The Tech News stressed that Froehlich had devoted her services to the program free of charge and encouraged other faculty members to do the same.45 When she retired from her professorship and decided to leave New York for the West Coast, she declared emphatically that she had “led women to engineering.” Having challenged the myth that engineering is “a physically taxing, masculine occupation,” she claimed that “actually many branches of engineering are ideally suited to women.” By way of example she cited acoustics, electronics, engineering design, and chemical engineering. She suggested, furthermore, that more high schools should prepare and guide girls toward engineering careers: “In most instances, no one bothers to tell female high school students about engineering careers. As a result, the girls frequently fail to elect adequate preparatory courses in mathematics and science. When they get to college, they find they don’t have the necessary qualifications to study engineering.”46 Froehlich’s appointment to Pacific University had a good deal to do with her involvement in the American Association of University Women (AAUW), in which she continued to be an active member. Miller A. F. Ritchie was then president of Pacific, and his wife, Josephine B. Ritchie, happened also to be an active AAUW member. Thus Froehlich’s name was brought to the president’s attention. After a meeting with him, she was offered the job of chairing the mathematics department, as mentioned above. As a professor emerita at Pacific University, Froehlich was ultimately regarded as “a living example of the ideals and objectives of AAUW relative to the potential role of women as leaders in society and as contributors to its betterment.”47 In April of 1979, the highest honor awarded by this organization, which was dedicated to equity and education for women and girls, was presented to Cecilie Froehlich, namely a research fellowship was created in her honor. At the time it was expected that at least ten years would be required before the Cecilie Froehlich Fellowship would achieve endowment status.48 The money, however, came more quickly than expected from donors such as the Forest Grove branch of AAUW, the Hillsboro branch of AAUW, the Heineman Foundation in New York, and from former students and acquaintances. At the time of her eightieth birthday,

45 Ibid. 46 The Riverdale Press (March 10, 1966), p. 18. 47 Introductory Remarks by Corinne Scott, the treasurer of the Forest Grove branch of the AAUW, delivered at state division meeting held on April 23, 1983 in Newport. The text, which is archived in [UBBonn] Hausdorff papers (Prof. Brieskorn), was published in a shorter version in The Times (April 20, 1983). 48 “Dr. Froehlich Honored, AAUW Fellowship Names Retired Pacific Professor,” New Times [Forest Grove, Oregon] (August 29, 1979), p. 7.

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in 1980, friends contributed 1,500 dollars to the fund in lieu of birthday gifts.49 By 1983, Froehlich had been a member of AAUW for more than forty years; a celebration was duly held, for it was also in this year that her fellowship had become fully endowed (at least 25,000 dollars were required). For some time, the AAUW ran the largest non-university grant program in the nation. The foundation helped more than 5,000 women complete graduate degrees, for instance, from 1988 to 1990. During the latter year, Cecilie Froehlich’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a reception; the theme of the evening was “Family Math.”50 6.7 Epilogue On the occasion of Froehlich’s eightieth birthday, Miller A. F. Ritchie, the former president of Pacific University, remarked: “At 80 she is just as sharp as she’s ever been. You can’t get near her without experiencing some sort of intellectual stimulation.”51 Some twelve years later, on November 9, 1992, Cecilie Froehlich passed away at her home in Forest Grove, Oregon. She died of causes related to old age. She was survived by her nephew Peter Froehlich of Ottawa, Ontario; and her sister-in-law Thea Froehlich of Stockton, California, as well as by numerous friends and colleagues. A memorial service took place on Friday, November 20 in the Old College Hall Chapel of Pacific University, and she was buried in Mt. View Memorial Gardens in Forest Grove. Bibliography [EC] Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, file at the New York Public Library [UAOregon] Collection on Cecilie Froehlich, Pacific University Archives, Forest Grove, Oregon. [DTMB] Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Historical Archives, Firmenarchiv AEG – Telefunken, Bestand 1.2.060 C. [Courant Papers]. Richard Courant Papers at Bobst Library, New York City, New York, New York University Archives, not yet fully catalogued. [UA Bonn] Archives of the University of Bonn, Promotionsalbum; Exmatrikulationsakte (C. Fröhlich). [UB Bonn] Library of the University of Bonn, Dept. Handschriften and Rara, Hausdorff papers. ABELE, Andrea; NEUNZERT, Helmut; TOBIES, Renate (2004). Traumjob Mathematik! Berufswege von Frauen und Männern. Basel: Birkhäuser. BECK, Hans (1927). “Erwiderung auf Herrn Study.” Jahresbericht der Deutschen MathematikerVereinigung 36, pp. 180-83. CRAENER, Vera (1956). “Eine Frau wird hervorragende Ingenieurin. Die Karriere der Cecilie Froehlich.” Welt der Frau (Friday, June 1). 49 “Pacific, Community Friends Fete Dr. Froehlich on 89th,” Forest Grove News-Times (November 26, 1980). 50 See WAGLER 1990. 51 “Pacific, Community Friends Fete Dr. Froehlich on 89th,” Forest Grove News-Times (November 26, 1980).

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FIELDS, Sidney (1956). “Only Human.” Sunday Mirror (October 14), n.p. FRÖHLICH, Cäcilie (1925). Die konformen Transformationen im dreidimensionalen Raum. Greifswald: Abel. — (1929). “Ein Fall, in dem das Magnetfeld zweier komplanarer Stromschleifen keine der beiden Ströme gemeinsam umschlingenden Kraftlinien aufweist.” Elektrotechnik und Maschinenbau 47, pp. 469-70. — (1932). “Wirbelstromverluste in massiven schmiedeeisernen Platten und Ringen.” Archiv für Elektrotechnik 26, pp. 321-29. GOLDSTEIN, Kenny K. (1942). “First Female Invades Tech School Faculty.” The Campus: Undergraduate Newspaper of the City College of New York (Thursday, October 1), n.p. HOCHKIRCHEN, Thomas (1998). Die Axiomatisierung der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung und ihre Kontexte. Doctoral dissertation: University of Wuppertal. (=Studien zur Wissenschafts-, Sozial- und Bildungsgeschichte der Mathematik, 13. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). JÄGER, Kurt; HEILBRONNER, Friedrich, eds. (22010). Lexikon der Elektrotechniker. Berlin: VDE Verlag. SIEGMUND-SCHULTZE, Reinhard (2003). “The Late Arrival of Academic Applied Mathematics in the United States: A Paradox, Theses, and Literature.” NTM-International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology, and Medicine 11, pp. 116–27. SIEGMUND-SCHULTZE, Reinhard (2009). Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact. Princeton University Press. STRAUSS, Herbert A.; RÖDER, Werner, eds. (1983). International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Vol. 2. Munich: K. G. Saur. STUDY, Eduard (1926). “Über einige Arbeiten des Herrn H. Beck.” Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 35, pp. 295–98. TOBIES, Renate (2006). Biographisches Lexikon in Mathematik promovierter Personen an deutschen Universitäten und Technischen Hochschulen, WS 1907/08 bis WS 1944/45. Augsburg: Rauner. JÄGER, Kurt; HEILBRONNER, Friedrich, eds. (22010). Lexikon der Elektrotechniker. Berlin: VDE Verlag. WAGLER, Pat (1990). “AAUW Honors Retired Teacher for Life’s Work.” Forest Grove NewsTimes, n.p. WAXMAN, Albert (1961). “Eta Kappa Nu Award Goes To Prof. Froehlich.” Tech News: The City College of New York School of Technology, Vol. 14, No. 8 (Wednesday, May 24). WIEGAND, Réné, ed. (1999). Otto Toeplitz. Teilnachlass. Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn.

PART III

THE CHEMICAL, COSMETICS, AND NUCLEAR INDUSTRIES Jeffrey Johnson, Maria Rentetzi, and Renate Tobies In 2011, the International Year of Chemistry celebrated the achievements of chemistry and its contributions to the well-being of humankind in more than a hundred countries. The year also focused on the contribution of women to chemistry. A paper in Nature written by Carol Robinson registered some progress that has been made with respect of women in chemistry, but also stated that there was still much work to be done. In particular, Robinson indicated that there might in fact be more difficulties for women in chemistry than in other fields. For instance, the decline between women who earn Ph.D.’s in chemistry (46%) to women who hold professorships (just 6%) is steeper than in other disciplines, including physics and engineering. Robinson suggested a need for new role models for today’s women, noting that “chemistry… has a macho culture in which getting to the finish line first is more important than how you get there.” Besides, she stated, “Too often, female scientists shy away from responsible roles or don’t have sufficient confidence or aspirations.”1 Two years later, the magazine Chemical & Engineering News reported on women’s gains at the top of chemical firms, albeit still far from achieving equal status in the industry. Nevertheless, at that time, of the 407 director positions at forty-two public chemical firms, 14.5 % were held by women, a figure significantly higher than the 13.6 % share found in 2012.2 In 2013, the Society of German Chemists also edited a booklet on equal opportunity in chemistry, including a chapter about women chemists in leading positions in both the German and French chemical industries.3 From this we learn, first, that chemical corporations are interested in promoting women and ushering them into management and research positions. Second, we see that, in recent decades, several female chemists have been able to have successful careers while also being wives and mothers. 1 2 3

See ROBINSON 2011, pp. 273–75. See TULLO 2013. Gelebte Chancengleichheit in der Chemie, Frankfurt: Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, 2013 (86 pp.).

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Third, the conditions for such career paths have been more favorable in France than in Germany, most of whose Western provinces are still afflicted by the stereotype of the Rabenmutter (uncaring mother), which is applied to a mother returns to work immediately after the birth of a child. Chemistry developed into an exact science during the eighteenth century, and the practical insights made at that time led to the nineteenth-century emergence of the chemical industry.4 As early as the final third of the nineteenth-century, the chemical industry employed many (male) university-educated chemists. Beginning around 1900, when women were first granted access to higher education, they too sought occupational niches in this industrial sector; moreover, they created their own chemical societies. In Chapter 7, Jeffrey Johnson, an expert in the history of German chemistry, describes the situation of women in the chemical industry during the first half of the twentieth century. Above all, he demonstrates how difficult it was for women to achieve appropriate positions in chemical corporations, where only very few became successful researchers at that time.5 The most famous women chemists and their findings and inventions are well known, however, and they can be found in several books, journals, and websites.6 Our aim here is rather to present a survey of the general conditions that prevailed for women scientists in the chemical industry and related fields. The radium and cosmetics industries emerged as special branches of chemical corporations, and were based on several disciplines.7 The cosmetics industry boomed during the 1930s, and cosmetics – despite seeming to be a characteristically female subject – nevertheless became an industrial sector dominated by men. Maria Rentetzi explains this phenomenon in Chapter 8, which focuses on the career of the chemist Florence Wall in the United States. Wall, who had held a variety of industrial positions, contributed significantly to the elevation of cosmetology into science. Chapter 9 concerns women – educated mainly in chemistry and physics, radiochemistry or physical chemistry – who were employed in the nuclear industry. It addresses the parallel developments of this industry in the United States and the Soviet Union during the time of the Second World War and the Cold War, when many (mostly male) German specialists were also involved. Bibliography GRINSTEIN, Louise S.; ROSE, Rose K.; RAFAILOVICH, Miriam H., eds. (1993). Women in Chemistry and Physics: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. JOHNSON, Jeffrey Allan (1990). The Kaiser’s Chemists. Science and Modernization in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. 4 5 6 7

See THACKRAY et al. 1985; JOHNSON 1990. See also JOHNSON 1998. See GRINSTEIN et. al 1993; RAYNER-CANHAM 1998; ROBINSON 2011; http://chemistry.about.com/od/womeninchemistry/a/womenchemistry.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_chemists, etc. For radium corporations and women’s work see especially RENTEZI 2008.

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— (1998). “German Women in Chemistry, 1895–1925,” and “German Women in Chemistry, 1925–1945”. NTM-International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine, N.S. 6, pp. 1–21, 65–90. RAYNER-CANHAM, Marelene; RAYNER-CANHAM, Geoffrey (1993) Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society. RENTETZI, Maria (2008). Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna. New York: Columbia University Press. ROBINSON, Carol V. (2011). “Women in science: In pursuit of female chemists”. Nature 476, pp. 273–75. THACKRAY, Arnold; STURCHIO, Jeffrey L.; CARROLL, P. Thomas; BUD, Robert (1985). Chemistry in America, 1876–1976. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. TULLO, Alexander H. (2013). “Women in Industry”. Chemical and Engineering News 91, issue 34, pp. 18–19.

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Figure 7.1: Emmy Wolffhardt, March 1944 (Source: [BASF Unternehmensarchiv Nr. 11751]).

7 WOMEN IN THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY Jeffrey Allan Johnson The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the pattern of development of work for women as industrial chemists and chemical technicians in factory laboratories during first half of the twentieth century, primarily by comparing the German, British, and American contexts, which are the best documented cases of major industrial nations, with occasional glances at other contexts. The main focus will be on the chemical industry, narrowly defined, as the branch producing organic and inorganic chemical products, with some attention to other areas where women worked, such as metals, food products, and pharmaceuticals. Cosmetics and the production of radioactive materials are the subjects of other chapters of this volume. The goal here will be to examine broad patterns of change, rather than individual cases. During the first half of the twentieth century, academically-qualified women chemists achieved real but nevertheless limited gains in industrial employment, albeit mostly in jobs that did not involve actual research. Significantly greater numbers of women worked in technical jobs and routine laboratory work that did not require completed higher educations, with little opportunity to work at higher levels. The two world wars acted to expand the range of employment for women while men were engaged in military service, but the extent to which the expanded opportunities survived the temporary wartime emergencies remains a matter of historical debate. The chapter will thus begin by briefly reviewing the situation before 1914, in which women’s chief gains came from increased access to chemical training. Subsequent sections will consider the wartime period 1914– 1919, the interwar decades 1920–1939, and finally the decade of the Second World War and its aftermath, 1940–1950 and beyond. 7.1 The Situation in 1914: Trained Women with few Prospects for Employment Women have been interested in chemical phenomena for millennia, and there is plenty of evidence that women contributed in significant ways to the creation of modern chemistry.1 The gendered process of professionalizing science unfortunately led to the almost wholesale exclusion of women from the chemical associations that developed during the nineteenth century, however, and prior to 1914 women remained rare exceptions among the ranks of professional chemists. Even in such countries where academic training was open to women by the 1860s, such as Britain or the United States, societies either prohibited women from joining (the Chemical Society of London) or made them unwelcome (the American Che1

Cf. APOTHEKER/SARKADI 2011; RAYNER-CANHAM 1998.

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mical Society).2 Russia seems to have been something of an exception, with active women members in its chemical society as early as the 1870s, despite their having to gain their academic training abroad until the gradual development of special courses for women toward the end of the century.3 Overall, as the twentieth century dawned and women began to successfully gain access to broader opportunities for academic training in chemistry, some organizations exhibited a more welcoming yet still generally ambivalent attitude toward women. No country before 1914 offers evidence of significant employment of academically-trained women in the chemical industry. Thus, whereas male chemists preferred to go into industry rather than teaching, it appears that most women who obtained academic training sought to follow careers in secondary teaching.4 In the United States, the 1910 census identified 579 women in the category “chemists, assayers and metallurgists” (3.5% of the total).5 Clearly some of these were in the chemical industry as such, but how many had higher academic training? Women chemistry students organized honor societies to recognize academic achievement at several different universities between 1900 and 1913, when they began to consolidate into what in 1916 became Iota Sigma Pi, the first national honor society for women in chemistry. This organization gradually developed into a professional networking organization for women.6 Unfortunately, the organization’s official centennial history includes few indications of the types of employment that the members subsequently found. While most appear to have become chemistry teachers, including some in higher education, a few may have had industrial jobs before 1914 despite the very “limited” opportunities for women in industry.7 The reasons for these limitations were similar to those that Sally Horrocks has identified in Britain: “It was argued that women lacked the intellectual capacity and staying power for scientific work, particularly for original work, and that expensive training would be wasted when they left to marry. In addition they could not work directly alongside men because of the possibility that men might be distracted from their work by the presence of female colleagues, nor could they be placed in positions of authority over men.”8 Moreover, it was claimed that women could not handle the physical work in chemical plants, which were in any case inappropriate, possibly dangerous places for women. In other national contexts women chemists had far fewer opportunities to gain permanent positions either in higher education or in industry, with the case of Marie Curie in Paris 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

On British chemical education for women, see RAYNER-CANHAM 2008; for the profession, see MACKIE 2008, p. 144; by 1914 a “handful of women” had joined the Society of Chemical Industry and the Institute of Chemistry (the professional certification body, which began admitting women in 1891). On U.S. education and professional groups, see ROSSITER 1982. BROOKS/KAJI/ZAITSEVA 2008, p. 294; Tollmien (1997). Cf. the introduction to this volume. For France, see FAUQUE 2011; MAYEUR 1977; HULIN 2002; HULIN 2008. Thanks to Danielle Fauque for providing copies and references to sources. BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION 1922, p. 3. SHERREN/VERCELLOTTI 2005, p. 11. BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION 1922, p. 46. HORROCKS 2000, p. 353–54.

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among the rare exceptions in this period; she was also notable for her involvement in the radium industry.9 In Germany, it was not until 1908–09 that all of the universities began to admit women as regular students, though it was possible for women to obtain doctorates earlier than this at some universities.10 Thus the first German-born woman to get a doctorate in chemistry was Clara Immerwahr at the University of Breslau in 1900; but after a short academic assistantship she gave up her career to marry Fritz Haber in 1901.11 As to industrial jobs, the Association of German Chemists (Verein Deutscher Chemiker or VDC) in its surveys of employment in the chemical industry first took notice of women in 1913, when one left a company due to marriage (whether she was dismissed or left voluntarily was not mentioned); three new women had been hired. The VDC’s reporter jovially suggested that the survey might need a new heading: departure due to marriage.12 This category was in fact introduced in the 1930s. Nevertheless at least one German woman chemist combined work with marriage and children in the pre-war era, Dr. Clara Plohn of Berlin. With her husband (Robert Plohn, a pharmacist), she attended the London Congress of Applied Chemistry in 1909 and later a series of other technical congresses such as the Third International Congress on Refrigeration in Chicago in September 1913, which she attended by herself as a science journalist. While in Chicago, she was quoted as a strong advocate for childcare to help married professional women pursue their careers; a century later, her words still challenge the conventional social order: I can’t see that it’s necessary for a woman to remain at home with her children. I am devoted to my babies [then four months and one year seven months old] and I see that they receive the best of care. When I am away, which is about six months of the year, I put the children in a baby home, where they get proper food and a trained nurse’s attention. My husband goes to see them frequently. He remains in Berlin. I have heard learned doctors say that women in professions have got to stop – that women are absorbing men’s work. I do not believe it will stop. Women will have to go into professions to help their husbands make a living. There will be more baby homes than ever.13

Plohn was no doubt exceptional for her time. Germany presents, however, the first clear case of a systematic effort to train women for chemical work in an industrial setting, albeit not in the chemical industry as such (in which Germany of course then led the world) but in the beet sugar industry. Since the 1890s, women had been trained in short courses (extending from three months to one year) in the chemistry vocational schools and from 1900 on in the Institute for the Sugar Industry (Institut für Zucker-Industrie) in Berlin, directed by Alexander Herzfeld. 9 10 11 12 13

On Curie, her industrial connections, and the women who worked with her, see recent works including PIGEARD 2013; TROTEREAU 2011; OGILVIE 2004; BOUDIA 2001. On French women chemists in general, see FAUQUE 2011; MAYEUR 1977; HULIN 2002; HULIN 2008. MAZÓN 2003. JOHNSON 1998, p. 4; cf. SZÖLLÖSI-JANZE 1998, pp. 124–31. VDC-STATISTIK 1913, p. 757; on the VDC at this time see, JOHNSON 2008. Quoted in “The President’s Desk” 1914; on Plohn in London in 1909, see the list of German attendees in RAMSAY/MACNAB 1910, pp. 264–73; on Robert Plohn, see VDC 1919, p. 107.

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Women graduates of such schools as well as some of the few German women university graduates had begun to get temporary analytical jobs in the beet sugar industry of Prussia’s eastern provinces, which required little chemical expertise and paid correspondingly low salaries. For decades many male chemistry students had found their first jobs doing routine technical analyses in the sugar industry’s seasonal “campaigns” paying an average of 1,400 Marks, or regular jobs at salaries that might range as low as 80 Marks per month. Because male chemists found such positions undesirable, women began to move into them in increasing numbers, particularly as more and more vocational chemical schools were founded (by 1911 there were at least twenty-five such schools, including twenty founded since 1909). By this time women were beginning to find jobs in other types of chemical laboratories as well, so that women’s prospects as technical assistants appeared to be excellent; even so, unlike men, women with academic training in chemistry continued to see far better opportunities in secondary teaching than in industry.14 Nevertheless, the concentration of women with chemical training in the German beet sugar industry produced the first known professional organization for women chemists, the Association of Female Chemists (Verein weiblicher Chemiker or VWC), which by 1908 had forty-seven women members (and two men). Its tiny capital of 79 marks and its location in Pelplin, West Prussia (now Poland), reflect its members’ poverty as well as their role in the sugar industry; chemists had few other occupational prospects in that province. Yet these women were clearly insisting on their identity as “female chemists” and were trying to help their members find decent laboratory jobs in the industry. To minimize male chemists’ complaints about salary undercutting, the association’s statutes specified that members not accept seasonal jobs at monthly salaries under 125 Marks, or permanent ones below 90-100 Marks. Even so, these put women on much the same level as technicians, and they fell significantly below the typical income of an academically-trained male chemist in the chemical products industry.15 For this reason, when women seeking employment as chemists began placing notices in the trade journals, the VDC’s leadership perceived a threat to male professional status and in 1906 began a campaign to exclude such women from professional recognition. The VDC never recognized the VWC, urged the journals not to accept advertisements from women (ignoring the possibility that some women might actually have academic qualifications), advised the vocational schools that their training of women was not in the interest of the profession, and requested that women thus trained be given a different title than “women chemists (Chemikerinnen).”16 As a result, according to the industrial organic chemist Carl Duisberg, the VDC’s former chair and current director of the Bayer Dye Factories, no larger dye company had hired a women chemist by January 1914.17 14 15 16 17

HAUFF 1911, p. 43; GÖRS 2002. JOHNSON 1998, pp. 6–7. VDC 1910. JOHNSON 1998, p. 6.

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7.2 Impact of the First World War and its Immediate Aftermath, 1914–1919 The advent of war in 1914 did not at first affect women’s opportunities in the chemical industry, for it was almost universally assumed that the war would be short. By the end of 1915, however, with the opposing sides almost evenly matched and neither able to achieve a decisive victory on the battlefield, it was becoming clear that the outcome of the war would depend upon the most extensive possible mobilization of human and material resources, including chemists, technicians, and chemicals for war production.18 Thus with millions of skilled male workers and professionals on the fighting fronts, industrial and professional leaders in all the major belligerent nations began to look more favorably upon the recruitment of women as temporary replacements for men in uniform, thus for the first time opening many doors of opportunity. Unfortunately those doors were also expected to shut again once peace had come. As it happened, however, once women entered the chemical industry, they could not again be wholly excluded. This section will briefly survey the resulting patterns of employment for women in the chemical industries of Germany, Britain, France, and the United States. German military and political leaders made no effective, concerted effort to mobilize German women until late in 1916, when a major reorganization of the German military administration included the creation of a War Office with a Women’s Central Labor Office under Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, a specialist on training women workers.19 Her staff of educated women, including social workers who took positions in provincial and local branches of the War Office throughout Germany, took the initiative in coordinating the recruitment of women into the war industries, including munitions production, in which chemicals and explosives played a major role; these women were about half of the workforce in the second half of the war, including many the wives or widows of soldiers, who made up about half of the women employed by the Bayer Dye Factories in Leverkusen during the war. Women’s wages rose faster than men’s after March 1915, but in Leverkusen by October 1918, adult women still earned only 60% of the wages of regular male factory workers. The level of women’s wages in the chemical industry in general was only 55% of the men’s in September 1918.20 Unfortunately, while it was relatively easy to recruit thousands of young working-class and lower middle-class women into low-wage jobs in the munitions factories (after putting in place special regulations on housing, meals, hours, and childcare), it was quite another matter to place upper-class, educated women in factories (as opposed to more traditional functions such as secretarial, nursing or hospital work). It appears, however, that each factory with a significant number of women workers was required to employ an educated woman as factory social worker (Fabrikpflegerin). Moreover, by the end of the war some women were serving alongside men in supervisory positions (over women workers) at explo18 Cf. MACLEOD/JOHNSON 2006. 19 DANIEL 1997, pp. 75–79; RYAN 2006, p. 250; FELDMAN 1966, pp. 306–07; LÜDERS 1936. 20 KARBE 1928, pp. 77, 80–84.

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sives factories such as the Royal Saxon Powder Factory at Gnaschwitz, where the proportion of women workers rose from about a quarter in 1914 to more than 40% at the end of 1917.21 Even so, despite a proclamation from the War Ministry in the fall of 1917 for women students to volunteer for munitions work, many of those who sought to respond to such calls encountered resistance; factory officers would claim that there were no positions suitable for them. The Ministry then issued a correction, explaining that there was really not a great need for women students (as opposed to working-class women) to work in munitions, and they should rather remain in the universities as “reserves” while completing their studies.22 Between 1913 and 1918 German women had increased their numbers among chemistry students from around three percent to more than a third of those passing the predoctoral qualifying examinations, and from about a dozen (4%) to ca. twenty (18%) of the doctorates. For the first time, there were also several women assistants in the academic chemical institutes (e.g., three women among the ten assistants at the University of Leipzig).23 The predominant fields of specialization also had shifted from physical chemistry, which had seemed more open to women before the war, to organic chemistry, the field traditionally favored by men going into industry. But could women chemists enter the wartime German organic chemicals industry? This branch, mainly export-oriented before the war, had responded to the British blockade and a rapidly growing demand for military explosives (produced using the same raw materials and intermediates as for dyes) by shifting to mainly war-related production, so that by summer 1916 the former dye industry was already producing more high explosives than the explosives industry. For example, BASF was one of the largest producers of dyes as well as (due to the Haber-Bosch process) synthetic ammonia and nitrates, which were crucial to explosives production. The company thus doubled its labor force to 22,000 by November 1918; but because its high priority in military production allowed it to reclaim skilled workers from the military and to also utilize prisoners of war, it did not even begin to hire women until 1916, and by the end of the war employed fewer than 2,000 women (under ten percent of its workforce). Explosives or nitrates production did not, moreover, require the intensive, systematic laboratory research characteristic of innovation in dyes or pharmaceuticals, so that even with many male chemists in the military, women had relatively few new opportunities in the dye industry. After recruiting twenty-five male chemists since 1915, BASF hired its first woman chemist in January 1918: Dr. Lili Wachenheim, who had studied nitrogen reactions at Heidelberg under Theodor Curtius, but she left BASF at the end of 1918. After hiring thirteen more men, BASF hired its second woman chemist four days after the Armistice, on 15 November 1918: Dr. Martha Bretschneider, whose Leipzig dissertation was on physical-organic analysis. She

21 StAD 1918. 22 StAD 1917. 23 JOHNSON 1998, p. 7.

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worked in the Ammonia Laboratory, which was to become one of the principal workplaces for women chemists in the interwar period.24 The chemical industry had greater demand for women in technical positions. During the later years of the war, the shortage of trained chemical technicians reached such a critical point that the VDC suspended its rule of rejecting women’s applications for assistance in obtaining employment as chemical technicians (Chemotechniker) and laboratory workers (Laboranten). This change in policy came in response to the arguments of chemists like Kurt Arndt, who took the position in 1916 that women’s physical nature made them unsuitable for the strenuous (and well-paid) work of supervising industrial chemical production, though not for menial (and poorly-paid) tasks as laboratory technicians. In August 1918, the corporate director Karl Goldschmidt followed this up by recommending that whereas women should be discouraged from competing with men as full-fledged chemists, which would tend to lower average salaries, women should be preferred to men as Laboranten. That was not only because women were more naturally inclined to be precise, conscientious and clean in their analytical work, but also because these women came from the upper classes rather than from the working classes that produced most of the male Laboranten.25 In September 1917 the VDC even began passing along to its member firms applications (for employment as industrial chemists) from the previously scorned Chemikerinnen, women graduates of the chemistry vocational-technical schools, albeit with a cover letter indicating that although the applicant was not a “real chemist,” in view of wartime shortages of trained men the firm might nevertheless be interested in her services.26 Unfortunately the VDC did not keep records on whether such applicants were successful, as no employment surveys were conducted during the war. The VDC probably also admitted its first two women as regular members in 1917: Dr. Henny Hövermann, an assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim in the Ruhr, and Dr. Marie Jacobsohn, a technical chemist living near Freiburg/Breisgau.27 Moreover, changes in their professional organization indicate that German women chemists had a foothold in the industry by 1918, as the old VWC based in the rural sugar industry had given way by 1918 to the Association of German Women Chemists (Verein Deutscher Chemikerinnen or VDCn), based in Berlin. Its leaders had doctoral degrees and lived or worked mostly in the industrial centers of Berlin (Clara Plohn), Leipzig (Toni Masling, Dr. phil. Münster, 1914), or the Rhineland (Martha Bretschneider of BASF). Initially the group seems not to have been very large: in 1919 31 women were on the VDC membership list, of whom at least 29 were members of the VDCn, including all five women chemists just mentioned. The VDC at once accepted it as an affiliated organization, representing the “special interests of women chemists” but otherwise following the VDC’s lead. Thus in 1919 the women’s group accepted 24 25 26 27

[BASF-UA (1992A)]; [BASF-UA (1931)]; WACHENHEIM (1917); BRETSCHNEIDER (1918). ARNDT 1916; GOLDSCHMIDT 1918, pp. 157–60. JOHNSON 1998, p. 10. VDC 1917, pp. 59, 63.

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the VDC’s position that returning male war veterans should have priority for industrial jobs, and issued an urgent “warning against choosing the occupation of women chemist,” adding that “the possibility of using women chemists in industry is very limited.”28 Yet when Erna Friedländer (Dr. phil. Berlin, 1918) reported on women in the chemical industry in 1919, she argued militantly that despite the priority given returning veterans, women should “not lose courage and not let themselves be driven out of positions they had fought so hard to win.” Moreover, because a recent survey had reported that women chemists’ salaries had been equal to those of men during the war, women chemists should “legitimately fight” the recent contract agreement of the (male) employees’ union in Greater Berlin that specified a 10-15% lower salary rate for women in the chemical industry. On the other hand, after noting that “almost all” of the women chemists in industry were in laboratories rather than in production plants, on the assumption that most women were unsuited for strenuous work, she also suggested that women might want to avoid “the unhealthy air of the laboratory” (not mentioning women’s purported suitability to be there as laboratory workers or technicians). Instead, women could work effectively “in the literary and patent offices of large firms.” Although she was not aware of any German women who were directors or owners of a factory, she suggested that this might eventually change. In the meantime, women must “demonstrate their prowess and prove that they could achieve as much as their male colleagues, then they would be bound to succeed.” The VDCn then agreed to join the newly organized professional Union for Employed Chemists and Engineers in the chemical industry (Bund der angestellten Chemiker und Ingenieure or Budaci), in the hope of participating in national salary negotiations so as to avoid further setbacks like the one in Berlin.29 But just a month later in Bavaria, the regional leadership of Budaci negotiated wage guidelines similar to those in Berlin, whereby women chemists were paid minimum wages fifteen percent below those of unmarried men, who were in turn paid substantially below married men.30 Such gender discrimination in wages would be outlawed by the Weimar constitution’s principle of equal pay for equal work, but this principle could be undermined by segregating women industrial chemists into separate, lower-status roles. Even so, other nations’ women chemists had no similar legal rights. The stage was thus set for an interwar period in which women chemists going into industry usually found themselves in positions that did not compete with men, frustrating any ambitions to demonstrate their competence in the chemical work favored by male chemists. Similarly in Britain, thousands of unskilled women took jobs to supplement or replace men as munitions workers, thereby reaching a share of nearly 90% of the

28 VDC 1918, p. 175; VDCn 1919a; Wiemeler 1996, p. 238; Roloff 1989, pp. 99–102. In the absence of original documents of the VDCn, I am dependent upon the brief notices published in the journal of the VDC. 29 VDCn 1919b. 30 [HStAM 1919].

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total staff in chemical and explosives factories.31 This was of course far more than the comparable proportion in Germany. Another significant difference between the British and German patterns was that in 1915 the British government chose to locate most of its explosives and munitions production in new, state-owned National Factories, rather than the “mixed” system of public and private industry in Germany. Most of the National Factories were explicitly temporary, so that women working there could not expect to be employed after the war. At the same time, women chemistry students were advised, like their German counterparts, to stay in the universities and finish their studies. Many women students and assistants nevertheless engaged in critical war-related research work in synthetic and analytic organic chemistry, including explosives and war gases.32 Moreover, the National Factories employed large numbers of women doing routine chemical and metallurgical analysis in connection with munitions production, so that by 1918 analytical chemistry seemed to offer considerable potential as an occupation for women in the postwar era.33 A few women did more than routine work in such factory laboratories and even rose to supervisory positions, such as May Sybil Leslie, who in 1916 became Chemist in Charge of Laboratory and was awarded a D.Sc. degree by Leeds University in 1918 for her work, only to be forced to return to academic life after the end of the war.34 In France, which of all the major contending nations had the fewest academically-trained chemists in industry at the outset of the war, there is also evidence of a wartime demand for women chemists to work in factories. Unfortunately there appear to be no studies yet that document how many women found such positions, or where they were located. Contemporary literature on women’s war work does, however, suggest that women played a considerable role in the French munitions industry as managers of the small, family-owned firms that were a major element of French wartime production.35 In the United States, the impact on women’s employment was limited by the country’s late entrance into the war, in April 1917, followed by a rather slow industrial mobilization, which was still in process when the war ended in November 1918. This, coupled with the fact that the American Expeditionary Force suffered far fewer casualties than the armies of other nations, meant that most of the male industrial chemists inducted would return to their jobs within a year, leaving their female replacements little time to prove themselves. Even so, women were hired to work in a wide variety of industrial settings requiring chemical expertise for analysis, production control, and research, including metallurgy, food chemistry, electrochemistry, paper production, cement, and organic chemicals. After the war it was estimated that the proportion of women chemists amounted to around 4-5% of the total employed. Employment opportunities in the organic chemical industry 31 32 33 34 35

RAYNER-CANHAM 2008, p. 456. Ibid., pp. 448–49, 450–55. Ibid., pp. 457–59; FRASER 1918, p. 272. RAYNER-CANHAM 2008, p. 189; HORROCKS 2000, p. 15. FAUQUE 2011; BLATCH 1918, pp. 65, 68.

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in particular grew during the war, because the British blockade had cut off access to German coal-tar chemicals such as dyes and pharmaceuticals, and American companies sought to take advantage by expanding domestic production (and ultimately by taking over confiscated German patents at the end of the war).36 As mobilization began, they faced a “desperate” shortage of trained male chemists, which led firms to be more willing to hire women chemists, at least for the duration of the war, despite their typical lack of appropriate training for industrial chemistry. Thus one American company producing coal-tar products in 1917 “employed ‘quite a few’ women chemists for routine analysis, as librarians, and for bibliographical work,” despite its impression that they were not as well trained as their male counterparts.37 As in Germany, these areas would become principal forms of “women’s work in chemistry” during the interwar decades. 7.3 The Interwar Decades, 1920–1939 What opportunities did women chemists have in industry during the two decades following the First World War? As suggested above, the pattern would be remarkable similar in every major country: despite the hopes expressed in the immediate aftermath of the war, and despite increasing numbers of women receiving academic training for research, very few would find the opportunity to actually do research in an industrial setting, instead being shunted into “women’s work” that the men considered too boring or unremunerative. The main focus of the following section will be on Germany, followed by some comparative perspectives on Britain and the United States.38 7.3.1 “Women’s Work” in Industry In interwar Germany the number and proportion of employed women chemists was always considerably smaller than that of women chemistry students. Yet because so few women chemists had been hired by industry during the war, and because there was great demand for chemists of any kind during the inflation-driven postwar expansion culminating in the hyperinflation of 1923, women’s overall share in employment briefly increased to a peak of 2.0 percent (68 women), fewer than half of whom worked in “big firms” (employing more than twenty chemists in any given year). With the crisis of deflation in 1924–25, the chemical industry began to retrench, and the flow of women graduates into industry slowed to a 36 STEEN 2014. 37 ROSSITER 1982, pp. 116, 118, 249; BLATCH 1918, p. 130; BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION 1922, p. 94. 38 I do not discuss France, as I have not been able to locate adequate sources on French women chemists in industry during this period. Aside from the unique role of Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, however, French patterns were probably similar to those in the other major industrialized countries.

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trickle (from sixteen in 1922 – almost 4 % of the total hired – to the discouragingly small number of three in 1924 – only 1.4% of the total), so that afterward the recruitment of new women chemists could not always replace those leaving industrial jobs. During the 1920s prospective women chemists were repeatedly warned to expect a poor job market for women professionals and disproportionately low salaries. In fact most women held industrial positions for only a relatively short time; Margarete Raunert, for example, who had begun studying chemistry at Leipzig during the war but could not obtain a doctorate there because she did not have a classical secondary education, moved from her assistantship to a position as metallurgical analyst in an iron foundry in the early 1920s, at the recommendation of her professor; but she remained only a few months and was afterwards only sporadically employed. Ida Tacke presents another example of a woman spending only a short time in industrial chemistry in the early 1920s, as she briefly held a position as a coal chemist with the AEG electrical corporation in Berlin before shifting to the National Institute for Physics and Technology, where she became a “guest scientist” under her future spouse, Walter Noddack. A similar pattern of high turnover among women could be seen at BASF.39 Nor did women gain much independence in industry, or even much opportunity to do laboratory chemistry. At various times one woman held an independent or directing position in one of the smaller firms during this period (e.g. in 1925), but none held such a position in the big firms.40 In firms such as the BASF’s Ludwigshafen plant, women who were lucky enough to find positions as chemists could scarcely be found in laboratory research on synthetic products or to supervise production operations; these creative and lucrative positions were generally reserved for men. As Mirjam Wiemeler has shown, in the early 1920s the BASF was already channeling women chemists into “women’s work” in chemistry: paperwork jobs such as administrative assistants or literature chemists in the patent departments. This reflected the general consensus of male directors that these were “positions suitable for ladies.”41 This pattern continued after the merger that produced the giant chemical concern IG Farbenindustrie AG (henceforth: IG Farben) in 1925. No women appear to have been working in research positions in Ludwigshafen in 1929, but five women (four chemists and one physicist) were among the twenty-two academics categorized under “Patents, Literature, Statistical Centers.” Two were in the Patent Department, three doing literature work in the Main Laboratory. In the IG Höchst plant, five women could be identified in 1931; three were working in patent literature, and two were among the fourteen chemists in the analytical laboratory. Given this situation, it is not surprising that the VDCn’s leaders chose to recommend a “niche strategy” to their members, even suggesting that German women emulate the Americans by developing the chemistry-based profession of home economics.42 39 40 41 42

Raunert interview (1989); VAN TIGGELEN/ LYKKNES 2012; WIEMELER 1996, p. 238. VDC-STATISTIK (1921-1938). WIEMELER 1996, pp. 237–39, on 239 (from 1922 BASF directorial correspondence). JOHNSON 1998, pp. 71–74.

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Curiously enough, the dilemmas of women chemistry students seeking careers in industry temporarily came under public scrutiny at the end of the 1920s through an unexpected medium: a best-selling novel made into a film. A young writer, Vicki Baum, not a chemist but a musician who had turned to a literary career, gained her first great success in 1928 with the serialized novel Stud. chem. Helene Willfüer. Her heroine, an attractive and intelligent example of the New Woman of Weimar culture, copes not only with the challenges of laboratories and lectures, but also an unplanned pregnancy, before finally – with support from her professor – realizing her dream, a research position in a major chemical works. Yet in an anticlimactic ending that sent a mixed message, she gives up her career to marry that same professor, thus accepting the conventional notion that a woman chemist could not combine a career and a marriage. This novel did not go unnoticed among male chemists, at least some of whom “jokingly” identified a female colleague with the novel’s heroine, thus not so subtly suggesting that her own career would be equally brief.43 There was at least one setting that did not wholly exclude women from creative laboratory work during the 1920s: the BASF’s Oppau Ammonia Laboratory, presided over by Alwin Mittasch from 1912 to 1932. Of five women hired by BASF during the three years after the war (to November 1921), one began in the Main Laboratory in Ludwigshafen (doing paperwork), but the other four joined twenty-three new male chemists in the Oppau laboratory, which grew rapidly during this period (absorbing more than a quarter of one hundred new BASF chemists) and became a key center of what would later be called basic research. In August 1924 there were five women (one a physicist) in the laboratory out of a total of sixty academic staff members. On the eve of the Great Depression in 1929, Oppau employed some 365 chemists, physicists, and technicians, the largest single concentration of the 1,365 total in what was then IG Farben; the Ammonia Laboratory’s more than one hundred people working in “experiments in new areas” made up half of the total number the IG then had working in this category. The laboratory’s approximately two hundred chemists and physicists, organized in groups of ten or fifteen (including many women), worked on a variety of basic research problems.44 One of these lucky women doing basic research was Edith Weyde, who had already worked in a chemical factory for four years during the hyperinflation period before obtaining a degree in photochemistry in 1927 under Robert Luther at the Dresden TH. With Luther’s recommendation she had taken a position in 1928 at the Oppau laboratory, where she worked on the photochemical problem of testing cheaper substitutes for silver in photographic paper.45 Precisely because these women’s research had little relationship to production, Wiemeler has plausibly suggested that it made the work more acceptable for women. That is, whereas most male chemists were expected to leave research for more remunerative technical operations, and would thus be best placed in laboratories with 43 BAUM 1928; WINNACKER 1971, p. 53; cf. OBERKOFLER 2000, pp. 63–64. 44 [BASF-UA (1929)]. 45 [BAL-WEYDE (1984)], pp. 1, 126.

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closer ties to technology, most female chemists were expected within a short time to leave research and industrial careers for marriage, as Baum’s novel implied.46 In 1929 Emma Wolffhardt might not have thought herself quite so lucky as Edith Weyde. After completing her doctorate in organic chemistry at Würzburg in 1924 and taking up an assistantship at Karlsruhe, in 1925 she entered the BASF Main Laboratory, replacing the first woman there (who had just married). Unfortunately she was soon so bored by the paperwork assigned to her (sorting through old laboratory journals), that she took the drastic and risky step of complaining to the laboratory director, Kurt H. Meyer, who proved unexpectedly sympathetic and agreed to transfer her to the Ammonia Laboratory at Oppau. Even there, however, she could not (yet) do laboratory research. For the next fifteen years she would be the director’s administrative assistant.47 But at least she stayed in Oppau, whereas Weyde, along with a significant portion of the basic research staff, would soon have to leave after the economic depression began in 1929. Throughout the interwar period, the employment outlook for women continued to be worse in industry than in academe. VDC annual surveys of the chemical industry (narrowly defined) show that the number and proportion of employed women industrial chemists remained considerably smaller than that of women chemistry students (around 5-6% of the total, of whom those working on doctorates made up a somewhat larger group, reaching 9.6% in 1931) or even of academic assistants (around 2-3%). Women’s overall share in industrial employment hovered between one percent and the 1924 maximum of 2.0%. In absolute numbers the peak came in 1928–30 with seventy, a figure not reached again until 1937, when the proportion in big firms had dropped from half to 44%. At various times before 1931 there was even one woman holding an independent or directing position in one of the smaller firms, but in none of the big firms. The giant IG Farben concern set the tone for the rest. Although the concern greatly increased the numbers of chemists in its employ between 1926 and 1930, women remained a small fraction of the total. This relative indifference was at least better than the outright hostility seen in some smaller companies, whose male chemists absolutely refused to work with women.48 Even before the onset of the depression in 1929, prospective women chemists were being warned that chemistry offered one of the worst job markets for women professionals.49 Nevertheless, those women who did find industrial jobs showed an increasing tendency to keep them, so that the turnover rate appears to have fallen after the mid-1920s, perhaps because the economic depression greatly limited their chances of finding another position. Thus whereas only two of the twelve academically-trained women hired at BASF/ IG Ludwigshafen before 1925 stayed longer than ten years, eight of the fifteen hired in 1925–29 did so. Similarly, of fourteen women chemists in IG Leverkusen

46 47 48 49

WIEMELER 1996, pp. 242–44. [BASF-UA (1992B)]; WOLFFHARDT (1924). VDC-STATISTIK (1921-1938) and [BASF 1992b]. JENDE-RADOMSKI 1929, pp. 65–66.

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in 1940, seven had been hired before 1930, and only three in the entire group were under age 25.50 Far more women occupied the lower end of the spectrum of industrial chemistry employees, doing routine and uncreative work as analysts or laboratory technicians. It is unfortunately impossible to estimate how many women chemists, out of frustration, took posts for which they were overqualified. However, it can be shown that the chemical industry recruited a much higher proportion of women as technicians than as chemists. By the early 1920s the occupation of chemical laboratory technician had already become highly feminized; more than a third of the employees were women. During the following years a curious pattern emerged: until 1930 the big firms steadily increased their numbers of technical staff and, by recruiting largely among women, greatly increased the proportion of women technicians. At the same time, that proportion steadily decreased in other firms, which recruited a much higher proportion of men during the late 1920s. This suggests that the big firms, including IG Farben, were following a deliberate policy of feminizing their technical staff, probably for financial reasons but perhaps also because, as Karl Goldschmidt had argued, the women technicians tended to come from a better social class and hence seemed better suited as laboratory helpers for their academically-trained male industrial chemists. Even after the Depression began in 1929-30, the overall proportion of women technicians did not fall below a quarter.51 The Depression temporarily ended even the limited opportunities for women chemists to enter the chemical industry. Three women with doctorates entered the industry from academic institutes in 1929, along with 148 men. During the next two years only two women moved from academe to industry, and none at all in 1933. Between January 1929 and August 1936 not a single woman appears to have been hired by Ludwigshafen, Oppau, or other related plants of IG Farben.52 Work in the Oppau research center was drastically reduced to save money; the academic employees’ organization (Budaci) was given its choice of what groups of employees to cut first, and it chose the women and unmarried men. Even so, the IG directors attempted to retain as many as possible by transferring them to other plants in the IG. VDC surveys showed, however, that smaller firms were far less willing to hold their women chemists, and the total number of women in the chemical industry fell from 70 in 1930 to 41 in 1933. By 1931 the last woman chemist in an independent business position was already gone.53

50 51 52 53

WIEMELER 1996, p. 238; [BAL (1940)]. VDC-STATISTIK (1921-1938). [BASF-UA (1992A)]; Wiemeler 1996, p. 238. [BAL-WEYDE (1984)], p. 4; VDC-STATISTIK 1933, pp. 377–79.

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7.3.2 The Impact of German National Socialism after 1933 Whereas in every country women had to contend with the economic depression, in Germany the situation was worsened by the National Socialist regime beginning in 1933, which brought both the purging of women from professional positions on “racial” and political grounds, as well as continued support for gender biases in industrial employment, particularly against married women “doubleearners” as well as women with academic training. Thus women continued to be under-represented in industrial chemistry during the Nazi period. Moreover, the Nazis abolished independent unions for chemical employees in 1933, and the women chemists lost their visibility with the dissolution of the VDCn as part of a Nazi-dictated reorganization of the professions in 1937. Throughout the 1930s, while Nazi policies led to a steady rise in the employment of male chemists, the number of women chemists and their proportion of employment in the industry remained below the level of the 1920s. The VDC meanwhile (following up on a suggestion first made in 1913) introduced into its occupational surveys a new reason for leaving a firm: marriage. Not until 1936, as the government began to invest heavily in chemical firms to promote autarky as part of the Four-Year Plan preparing for the next war, did these firms, led by IG Farben, again recruit women chemists. The Upper Rhine division (mainly the former BASF works in Ludwigshafen and Oppau) hired two women in 1936, at least one in 1937, and then four (including one physicist) in 1938.54 Statistics are less complete for technicians. It does appear that the initial effect of Nazi policies was to reverse the earlier process of feminizing the chemical laboratory technicians, and women’s employment declined, at least for the industry overall. Yet the big firms continued to employ a growing number of women technicians throughout the period, so that by 1937 for the first time they had a larger percentage of women chemical technicians than the rest of the industry. The Four-Year Plan further stimulated the hiring of technicians, who could replace chemists needed for work in the new plants called for in the plan.55 One of the few women who reached a position offering some opportunities for independent research in the German chemical industry during this period was Edith Weyde, who in 1932 began work in the small technical laboratory of the IG Farben photopaper factory in Leverkusen. Adapting to work outside the rarified scientific atmosphere of Oppau (see above), she was able to benefit from her previous experience and knowledge of photochemical processes to quickly become familiar with both production and sales in the small plant. Working almost entirely independently, Weyde suggested many improvements in the production and quality of the paper, and her laboratory grew into a research center that ultimately produced several significant inventions culminating in 1938 with “Copyrapid,” the first office photocopying process that could make positive copies on the spot in less than one minute. This “revolutionary discovery,” in the words of Agfa’s 54 JOHNSON 1998, pp. 81–85; [BASF-UA (1992A)]; [BASF-UA (1939)]. 55 JOHNSON 1998, pp. 81–83.

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official history, was to quickly spread throughout the business world after the war. Yet when the chief chemist of her laboratory retired, Weyde was not offered his position despite her qualifications; as she later recalled, she was told “that my accomplishments supported the view that I could lead a laboratory, but that it would be impossible to put a woman in this position.” The new (male) chief, who had entered the laboratory after she did, refused to grant her the independence she needed, so she obtained transfer to another location where, with a few female laboratory technicians (but no male assistants), she was able to continue her research undisturbed.56 7.3.3 Comparative Perspectives: Britain and the United States In Britain, the interwar period began hopefully with forecasts of growing opportunities for women in the chemical industry, particularly as analytical chemists.57 Yet the reality was that most of the women chemists who had worked in the National Factories during the war lost their positions when the government shut down most of these plants at the end of the war, and only a handful of women could hold onto positions in other companies. Thus just two of sixteen women analysts remained with Sheffield Steel following the Armistice, the rest being replaced by returning veterans.58 Women chemists did receive greater professional recognition, however. As the result of an anti-discrimination law, the Chemical Society began to women as fellows (full members), and during the interwar period on two occasions (1928 and 1931) women were elected to the board.59 British women thereby gained some of the visibility that their German counterparts enjoyed through the VDCn. In the next two decades, British women nevertheless confronted the same sort of resistance to their being employed in industry as appeared in other national contexts, with arguments that women were unsuitable because they might get married and leave the company (even though it must have been clear that many women of this generation had no prospect of marriage, given the loss of so many young men in the war), or because they lacked aptitude and dedication for creative research. The sole advantage women appeared to offer was that they would accept much lower salaries than men (ranging from 10% lower to 25% or more, with literature, library, or secretarial work paid the worst). Such salary differentials indicated that most companies saw them not “as a chemist but as a woman chemist,” to be assigned “all the boring, routine jobs,” as Kathleen Culhane recalled her experience in the physiology laboratory of a major pharmaceutical company. Yet Culhane, like Weyde, was nevertheless able to create opportunities for herself 56 [BAL-WEYDE (1984)], pp. 116–20; [BAL-AGFA (1959)], cited in Johnson 1998, pp. 82–83; SCHWARZL/HERTEL 2002. 57 Cf. FORSTER 1920. 58 RAYNER-CANHAM 2008, p. 465. 59 MASON 1991, pp. 233–38.

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to do creative research, ultimately leading to publications on insulin and vitamins, which proved significant enough that the company even chose not to dismiss her when she married in 1933 (she resigned in 1935 when she became pregnant).60 Biochemical research for medicines and pharmaceuticals, being a relatively new area, offered a potential niche to women chemists with relatively less competition from men. To some extent this was also true in the food industry, where women chemists were deemed appropriate because the companies already employed large numbers of women. Other areas included cosmetics, textiles and dyes, and Weyde’s field, photographic supplies. Even so, many women in these industries still found themselves in analytical and secretarial positions. Unfortunately, precise numbers are difficult to come by, as there were no general surveys like those done in Germany by the VDC. Based on census data that do not distinguish between industrial and other contexts, it has been estimated that there were 519 women analytical and research chemists in 1921 and 568 in 1931. Membership of women in the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the certifying body, show the total of women fellows and associates rising from 49 in 1918 to 211 in 1938; but the records do not indicate places of employment. Horrocks has found, moreover, that fewer than 10% of the job notices sent to the Institute of Chemistry in 193536 were open to women, even though this was a period in which women were beginning to be hired in larger numbers. Yet even in those contexts where it might have seemed appropriate to hire women chemists, such as the food industry, the tendency was to prefer men and to hire women only as laboratory assistants, a pattern also seen in the German case. The British employers’ view was that women assistants, unlike the men, would not view these positions as temporary training that would lead to higher positions; thus women could be confined to purely routine work, freeing their male colleagues for more creative research.61 As Horrocks has aptly put it, these findings show that “(w)omen’s employment as chemists in industry was […] circumscribed by their gender.”62 In the United States, Margaret W. Rossiter has confirmed a very similar pattern for the interwar period. Here too, American women gained a degree of professional visibility, with about 500 women as members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) by 1924 (about 3% of the total membership). By 1937 the number of women studying chemistry had reached a level such that the honor society Iota Sigma Pi had twenty-one chapters with more than two thousand members, vs. 585 in 1922 and a mere 164 in 1919. Moreover, in 1927 the ACS organized a Women’s Service Committee, which however pursued a very cautious “niche” strategy in promoting “women’s work” in industry.63 Rossiter thus concludes that women chemists had very poor prospects in industry following the First World War, which is reflected in the sober reporting of 60 RAYNER-CANHAM 2008, pp. 483–87, Culhane cited on 486; salary differentials in HORROCKS 2000, p. 360. 61 HORROCKS 2000, pp. 355–57, 363–65. 62 HORROCKS 2011, p. 166. 63 IOTA SIGMA PI 1937, pp. 11–13; ROSSITER 1982, pp. 303–04.

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the New York City Bureau of Vocational Information in 1922, though it must also be noted that the Bureau had surveyed an impressive number of 116 women chemists in industrial positions. Unfortunately, the onset of the Great Depression “seems to have hit chemistry particularly hard.” As in other national contexts, management favored women as laboratory technicians willing to remain in lowly positions far longer than men – but at the same time, women chemists were blamed for a high turnover, due to their alleged inability to “fit in” at industrial laboratories. Thus women chemists were placed in a “no-win situation,” disrespected if they accepted positions for which they were overqualified, but criticized if they left in search of something better. Of course there were exceptions, as some women reached positions as senior chemist, technical director, or research director in various contexts including the food industry and the paper industry, and no doubt such women paid a “high psychological price” for competing directly with men.64 Nevertheless, compared with the limits on the advancement of German and most British women chemists in the same period, one would have to consider these Americans to have been highly successful. On the eve of American mobilization for the Second World War, the Division of Chemical Education of the ACS organized a symposium on training and opportunities for women in chemistry. Reports from the symposium comprised the last eleven chapters of The Chemist at Work (1940), which seemed to indicate the possibility of broadening opportunities for women in a variety of fields. One may note however that Florence Wall wrote the chapter on cosmetics as a “fertile field for chemical research” that “should make a strong appeal to women chemists.”65 As Maria Rentetzi’s chapter in this volume confirms, however, such optimisticsounding language proved to be unjustified. Indeed, evidence in one of the reports on the job placement of more than one thousand women chemistry majors at the end of the 1930s showed that only 2% (about 20 women) were in industrial research and 5% (about 50) in medical research; by far the largest group, after some 17% engaged in further study and 16% in high school teaching, were medical technicians (15%; about 150), whereas the combined share of industrial technicians, chemical secretaries, and chemical librarians totaled about 8%, vs. 14% married and the rest divided among a miscellaneous group of activities, with fortunately only 4% unemployed.66 This survey, however, indicated that American women chemists still had a long way to go before they would have a strong presence in industry, even as technicians, secretaries, and librarians.

64 ROSSITER 1982, pp. 252–58; BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION 1922, p. xi. 65 GRADY/CHITTUM 1940, pp. 402, 409. 66 Ibid., p. 359.

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7.4 The Second World War and After, 1940–1950: Gains, but How Lasting? During the Second World War, opportunities for women industrial chemists in all nations somewhat improved as they were asked to take on the work of men inducted into the military. The German army by 1942 had absorbed 12.5 percent of all industrial chemists, and 26.4 of those under 35, offering significant opportunities for women to at least temporarily replace them.67 Thus in IG-Leverkusen (the once and future Bayer corporation), the number of women chemists rose from eight in 1937 to fourteen in 1944.68 Some of these women certainly retained their positions in the postwar era, particularly in the early years when huge numbers of young men were still in prisoner-of-war camps, but without the statistical surveys conducted in the interwar period, it is very difficult to give more precise estimates (in the case of Bayer, by 1960 the number of women chemists was down to nine, barely above the level of 1937 and proportionally lower, as there were many more male chemists in the company by then).69 This section thus presents only some anecdotal evidence from the experiences of three German women chemists. One of the women chemists who most benefited from the wartime changes was Emma Wolffhardt, who as noted earlier, despite her first-rate organic-chemical training had been working since 1925 as administrative assistant to a succession of three directors of the I.G. Farben (BASF) Oppau Ammonia Laboratory. Finally, in July 1940, at age forty-one, she was allowed to do actual experimental work in synthetic organic chemistry for the first time since leaving her assistantship in Karlsruhe fifteen years earlier. She was apparently the first academically trained woman chemist in the organic laboratory. During 1942–43 she worked on problems of producing synthetic aviation fuel and made an important contribution by using space-filling molecular models (introduced by Herbert A. Stuart in 1934) to help explain physical and structural limitations (“steric hindrance”) on organic synthesis. Despite some discussion in the prewar literature, such models were still unfamiliar to conventionally-trained industrial organic chemists; but they proved so useful in predicting the success of certain types of syntheses that her report became “one of the most-read works in the ammonia laboratory,” and she was asked to lecture on these techniques at the University of Heidelberg and at other IG laboratories. A photograph in the BASF corporate archive from this period (see Figure 7.1 above) shows her holding two space-filling models, probably illustrating an example of steric hindrance in connection with one of her lectures. In November 1944 Wolffhardt submitted a paper on her technique to the Berichte, the main German organic-chemical journal, but with wartime shutdowns it could not appear until 1947.70 67 68 69 70

[BAL-VDC (1942)], cited in JOHNSON 1998, p. 81. ROLOFF 1989, p. 103. Ibid. Quoted in JOHNSON 1998, p. 83; photo and more detail in JOHNSON 2013, pp. 397–401; Wolffhardt interview (25 June 1993); WOLFFHARDT 1947.

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Some wartime gains for women in industry carried over to the postwar era. During the war, Hildegard Hess studied food chemistry in Freiburg and Berlin, completing her doctorate and state examination for food chemistry in 1944 and then assisting her father, Ludwig Hess, in directing an independent testing laboratory in Berlin. When she took over sole control after his death, she was probably the first woman to direct such a testing laboratory in Berlin, if not in all of Germany.71 Later she was “seventeen years on the board of the Society of German Chemists (Gesellschaft deutscher Chemiker, successor to the VDC), until 1980 as administrator of the business office, because [she] was an independent professional on the one hand, and represented the feminine side on the other.” Although she was “often alone” in representing women chemists, her male colleagues dismissed her misgivings about the lack of other women on the board.72 As the postwar era dawned, all too often men continued to view women chemists as unwelcome competitors rather than as colleagues who could help the discipline grow and thus open more opportunities for all. The longterm positive effects of women’s increased participation in the profession as a result of the two world wars were limited. When Emma Wolffhardt completed her 25th year at the BASF in March 1950, she was told that she was the first academically-trained woman to reach this milestone. Her response was to hope that she and her female colleagues might persuade the leadership of the BASF “that a careful recruitment of the best younger women chemists could become a valuable addition to the academically-trained staff of our company.”73 Edith Weyde found, however, that the success of her “Copyrapid” process beginning in 1949 brought her a laboratory of her own (initially supervising only female chemists, but later even some academically trained men) and eventually the status of a department head.74 During the postwar era in a divided Germany, western and eastern academic positions opened up to some extent for women, more in the east than in the west, but the pattern of discrimination against women in the West-German chemical industry continued. As late as 1978, when the Society of German Chemists carried out the first postwar survey of certified chemists in the chemical industry that included gender as a category, the proportion of women was still only 2.5%, barely higher than the 2% it had reached in the best interwar years, though the absolute numbers were about four times greater (280). It should be noted, however, that these included chemists with the Diplom, an intermediate degree in the interwar period that had not conferred professional certification until the Nazi reform of chemical education in 1939; hence the numbers would be expected to be larger than those of the interwar surveys, which primarily counted chemists with doctorates.75 Shortly after this survey was completed, Edith Weyde closed her memoirs of fifty years of Agfa service, comparing men and women in industrial research 71 72 73 74 75

Hess interview (14 July 1994). HESS 1995. Cited in [BASF-UA (1992C)]. ROLOFF 1989, p. 104. Ibid.; on the 1939 reform, see JOHNSON 2013, pp. 432–51.

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and noting that she was often more empirical and more willing than male colleagues to question theories contradicted by her own measurements. Then she asked, “Why is Agfa no longer hiring women anymore? Surely by now there is sufficient proof that women can be very valuable co-workers.”76 In Britain Horrocks has shown that the first systematic efforts to recruit women chemists to meet wartime needs did not come until 1941. This led to significant increases in the numbers of women chemists in industry, and enough remained in their positions after 1945 so that the proportion of women chemists in the postwar era was higher than it had been in the 1930s.77 As noted earlier, this cannot be definitively stated for the German case, though it was likely to have been true in the late 1940s. Moreover, British women chemists in the postwar era were able to choose to continue in their jobs even after marriage, and the younger women who entered the profession during and after the war were offered a wider range of potential positions and by 1955 were earning salaries higher than those of their now much older interwar counterparts. Hence, “the situation for women chemists in industry by the mid-1950s was certainly no worse than it had been during the 1930s, and, in at least some respects, had improved considerably.”78 For the United States during and immediately after the Second World War, Rossiter has argued that despite vigorous recruiting by the chemical industry of women chemists early in the war, the women’s situation had not fundamentally changed. She has found only limited industrial interest in employing women chemists with advanced degrees, as opposed to the 90% of women who were classified as chemists on a National Roster of scientists for recruitment to wartime employment, despite having only a bachelor’s degree or less. Such women seemed destined only to do more of the routine work to which their interwar predecessors had been largely confined. Complaints about lack of employer interest in women with advanced degrees, salaries kept at half the level of their male counterparts, lack of opportunities for advancement, and a high turnover of married women continued to arise among women chemists even at the height of the war, in 1943.79 In 1942, of 570 women replying to a survey of women in chemistry by Iota Sigma Pi, fewer than a quarter (22.3%) were in industry; the largest group (40.9%) were in teaching, the rest in other occupations.80 In the immediate aftermath of the war, in 1946, an article by two women chemists at the Hercules Powder Company in Delaware again complained about a lack of promotion for women in industry, and demanded that management change its view of women chemists so as to see them “as a chemist rather than as a woman.” Yet the leaders of Iota Sigma Pi and similar groups failed to take up this cause, preferring instead the traditional but ineffective strategy of advising women to excel in low-level positions for which they were overqualified. Thus the Sec76 77 78 79 80

[BAL-WEYDE (1984)], p. 123. HORROCKS 2011, pp. 167–68. Ibid., p. 169. ROSSITER 1995, pp. 16–17. SHERREN/VERCELLOTTI 2005, p. 23.

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ond World War perhaps brought women chemists relatively fewer significant gains than the First World War, in part because, in Rossiter’s view, women chemists feared that vigorous efforts to promote their professional interests might provoke a “backlash” similar to that which followed the earlier war.81 And indeed as the men returned, there was a sharp postwar decline in the proportion of women among American chemists, according to two different surveys in 1946–47 and 1948, which estimated the share of women in each group of chemists at 7.0 and 4.6% respectively. Moreover, these proportions were destined to fall even more, as men took advantage of the GI Bill to go to universities, in which their sheer numbers overwhelmed the women. Even though the number of women taking doctorates steadily increased, they did so at a much slower rate than that for men, so that by 1950 the women’s share had fallen from about a third in 1946 to around 5–7% of the total. Similarly, surveys in the mid-1950s and 1968 showed that the proportion of women chemists in industry remained consistently below 4%.82 These were levels that would not be exceeded until after Affirmative Action legislation in the 1970s initiated a slow process of creating gender balance in American education and employment. 7.5 Concluding Reflections Considering the almost total invisibility of women in the chemical industries before 1914, the unanticipated demand for industrial chemists during the First World War was probably critical in temporarily opening many doors to positions previously reserved to men. Although most of the women thus employed were in relatively routine work, and although most of them were afterwards dismissed, some women nevertheless maintained a foothold in the chemical industry, having proven that they could do the work. But during the interwar decades, the pattern of women’s work in industry was strikingly similar in Britain, Germany, and the United States, each of which primarily directed women chemists toward work that was routine, boring, and often primarily paperwork (patents, literature, secretarial correspondence) rather than laboratory chemistry. When women did enter laboratories, they did so most commonly as technical assistants (and were thus, if academically trained, overqualified for the work), occasionally as analytic chemists, but only rarely as creative researchers. That a woman might rise to a supervisory position over male chemists in a laboratory was almost unheard of, though it may have occurred in a few cases. Marriage and chemical work were normally considered mutually exclusive for women, though of course not for men. The advent of the Second World War opened doors once again and brought increased employment of women, but not in as dramatic a fashion as before, and again with more effect on less-skilled positions than on women with advanced degrees. In the aftermath of the war, the continued dramatic expansion of the che81 ROSSITER 1995, pp. 19–20. 82 Ibid., pp. 29–35, 76–77, 100.

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mical industries ultimately produced relatively more employment for male than for female chemists, though dismissal for marriage became less common, at least in Britain and probably the United States. Certainly in absolute terms there were far more women chemists than there had been in the interwar period, but they tended to be less visible in a baby-boom era that fostered an image of the stay-athome mother with a large family. Significant relative gains for women chemists would thus have to wait for another generation. Bibliography Archival documents [BAL] Bayer-Archiv, Leverkusen, Germany. [BAL-AGFA (1959)] Der Werdegang der Agfa und ihr Beitrag zum Fortschritt der Photographie (5. Feb. 1959), typescript, in BAL Nr. 5/E2: I.G.-Werke: Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation Berlin, Allgemeines. [BAL (1940)] List of chemists in Leverkusen (1 July 1940). In Chemiker-Statistik 1930–1940, in BAL 213/2.9. [BAL-VDC (1942)] Verein Deutscher Chemiker. Geschäftsbericht über das Jahr 1942. In BAL 46/1.4. [BAL-WEYDE (1984)] Weyde, Edith. 50 Jahre Arbeit für die Agfa. Unpublished, bound ms. in BAL 1/6.6.32, Geschichte der Agfa-Gevaert AG, Bd. Va (1984). [BASF-UA] BASF Unternehmensarchiv, Ludwigshafen, Germany. [BASF-UA (1929)] Arbeitsgebiete und Chemiker: Übersicht I.G. 1929 (1.1.1929), in BASF-UA, D05/26, Forschung - IG, Statistik 1929. [BASF-UA (1931)] Chemiker der BASF . . . Eintritte 1868–1931 (no date), in BASF-UA, C623. [BASF-UA (1939)] Chemiker-Liste der Betriebsgemeinschaft Oberrhein, 16 May 1939, in BASFUA. [BASF-UA (1992A)] FROMM, Ruth. Die ersten weiblichen Akademiker. In BASF-UA. [BASF-UA (1992B)] Wolffhardt, Emma. “Wie ich in das Ammoniaklaboratorium der BASF gekommen bin.” Ms. transcribed by Frau Millhoff, Heidelberg, 28 Sept. 1992. In BASF-UA, Wolffhardt File. [BASF-UA (1992C)] “Chemikerin Dr. Emma Wolffhardt” (28 Aug. 1992) (c.v.) [HStAM (1919)] Abkommen (6. Dezember 1919) (between Arbeitgeberverband Sekt. VIII, Dr. Bloch, and Bund der angestellten Chemiker und Ingenieure, Landesgruppe Bayern, Dr. L. Sender), in Hauptstaatsarchiv Munich, Germany, MArb 526, Akten des Bayerischen Ministeriums des Äußern, für Wirtschaft und Arbeit (Abteilung Arbeit): Tarifvertrag, Band I, 1920–. [StAD-F] Staatsarchiv Dresden, Bestand 11270: Feldzeugmeisterei. [StAD (1917)] Kriegsminister, Berlin (s. Scheüch) to rectors at German universities and technical colleges (printed circular, 3 Nov. 1917), in StAD-F, 4072-4073: Beschäftigung von Studentinnen, 1917, 1917–1918. [StAD (1918)] Kgl. Pulverfabrik Gnaschwitz Tätigkeits-Bericht, 1. Aug. 1914–31.3.1918, pp. 80– 87, in StAD-F, 3166, Tätigkeitsberichte der Pulverfabrik Gnaschwitz 1914–1918.

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Interviews by the author, also cited in JOHNSON 1998. Hess, Hildegard (14 July 1994). Raunert, Margarete (23 June 1989). Wolffhardt, Emma (25 June 1993). Literature APOTHEKER, Jan; SARKADI, Livia Simon, eds. (2011). European Women in Chemistry. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag. ARNDT, Kurt (1916). “Die Chemikerin.” Vossische Zeitung 15 (15. Jan. 1916). BAUM, Vicki (1928). Stud. chem. Helene Willfüer. Berlin: Ullstein. BLATCH, Harriot S. (1918). Mobilizing Woman-Power. New York: The Womans Press. BRETSCHNEIDER, Martha (1918). Über die Halochromie von Phenylcarbinolen und Phenoläthern. Doctoral Diss. Universität Leipzig. BOECK, Gisela (2003). “Unabhängig ein Leben lang.” Nachrichten aus der Chemie 51, Issue 1, pages 67–68, Januar 2003. [interview with Hildegard Hess] BOUDIA, Soraya (2001). Marie Curie et son laboratoire: sciences et industrie de la radioactivité en France. Paris: Ed. des archives contemporaines. BROOKS, Nathan M.; KAJI, Masanori; ZAITSEVA, Elena (2008). “Russia: The Formation of the Russian Chemical Society and Its History until 1914.” In ŠTRBÁĕOVÁ/NIELSEN, pp. 284–306. BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION (New York, N.Y.) (1922). Women in Chemistry: A Study of Professional Opportunities. New York City: The Bureau of Vocational Information. DANIEL, Ute (1997). The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War. Oxford/New York: Berg. FAUQUE, Danielle (2011). “Les femmes chimistes en France au XXe siècle.” Introduction to symposium of the Centre de recherche en histoire des sciences et des techniques (CRHST) and the Club d’histoire de la chimie, Paris, 8 March (copy provided by the author). FELDMAN, Gerald D. (1966). Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918. Princeton: Princeton University Press. FORSTER, Emily L. B. (1920). Analytical Chemistry as a Profession for Women. London, C. Griffin & Company. FRASER, Helen (1918). Women and War Work. New York: G. A. Shaw. GÖRS, Britta (2002). “Die chemisch-technische Assistenz – Zur Entwicklung eines neuen beruflichen Tätigkeitsfeldes in der Chemie zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Frauen in Akademie und Wissenschaft – Arbeitsorte und Forschungspraktiken 1700–2000. Ed. Theresa Wobbe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 169–95. GOLDSCHMIDT, Karl (1918). “Die wirtschaftliche Lage der Chemiker nach dem Kriege.” Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie 31, pp. 157–60. GRADY, Roy I.; CHITTUM, John W., eds. (1940). The Chemist at Work. Easton: Journal of Chemical Education. HAUFF, Lilly (1911). Die Entwicklung der Frauenberufe in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der beruflichen Entwickelung in Halle a.S. Berlin: Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht. HESS, Hildegard (1995). “Meine Tätigkeit als Frau mit unabhängigem Chem. Labor.” Unpublished ms. (1 Oct. 1995) (copy provided by the author). HORROCKS, Sally M. (2000). “A Promising Pioneer Profession? Women in Industrial Chemistry in Inter-war Britain.” British Journal for the History of Science 33, pp. 351–67. — (2011). “World War II, Post-War Reconstruction and British Women Chemists.” Ambix 58, pp. 150–70. HULIN, Nicole (2002). Les Femmes et l’enseignement scientifique. Paris: PUF. — (2008). Les Femmes, l’enseignement et les sciences. Un long cheminement, XIXe-XXe siècles. Paris: L’Harmattan,

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IOTA SIGMA PI (1937). History of Iota Sigma Pi, National Honor Society for Women in Chemistry. Berkeley: Iota Sigma Pi. JENDE-RADOMSKI, Hilde (1929). Akademische Frauenberufe. Dessau: Dünnhaupt. JOHNSON, Jeffrey Allan (1998). “German Women in Chemistry, 1895–1925,” and “German Women in Chemistry, 1925–1945.” NTM-International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine 6, pp. 1–21, 65–90. — (2008). “Germany: Discipline – Industry – Profession. German Chemical Organizations, 1867–1914.” In ŠTRBÁĕOVÁ/NIELSEN, pp. 113–38. — (2013). “The Case of the Missing German Quantum Chemists: On Molecular Models, Mobilization, and the Paradoxes of Modernizing Chemistry in Nazi Germany.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 43, pp. 391–452. KARBE, Agnes (1928). Die Frauenlohnfrage und ihre Entwicklung in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit mit bes. Berücksichtigung der Industriearbeiterschaft. Rostock: Carl Hinstorffs Verlag. LÜDERS, Marie-Elisabeth (1936). Das unbekannte Heer. Frauen kämpfen für Deutschland 1914– 1918. Berlin: Mittler. MACKIE, Robin (2008). “Great Britain: Chemical Societies and the Demarcation of the British Chemical Community, 1870–1914.” In ŠTRBÁĕOVÁ/NIELSEN, pp. 140–61. MACLEOD, Roy M.; JOHNSON, Jeffrey A., eds. (2006). Frontline and Factory: Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914–1924. Dordrecht: Springer. MASON, Joan (1991). “A Forty Years’ War.” Chemistry in Britain 27, pp. 233–38. MAYEUR, Françoise (1977). L’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la Troisième République. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques. MAZÓN, Patricia M. (2003). Gender and the Modern Research University: the Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. OBERKOFLER, Gerhard (2000). “Eine weltweit anerkannte Arbeit: Die Chemikerin Erika Cremer (1900–1996).” Berlinische Monatsschrift 11, pp. 63–70. OGILVIE, Marilyn B. (2011). Marie Curie: A Biography. Amherst: Prometheus Books. PIGEARD, Natalie (2013). Les femmes du laboratoire de Marie Curie. Paris: Éditions Glyphe. QUINN, Susan (1995). Marie Curie: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. “The President’s Desk” (1914). Child-Welfare Magazine 8, pp. 160–61. RAMSAY, William; MACNAB, William, eds. (1910). Seventh International Congress of Applied Chemistry, London . . . 1909: Organisation of the Congress – General Meetings. London. RAYNER-CANHAM, Marelene F.; RAYNER-CANHAM, Geoff (1998). Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society. — (2008). Chemistry was Their Life: Pioneering British Women Chemists, 1880–1949. London: Imperial College Press. ROLOFF, Christine (1989). Von der Schmiegsamkeit zur Einmischung: Professionalisierung der Chemikerinnen und Informatikerinnen. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft. ROSSITER, Margaret W. (1982). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. — (1995). Women Scientists in America. Vol. 2: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. RYAN, Marynel (2006). Between Essence and Expertise: German Women Economists, 1890–1933, and the Shifting Ground of Social Reform. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota. SCHWARZL, Sonja M.; HERTEL, Marion (2002). “Zum Beispiel: Edith Weyde.” Nachrichten aus der Chemie 50, pp. 1283–84. SHERREN, Anne T.; VERCELLOTTI, Sharon V., eds. (2005). The Centennial History of Iota Sigma Pi: National Honor Society for Women in Chemistry Founded 1902. Covington: Iota Sigma Pi. SZÖLLÖSI-JANZE, Margit (1998). Fritz Haber, 1868–1934. Munich: C. H. Beck.

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STEEN, Kathryn (2014). The American Synthetic Organic Chemicals Industry: War and Politics, 1910–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (in press). ŠTRBÁĕOVÁ, SoĖa; NIELSEN, Anita Kildebaek, eds. (2008). Creating Networks in Chemistry: The Foundation and Early History of the Chemical Societies in Europe. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing. TOLLMIEN, Cordula (1997). “Zwei erste Promotionen. Die Mathematikerin Sofja Kowalewskaja und die Chemikerin Julia Lermontowa, mit Dokumentation der Promotionsunterlagen.” In “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz”. Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Ed. R. Tobies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 83–130. TROTEREAU, Janine (2011). Marie Curie. Paris: Galimard. VAN TIGGELEN, Brigitte; LYKKNES, Annette (2012). “Ida and Walter Noddack Through Better and Worse: An Arbeitsgemeinschaft in Chemistry.” In For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences. Ed. A. Lykknes; D. L. Opitz; B. Van Tiggelen. Basel: Birkhäuser. WIEMELER, Mirjam (1996). “‘Zur Zeit sind alle für Damen geeignete Posten besetzt’ – promovierte Chemikerinnen bei der Badischen Anilin- und Sodafabrik (1918–1933).” In Geschlechterverhältnisse in der Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik. Ed. Ch. Meinel and M. Renneberg. Stuttgart: GNT-Verlag.

8 CREATING A NICHE FOR WOMEN IN THE COSMETICS INDUSTRY Maria Rentetzi

“Yes, Florence Wall can think and work like a man.”1

“It was the summer of 1917. The draft was rapidly taking young men, and many plants were looking for women employees. Knowing that I had taken a course in radioactivity, George S. Willis […] offered me a job with the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, N.J., of which he was an officer.”2 This is how the chemist Florence Wall described her introduction to industrial chemistry during the First World War. Long ago, the historian Margaret Rossiter pointed out the fact that, although the sudden demand for industrial chemists gave women the opportunity to find their first jobs in the fast-expanding American industry, during the First World War women worked only as men’s replacements. To Rossiter, the way they were employed during this period “even increased the prevailing sexual segregation” in the workplace. Female chemists were highly exploited, forced to perform as “one of the boys,” worked at any hour of the day or night depending on what their male bosses demanded, and yet were finally asked to quit when men came back from the front. Throughout the 1920s, the number of women in science increased, but this did not amount to an improvement of their position in the chemical industry. Women scientists remained underpaid and at the lowest ranks; they were scarcely offered research positions but were instead assigned secretarial tasks despite being qualified for scientific work; prejudices and gender stereotypes prevailed and defined the attitudes of their male employers. Under these circumstances, women adopted a “kind of survival tactic,” less argumentative and aggressive, a strategy that was “very defensive” and “conservative.” Instead of fighting for equality in the workplace, women industrial chemists confined themselves to a narrow range of industries and subordinate positions: “The new view was to accept the discrimination and take advantage of prevailing sexual stereotypes that labeled some positions in chemical companies and on chemical journals as typically feminine.” 3 Investigating the situation of women chemists in Britain during the interwar period, the historian Sally Horrocks has taken a step further. According to Horrocks, women were in fact not direct replacements of men in the chemical industry, because they did not have the same education, status, and opportunities as their male colleagues. They actually occupied a distinct position in the labor market and thus developed different career paths from men. As Horrocks admits, “the employment of women clearly facilitated a reorganization of tasks along gender lines so that the creation of a sphere of ‘women’s work’ also led to the 1 2 3

KOZLAY 1958, p. 168. WALL 1969, p. 17. ROSSITER 1982, pp. 116–17, pp. 248–50, p. 253.

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redefinition of ‘men’s work’.”4 In short, to understand men’s career opportunities during the interwar period, one has to take into account the fact that women’s employment in industry facilitated an increased division of labor within industrial laboratories. Both historians based their studies on extended archival research and several individual cases of female chemists in industrial settings. Here, on the contrary, my narrative is admittedly episodic, supposing that larger pictures in science and technology are most clearly seen from the vantage point of particular cases. The focus of my study is Florence Wall, an American chemist who entered the radium industry during the First World War – mainly a male preserve – and quickly moved to what Rossiter has considered a “typically feminine” industrial sector, namely that of the cosmetics industry.5 Yet I would like to argue that, although historians’ accounts of women in industrial chemistry have been revealing about the harsh conditions of “women’s work” in this field, they have overlooked the creativity with which mainly middle-class white women chemists, at least in the United States, maneuvered within different industrial sectors to secure their work. Instead of being “defensive,” I regard these women as being strategic, for they capitalized on traditional gender stereotypes to create niches within a male-dominated setting. 8.1 Entering the Radium Industry Before the First World War, there were hardly any women working as industrial chemists. This is understandable, however, given that the few women chemists active at the time were typically relegated to laboratories of home economics. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was women’s colleges that created an entrance point for women scientists and enabled women to graduate with degrees in chemistry and physics. Catholic women’s colleges, in particular, were among those that allowed their female students to flourish and even train the next generation of women in science. It was from one of the better-known Catholic colleges of her time, the College of Saint Elizabeth in New Jersey, that Florence Wall graduated with honors in both chemistry and English in 1913. Her bachelors’ degrees were in both art and education. Four years later, the College of Saint Elizabeth was placed on the approved list of colleges and universities by the Association of the American Universities. Born in 1893 in Paterson, N.J., Wall, while in her twenties, was one of the very few women trained in a field with no employment opportunities beyond teaching in high schools. Until 1917, she did just that. When approached by George Willis, a consulting physician at the College of Saint Elizabeth, Wall seized the opportunity to enter the radium industry in that year. “I had been teaching science and English in high school in Suffern, N.Y.,” she recalled, 4 5

HORROCKS 2000, p. 352. PUACA 2007, p. 36: “Embracing feminine fields – instead of defying sexual stereotypes – served as a survival tactic for hard times but hardly promised lasting change or reform.”

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“but willingly resigned and became the assistant to the company’s president, Sabin von Sochocky, a physician and scientist.” Sabin von Sochocky was a Ukrainian-born physicist and physician who, in 1913, introduced a cheap luminous paint formula that led to the wider use of luminous watches in the United States just before and during the interwar years. Sochocky foresaw sufficient profit in the mass production of his formula for the luminous radium paint known as “Luna” and its application to compass dials and other airplane and submarine instruments. Taking advantage of the First World War and the excessive demand for luminous devices that functioned unnoticeable in combat, Sochocky opened a small laboratory on 23rd Street in New York, where he applied his proprietary formula – a yellowish zinc sulfide compound containing radium – for the production of luminous paint. The water-based paint contained radium-226 and mesothorium, which is a radium isotope (radium-228) less expensive than radium itself. Supported financially by the Metals Thermite Company, he was able to develop his formula industrially and, in 1914, he established a dial-painting corporation. In collaboration with Willis, who at the time taught a course on radioactivity at the College of Saint Elizabeth, he founded the Radium Luminous Material Corporation (RLMC) in 1915 with headquarters in New York City. He served as president, while Willis acted as vice president and the company’s treasurer. Commercial production began in 1916 in an industrial plant in Newark. A year later, when the National Radium Institute ceased its operations in Colorado, the company acquired radium mines in Paradox Valley and bought an extraction plant in Orange, New Jersey. The company’s history followed a pattern of excessively diversified facilities in various locations, where it maintained mining, extraction, purification, and application plants across the northeast and Colorado.6 The Luminous Company was one of the four major companies that produced radium at the time. It is worth noting here that, throughout the early twentieth century, there had been three main industrial sectors in which radium thrived: the medical, the cosmetics industry, and the industry that produced and applied radium paint to manufacture luminous compounds. The latter industry proved to be the most profitable during the First World War. The extraction plant of the RLMC 6

Besides Orange, New Jersey, the RLMC established an extraction plant in Boonton, New Jersey in 1919; retained several watch companies as subsidiaries; and controlled holdings of mines in Paradox Valley, Colorado. See [HAER] no. NJ–121, 20. Although the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was growing enormously, Sochocky probably felt uneasy about such expansions. In 1921, he stepped down, and “a consolidation of some of the larger radium companies of the country, including the RLMC of New York and Orange, N.J. with all its allied interests and subsidiaries” – as the New York Times reported in September of that year – was formed. (See “Radium Plants Combine,” 1921). The new corporation was emblematically named the United States Radium Corporation, and Arthur Roeder was elected chairman of the Board of Directors, which included Redmond Cross, Walter Bliss, and Allen Evarts. Roeder was a Cornell engineer who, in 1916, joined the Ingersoll Watch Company in New York as an assistant to the general manager. Two years later, he replaced Willis as a treasurer of the RLMC before he initiated the conglomeration of all the company’s subsidiaries and allies (see RENTETZI, forthcoming).

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operated day and night. It was housed in a three-story converted warehouse situated next to a railroad siding. A constant stream of trucks with carnotite ore and boxes of equipment arrived from various factories throughout the country. Behind the extraction plant was a new brick building, the application plant, and a work studio in which the paint was applied to dials of both watches and several instruments.7 The electroscopic laboratory, a galvanized iron shed, was located in the yard and was isolated from other buildings as a protective measure against radioactive contamination. The workers at the extraction plant were exclusively male. The work was difficult and required physical strength. Ore shipped from Placerville, Colorado had to be unloaded and processed. Typically, the ore contained radium in a ratio of one part radium to 3,000,000 parts uranium. Thus, since large amounts of ore were required, each ton of ore produced only a few milligrams of radium. As Wall described it, “[o]ne ton of ore was mixed with 60 tons of hot hydrochloric acid. This mixture was allowed to stand for a month.”8 Men, who normally had shifts during the day and the night, operated the mixing vats and large filter presses used in processing. They also worked in the process waste department. Known as “tailings,” the company’s waste contained radioactive elements at elevated levels and was temporarily discarded to unused areas of the facility. Because of obvious hazards, such as accidents during heavy duties, these positions were restricted to men. The ore was analyzed in the crystallizing laboratory. Large quantities of radium chloride solution from the plant were processed from silica tubes to smaller evaporating dishes. After conversion, the crystals of radium were transferred to tiny dishes and eventually to small glass tubes, which were then stored in heavy lead repositories to limit radioactivity hazards. Male chemists were employed in the laboratory and assigned to analyze and handle the samples. This is where Wall, in the summer of 1917, was first assigned. Along with her colleagues, she had to analyze the samples coming from each carload of carnotite ore for their contents in uranium and vanadium. In September, however, Wall was transferred to the electroscopic laboratory. There the situation was similar. Male chemists electroscopically tested samples of ore and the results were recorded. Three more women with no scientific training performed ancillary tasks related to the production of the luminous paint, which was also taking place in the laboratory. Wall was the only female chemist in the lab, working in a setting that was unpleasantly frugal. Two small windows permitted light to come in during the day. At night there was only a single suspended light bulb. A chair, some wooden stools, broad shelves along the walls, a cabinet for supplies, and several electroscopes completed the picture. A tall cylin7

8

Approximately seventy-five to one hundred women were employed to apply the radium paint. Because they adopted the technique of lip-pointing their brushes to speed up their work, most of these women suffered from radium poisoning by the early 1920s (see, for example, CLARK 1997). WALL 1969, p. 17.

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drical stove heated up the space during the cold New Jersey winters. Working conditions were not at all easy. In order to catch up with the work at the extraction plant, the laboratories operated twenty-four hours a day. Wall’s task was to test samples for their radium content. The procedure was painstaking and time-consuming. Sochocky prepared all of her samples and each was dissolved in water and sealed in a flat-bottom flask. The sample had to stand for twenty-four hours to allow for the production of radium emanation, radium’s decay product, a heavy gas that was collected in the flask. Wall had to pump the gas into the chamber of the electroscope, leave it undisturbed for three hours, and then take the final measurement. Each test, that is, lasted twenty-seven hours. “I did this faithfully,” Wall admitted. At the time, laboratory work with dangerous substances such as radium was not regulated; although scientists had already known about the effects of radiation on the human body, they remained inconsiderate and careless. For example, although Sochocky had injured his left index finger while working with radium and was aware of possible laboratory hazards, no precautions were taken by the corporation to protect the chemists working for the company. Wall was often ridiculed for being careful. She conducted her measurements wearing a leadimpregnated apron and handled her samples with ivory-tipped forceps, “even though the other chemists jeered good naturedly when they saw me swishing my rags.”9 Writing in 1969, she proclaimed: “[A]nyway, I am still here and some of my co-workers are not.” Being heavily contaminated and overexposed to radium, Sochocky died a “horrible death,” similar to those caused by chronic benzene poisoning or by acute leukemia. From the surviving information, we know that by 1929 four more men, all working at the company’s Orange plant, died from exposure to radioactive sources: a laboratory worker who used to transport radium salts and wrap them for delivery, a man who worked at the extraction division, and two male chemists.10 Wall had soon had enough of these conditions, but risk in the laboratory was not the only factor that led her to quit her job. Working hours were an equally important factor. As she explained, “[i]f the doctor [Sochocky] asked me to pick up a sample at five or six p.m. it meant I would have to be in the laboratory around the same time and next day to set up the electroscopes and also be there exactly three hours later to take the readings. This meant walking the mile home late at night – once between one and two a.m. Occasionally, I had a Saturday afternoon off because I was booked to appear on Sunday, the hour to be announced.”11 Wall ultimately left the job within six month of being hired. During Christmas, and while on holidays, she was asked to return to the plant at night in order to analyze a sample. On top of everything else, the weather was terribly cold. That was the triggering event. “On New Year’s Day I cautiously took stock of my plight, and decided that perhaps the time had come to quit. It was a soul-searing 9 WALL 1969, p. 18. 10 MARTLAND 1929, p. 472. 11 WALL 1969, p. 19.

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decision to make, because as the only woman among the chemists, it might make me seem a sissy. On 5 January 1918, I left the radium company” (my emphasis).12 Wishing to remain in industry and work in a laboratory, Wall immediately began a new job at the Seydel Manufacturing Company, a textile chemical company that was also located in New Jersey. Seydel Chemicals, as it was mainly known, had been established in 1907 in Georgia by the Seydel brothers, who came from Germany. In 1910, they moved production to New Jersey in order to add the New England market to their growing sales in the South. There, Wall became an expert in fur dyes. One day, while she was distilling benzyl acetate, a visitor passed through – according to the historians Marelene and Geoffrey Rayner Canham – and asked for a sample. A week later, Wall received a call to appear at the office of the Fellows Medical Manufacturing Company in New York, where the visitor in question was employed. The company was involved in a project commissioned by the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service. Embarking on a large-scale production of chemicals that were required as solvents for the lacquers coating the fabric skins of military aircraft, it was in need of a chemist to run its newly constructed plant. Wall was asked to join the endeavor, and she quickly accepted the offer. At the end of the war, however, the company closed its operations and Wall lost her job.13 Indeed, during the war and immediate after it, positions for women chemists were especially insecure and jobs were precarious. While men were returning from the battlefields and in need of work, women were pushed out of the job market. Wall quickly moved to another position, this at Ricketts and Company, which was a well-known chemical consulting firm with its headquarters and “an old fashioned laboratory” in downtown Manhattan.14 “It was in January of 1919,” her colleague Marston Hamlin recalled, “that I engaged a scrawny red-headed girl with clear Irish blue eyes to work for Ricketts in that old laboratory.” Wall worked assiduously to overcome the common prejudice against women’s employment in science. According to Hamlin, “Florence worked with us as an assistant chemist under the direction of Thomas A. Shegog. She had limitless courage and energy, and we knew we had a personality among us. Hundreds of samples of brass for Mergenthaler, a hundred more of unusual ores from South America, essential oils rushed in on Washington’s Birthday (only laboratory open, she the only one there!), a long and involved program of petroleum cracking research – it was all the same to Florence. She turned them out and her work was reliable.”15 Despite her hard work, Florence Wall did not remain with the company for too long. Within the same year, she moved once again, now to the U.S. Motor Fuel Corporation. Her assignment was to investigate a novel catalyst that was claimed to increase the yield of gasoline during petroleum

12 13 14 15

Ibid. M. & G. RAYNER-CANHAM 1998, p. 170. HAMLIN 1958, p. 159. Ibid. By “Mergenthaler,” Hamlin meant the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, which was the leading manufacturer of book and newspaper typesetting equipment.

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cracking. Nevertheless, she was soon fired when she expressed concerns about the inventor’s questionable and risky experiments on improving the catalyst. During the postwar industrial depression, jobs were scarce not only for women but for men as well. Unable to find her next job, Wall flew to Europe for almost a year in order to travel and study. When she returned to the U.S., however, the situation was still the same, and thus she took a teaching position in Havana, Cuba. It was not until 1924 that she came back by way of South America. In the meantime, a new industrial sector had emerged: the cosmetics industry. 8.2 Developing Cosmetology into a Science During the early twentieth century, the development of the cosmetics industry was astonishingly rapid. Whereas in 1909 there were only 429 establishments manufacturing cosmetics, with revenue of a little more than fourteen million dollars, in 1931 the number of manufacturing establishments had increased to 657, and the revenue had skyrocketed to 156 million dollars.16 Scientific Monthly reported that, from 1920 to 1924, estimates from tax returns had shown an increase of a hundred million dollars in the sales of perfumes and cosmetics. In 1931, according to the same article, an unofficial estimate of the Department of Commerce placed the annual expenditure for cosmetics and beauty care in the United States at nearly two billion dollars.17 In 1932, 3,018 licenses were issued for beauty work, and by 1934 there were 41,000 beauty shops in the country, employing 170,000 women. Throughout the 1930s, and despite the Depression in the United States, the cosmetics industry remained the fourth largest, following the food, clothing, and automobile industries. According to statistics from 1935, the cosmetics industry was actually rated second, because “during the depression the drop in this industry was less than any other industry excepting only foods.”18 The rapid development of the cosmetics industry in the 1920s brought dramatic changes to personal cosmetic practices. Before the rise of the mass beauty industry, women wore cosmetics that they made at home by mixing their own preparations in the kitchen and following family recipes. At the turn of the twentieth century, beauty meant the achievement of white, pale skin, and blushing cheeks by means of nearly invisible make-up composed of household ingredients and new substances available at pharmacies. As the historian Kathy Peiss explains, women who did not produce their own cosmetics had two choices. They could buy products made by “patent cosmetic” firms, distributed mainly via the mail, or they could purchase “house label” cosmetics made by the local pharmacist.19 Only in the 1910s did three companies – Max Factor, Helena Rubinstein, 16 DOWNING 1934, p. 2090. 17 ZIEGLER 1932, p. 233. 18 Quoted from WALL 1937, p. 311. The statistics come from a report by Dun and Bradstreet, a public company that licensed information on businesses and corporations. 19 PEISS 1998, p. 18.

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and Elizabeth Arden – seize the opportunity to follow the growing consumer impulse and initiate a beauty culture that linked the growth of commerce to training and education in the use of cosmetics.20 It was at this time that women’s magazines established sections in which beauty specialists responded to their readers’ questions, small manufacturing firms promoted “scientific” publications on their cosmetic products, and self-appointed beauty experts flooded the United States market. A series of new professions emerged to cover women’s need for looking beautiful; beauticians, beauty editors, cosmetologists, beauty saloniers, and beauty culturists, to mention a few. By the 1920s, however, an emerging class of managers and professionals transformed cosmetics into a national system of mass production, distribution, marketing, and advertising, and new companies emerged. As Peiss has made clear, these new cosmetics firms, although targeting their products exclusively to women, were led primarily by men.21 The cosmetics industry was obviously a male preserve, and chemists were in demand. As Florence Wall proclaimed retrospectively in 1937, “[t]he twentieth century is the Age of Science in cosmetics as in everything else. After centuries of neglect, the serious study of cosmetic products has come up again – this time in the hands of the chemists, who seem best qualified to handle the varied problems involved.” Indeed, when Wall returned to the United States in 1924, she entered the cosmetics industry and what was already known as the field of cosmetology. The term cosmetology was fairly new at the time. It meant the use of cosmetic products and treatments in beauty salons, but at the same time it also signified the educational preparation of beauty culturists. The term was adopted in the mid1920s on the recommendation of C. W. Godefroy, the vice president of the National Hairdressers Association (founded in 1921), who recognized that developments in hair products and treatments demanded that the new generation of hairdressers be far more educated than their predecessors. The practice of apprenticeship had to be replaced by educational processes that could produce skilled experts in the new and demanding cosmetics industry. In 1918, “beauty culture” was listed for the first time as a possible course in public vocational schools, and many manufacturers offered special courses on the application of their products. In addition to mechanical skills, however, cosmetologists were encouraged to learn basic science, such as anatomy, sanitation, dermatology, and chemistry. Florence Wall, although trained in chemistry and experienced in laboratory science, became one of the first and most successful cosmetologists of the twentieth century. Upon her return to the U.S. in 1924, Wall went to work for Inecto Inc., the leading manufacturer of hair dyes. Her position was director for technical advice. The director of the company, Ralph Evans, a pioneer in cosmetics chemistry, was looking for a female chemist with teaching experience, and Wall fit the job description. Hazel Kozlay, the editor of American Hairdresser, explained that Wall’s job was “to serve as liaison between the laboratory, where they were doing intensive research on dyes and other hair preparations, and the salon where these 20 KAY 1997. 21 PEISS 1998, p. 98.

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were tried out on models. She began in the most practical way.” Kozlay proclaimed: “[S]he dyed her first head of hair on her first afternoon with the company.”22 However, Wall’s laboratory work was soon sidetracked, for she was given a special position as a library researcher. Interestingly, Wall knew six European languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Swedish.23 She was a good writer, moreover, and thus the officials, who appreciated her talents, assigned her to establish a new department of technical advice, which involved handling all correspondence from cosmetologists and supervising the travelling product demonstrators. As if that was not enough, her employers asked her to write a textbook on hair dyeing, which she completed within three months. Wall was seemingly indefatigable. The next request was to organize a school, the so called Notox Institute, which would offer postgraduate training in everything related to hair dyeing. This was the first school of its kind, and its success was emulated and reproduced by many other companies. By 1927, Evans employed four chemists and two assistants. It was time to expand. He bought the Marinello Company, which was one of the earliest cosmetics companies and which also owned the first school for training beauty culturists. Florence Wall was once again asked to reorganize the company’s schools and redesign the curriculum. In 1928, by which time she held the title “Director of Trade Education and Technical Publicity,” Wall was discontent with the routine and the overwhelming requirements of her job. She thus decided to become a freelancer. Most of her colleagues were surprised by such a decision. Jobs were still scarce for women in chemistry. As Rossiter argues, the growth of the American chemical industry did not necessarily lead to the advancement of women chemists and their greater involvement in laboratory work. Instead, the growth went hand in hand with bureaucratization, which led to the creation of new positions for women chemists such as those available to Wall. “It was a great surprise to all of us when she made this move,” explained Kozlay, “because she seemed to be doing such a wonderful job. When I came to know her better, I realized why this had to come about. She is essentially a creative person. She loves nothing better than to create something out of nothing and get it going; but then she is willing to turn it over to someone else and start on something new.”24 Wall did indeed move on to something new. Unable to gain admittance to medical school, she informally attended courses on dermatology; regularly visited a dermatological clinic, where she followed the physicians as if she were an intern; and she took a course on organic chemistry at New York University. Finally, she moved yet again to Europe in order to see what could be learned there about cosmetics and beauty culture. As the former technical advisor of Inecto Inc., she had access and was welcomed by all the prestigious beauty salons in Europe. Wall returned to the U.S. confident that Americans had much to offer in the cosmetics industry at a time when French cosmetic products, above all, were overplayed in American advertisements. “Let’s 22 KOZLAY 1958, p. 161. 23 HAMLIN 1958, p. 160. 24 KOZLAY 1958, p. 162.

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have anything that is European, or that is French,” she used to say, “if it’s really better than what we have […] but not just because it’s European.”

Figure 8.1: Florence Wall – New York World’s Fair (1939–1940) (Source: [New York Public Library]).

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In the meantime, she had become the editor of The Chemist, the official journal of the American Institute of Chemists, a post she kept for two years. She joined the Women’s Advertising Club to establish connections with advertisers and people from the trade. She took courses at the New York Employing Printers Association. She managed to receive invitations from and present her work in schools and beauty salons all over the United States. She assisted the New York City Health Department in revising the sanitary code with respect to cosmetics, and she even reached out to the American Medical Association and assisted the Bureau of Investigation to ensure the safety of cosmetic products. During her subsequent years as a freelancer, she wrote several books and articles; by 1958, Wall had five books and three hundred articles to her name. Indeed, she had invented a new professional identity for herself: cosmetologist. Wall, in fact, was among the early few who invented this profession and shaped the field of cosmetology into a scientific discipline. “The subject matter of modern cosmetology,” she argued in 1937, “draws from biology, chemistry, dermatology, dietetics, physics, physical therapy, plastic surgery, endocrinology, physical education and psychology, as well as from the ancient arts of hairdressing and cosmetic establishment […]. It should be recognized and respected as potentially a new branch of science […].”25 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, while working steadily as a freelancer, Wall strategically promoted her new identity. She enrolled in the School of Education at New York University and took courses in anything that seemed relevant to the new profession she was crafting. Two years later, the school offered her the opportunity to teach a course on cosmetic hygiene, in response to the demand expressed by public schools in the city. The course enrolment skyrocketed to sixtynine students, while the regular size of classes was only fifteen. Wall soon added more courses, such as “advanced cosmetology,” “teaching of cosmetology,” and “teaching of personal grooming,” and some of these were cross-listed with the department of dermatology at the College of Medicine. Intriguingly, although physicians were hesitant to cross the rigid disciplinary boundary between science and cosmetology, some of them used to visit Wall’s advanced class; they did so, however, “always incognito and scared for their lives (and reputations) that some of their colleagues would learn where they disappeared to on those evenings.” Her major concern was to persuade her male colleagues in chemistry that cosmetology was indeed a science. “She became filled with a burning zeal to make cosmetics and cosmetology better understood by professional people,” argued her former student and later colleague Kozlay.26 Wall was the first to present a paper in cosmetics before the male-dominated American Chemical Society. As a consequence, she became the only female member of the Paint and Varnish Division of the Society. She also presented similar papers to the Society of Medical Jurisprudence and the Academy of Medicine. The title of her paper at the Academy is indicative of Wall’s strategic moves: “Cosmetics – Outcast of Medical Science.” Bringing cosmetics to mainstream medicine became Wall’s major concern. She even made 25 WALL 1937, p. 315. 26 KOZLAY 1958, pp. 165, 163.

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herself available to Senator Royal Copeland, the principal author of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act law in 1938. Acting as an independent witness on behalf of the cosmetics industry, she appeared in the hearings for the Copeland Bill and continued to work closely with the senator until the bill was passed. Education, nonetheless, continued to be her main endeavor. She had to give up teaching at the New York School only with the advent of the Second World War. From 1943 to 1947, she worked as a technical editor first for the General Aniline and Film Cooperation in Pennsylvania and then for Ralph Evans Associates. After the war, Wall returned to her independent consulting work. She had, by that point, a well-established reputation as an expert in the clinical testing of cosmetic products and treatments. In recognition of her efforts to develop cosmetology into a scientific field, the Society of Cosmetic Chemists awarded her the Society’s Medal in 1958. She was the first woman to receive such an honor. Presenting Wall to the Society’s meeting that year, Hamlin made this crystal clear: “At that time in the early twenties, after your Medalist turned to cosmetic chemistry, she resolved to bend her energies to putting this somewhat recondite, dopebook, cut-and-try field on a sound scientific basis.”27 It is not by chance that Wall had become a recognized member of a number of scientific societies: the American Institute of Chemists, the American Medical Society, and the Society of Medical Jurisprudence. Receiving the Medal, Wall admitted “how difficult it is to try to inject a new branch of study into established educational centers. All of this has made a career, which has always been interesting but never easy.”28 8.3 Cosmetic Chemistry: A Field Closed to Women In an article published in 1938, Florence Wall sketched the position of women in chemistry, and during the Exposition of Chemical Industries in 1935 she contributed to a symposium on the same theme. The article was the result of such involvement. As she explained, it was a time in which girls were advised to follow careers in fields considered more “appropriate to women’s interests,” such as foods, nutrition, textiles, child hygiene, and of course cosmetics. Reporting on the cosmetics and beauty industry during the same meeting, Ralph Evans proclaimed that, indeed, “beauty culture is primarily a woman’s industry.” What he really meant, however, was that “most of the customers are women,” and that many successful companies in the beauty culture were headed by women.29 In addition, women occupied the position of beauty editors in periodicals about cosmetics or had an advantage over men in positions that involved direct contact with female consumers. But what about women chemists in industrial laboratories? The prospects there were indeed minimal. What Florence Wall did was to open up an alternative opportunity for herself and the women chemists of her time. Jobs in 27 HAMLIN 1958, p. 161. 28 WALL 1958, p. 168. 29 WALL 1938, p. 185.

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cosmetology involved secretarial and editorial skills, educational and teaching abilities, and above all practical skills. Wall was successful because “she [could] actually perform all the beauty techniques herself.” Her own motto was: “[H]ow can I teach anything correctly to anybody unless I can do it myself?”30 This had nothing to do with work in chemical research laboratories, where new products were tested and manufactured. Although innovative, strategic, and pioneering, Wall could not cut across all the gender boundaries of her time. During the First World War, she had the chance to enter an industrial chemical laboratory only because there was a lack of chemists. Pure research remained a male preserve throughout the 1920s and 1930s. This situation did not change even after the Second World War. As the case of Wall demonstrates, industrial laboratories remained closed to women chemists even in the cosmetics industry. Bibliography [HAER] Historical American Engineering Record, U.S. Radium Corporation, no. NJ-121. “Radium Plants Combine, Form US Radium Corporation with Arthur Roeder as Head.” New York Times. 2 September 1921. CLARK, Claudia (1997). Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. DOWNING, John Godwin (1934). “Cosmetics Past and Present.” Journal of the American Medical Association. June 23, pp. 2088–91. HAMLIN, Marston (1958). “Florence E. Wall: Girl Chemist, B.C.” Journal of Cosmetic Science 8, pp. 159–61. HORROCKS, Sally (2000). “A Promising Pioneer Profession? Women in Industrial Chemistry in Inter-War Britain.” British Journal for the History of Science 33, pp. 351–67. KAY, Gwen Elizabeth (1997). Regulating Beauty: Cosmetics in American Culture from the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act to the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. Doctoral Dissertation: Yale University. KOZLAY, Hazel (1958). “Florence E. Wall: Rebel into Pioneer.” Journal of Cosmetic Science 8, pp.161–68. MARTLAND, Harisson (1929). “Occupational Poisoning in Manufacture of Luminous Watch Dials.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review 28, pp. 1200–75. PEISS, Kathy (1998). Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books. PUACA, Laura Michelleti (2007). A New National Defense: Feminism, Education, and the Quest for “Scientific Brainpower,” 1940–1965. Doctoral Dissertation: University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. RAYNER-CANHAM, M./RAYNDER-CANHAM, G. (1998). Women in Chemistry. Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation. RENTETZI, Maria (forthcoming). Radium Economies in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. ROSSITER, Margaret (1982). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

30 KOZLAY 1958, p. 166.

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WALL, Florence (1937). “The Quest for Beauty in the Library.” Special Libraries 28, pp. 311–16. — (1938). “The Status of Women Chemists.” The Chemist 15, pp. 174–92. — (1958). “The Medalists’s Address.” Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists 8, p. 168. — (1969). “Early Days of Radioactivity in Industry: Part I.” Chemistry 42, pp.17–25. ZIEGLER, Grace 1932. “The Diuturnal Use of Perfumes and Cosmetics.” The Scientific Monthly 34, pp. 222–37.

9 DORA I. LEIPUNSKAYA AND THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF WOMEN TO THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY Peter Bussemer Dora Ilyinichna Leipunskaya’s life and scientific work were closely tied to the Soviet Atomic Project, which began immediately after the explosions of the American atomic bombs in August of 1945 over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Breaking the American nuclear monopoly moved to the top of Stalin’s list of state priorities. He feared to lose the fruits of peace after winning the terrible war against Germany and wanted his own bomb to be produced as quickly as possible to reaffirm the role of the Soviet Union as one of two superpowers. The peculiarities of the socialist economy, with its military-style management and big-science institutions, were ideally suited for replicating America’s Manhattan Project.1 The first Soviet bomb, which was a close copy of the American plutonium bomb, was detonated on August 29, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk testing ground in Kazakhstan. Plutonium had been produced at the secret NII-9 (Research Institute No. 9), the workplace of Dora Leipunskaya. To understand the peculiar role of Leipunskaya as a woman scientist in the Soviet Atomic Project, it will be informative to outline, first, the role of women role in the comparable American project. 9.1 Women as Pioneers of Nuclear Science in the Manhattan Project Unlike other fields of physics, a surprising number of essential discoveries in nuclear physics was made by women, especially by those from Europe or trained there. It has been estimated that at least twenty-five women participated in the early research into nuclear science.2 The American-Austrian author Jonathan Tennenbaum has called nuclear energy a “female technology” and associates the atomic revolution with the greatest breakthrough of women in science.3 In an article entitled “Pioneer Women in Nuclear Science,” the authors estimate that at least fourteen women were working in the field of nuclear science during the early part of twentieth century.4 Among these, the most prominent were Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Mariü, who was a physicist of Serbian descent, is also occasionally included among the founding mothers of nuclear science, because Einstein’s most productive years, including his annus mirabilis of 1905, took place during their marriage. At the very least, she had acted as his supportive scientific colleague, especially during his development of 1 2 3 4

See HOLLOWAY 1994, which is a fundamental study if the Soviet nuclear armament. See HOWES/HERZENBERG 1999, p. 21. See TENNENBAUM 1994. See RAYNER-CANHAM/RAYNER-CANHAM 1990.

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mass-energy equivalence.5 The famous formula E=mc², after all, is the key to explaining the huge release of energy in nuclear fission. In August of 1945, after the devastation of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs, the American public learned for the first time about the gigantic research effort to construct them. Contemporary reports in the press about the Manhattan Project mentioned only one woman, Lise Meitner, but she did not actually work on the project. The earliest books and official histories, too, made no references to contributions by female scientists and engineers. The general view about the role of women in physical sciences was expressed by the physicist Vera Kistiakovsky, whose father, the Ukrainian-American physicist George B. Kistiakovsky, had prominently taken part in the Manhattan project. Vera Kistiakovsky, who became professor of physics at MIT in 1963, wrote an article under the chidingly ironic title “Women in Physics: Unnecessary, Injurious and Out of Place?” This title was borrowed from an essay by Strindberg, written at the end of the nineteenth century, which opposed the appointment of Sofia Kovalevskaya to a professorship at the University of Stockholm.6 It was not until the feminist movement of the 1970s that the important role of women in this project was rediscovered. Before that time, military and scientific leaders were convinced that the contributions of women had been restricted to supplying services to the laboratories and production facilities, as was done by the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).7 Historians at the American Physical Society began to undertake extensive detective work – questionnaires were issued, phone calls were made, and so on – to uncover the women associated with the project. The result of this effort, which was published by Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg in 1999, was a genuine surprise: More than three hundred women had performed technical work on the Manhattan Project, and perhaps their number was appreciably higher. These investigations were initiated by Melba Philipps, the most prominent female scientist in American national organizations. Born in 1907 on a farm in rural Indiana, she graduated from high school at the age of fifteen and, in 1928, received a master’s degree from Battle Creek College in Michigan. With the help of the nuclear physicist Edward Condon, she entered the graduate program in physics at Berkeley, where she became Robert Oppenheimer’s first graduate student.8 She earned her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1933 and conducted postdoctoral research there for the next two years. Along with Oppenheimer, she discovered the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, a special nuclear reaction in conjunction with nuclear fission.9 From 1936 to 1937, she continued her research at the Institute of Ad5 6 7 8 9

See EINSTEIN 1994; HERMANN 2004. See KISTIAKOVSKY 1980. In May of 1945, sixty-seven members of the WAC were stationed at Los Alamos, about forty percent of whom worked in scientific fields (see HOWES/HERZENBERG 1999, p. 149). Oppenheimer became the scientific director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1942 (see BIRD 2005). The Oppenheimer-Phillips reaction occurs when a low-energy deuteron passes close to a nucleus and brooks its neutron-proton bond. The neutron is stripped off and absorbed by the

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vanced Study in Princeton, where she was funded by a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Her first teaching position, which she began in 1937, was at the Connecticut College for Women, and a year later she went to Brooklyn College. During the war, Melba Phillips did not contribute to the Manhattan Project; rather, she became a lecturer at the University of Minnesota and spent five months working on the radar project. She returned to Brooklyn College after the war. In October of 1952, during the McCarthy era, she was fired from the college for refusing to answer the questions of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Internal Security concerning her own and her colleagues’ political views. Brooklyn College publicly apologized to her in 1987. While unemployed and blacklisted, Philipps wrote two textbooks, Principles of Physical Science with Francis Bonner (1957), and Classical Electricity and Magnetism with Wolfgang Panofsky (1955), which was one of the best graduate-level texts on electrodynamics.10 Having returned to teaching in 1957, Phillips enjoyed a distinguished career in physics education and eventually became the first female president of the American Association of Physics Teachers. At the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, the American Physical Society had 3,600 members. By the end of 1941, some 1,700 physicists – a quarter of them all – were employed in defense-related research. The majority of them and the public were convinced that the field of physics was beyond the capabilities of women. Some exceptions were made for unmarried women, but married female physicists were treated as talented amateurs and were allowed to work only if their husbands agreed. A typical example is the case of Maria Goeppert Mayer.11 In 1939, when her husband Joseph E. Mayer moved to Columbia University, Maria was offered an unpaid lectureship. In 1942, Harold Urey, the director of the Manhattan Project’s gaseous-diffusion project, recruited her for parttime work at Columbia. This was her first salaried position as a researcher. Working on isotope separation, she quickly became the leader of a group of twenty-five scientists and technicians. On account of her German background, she was not allowed to work within the Manhattan Project; encouraged by Edward Teller, however, she did conduct important research for it. She calculated, for instance, the opacity of uranium at very high temperatures and how, in a nuclearfission explosion, the fissioning mass absorbed electromagnetic radiation. At the time, these results were considered interesting but unimportant, but later they became important to the fundamental design of the hydrogen bomb.12 As examples of female contributors to the Manhattan Project, especially to plutonium technology, the following women are especially noteworthy:

nucleus. Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize winner and the director of the Theoretical Department in Los Alamos, regarded this effect as Oppenheimer’s most important contribution to nuclear physics (see CASSIDY 2005, p. 173). 10 See PANOFSKY 2005. 11 See SACHS 1982; FÖLSING 1990, pp. 65–74; TOBIES 1997, pp. 41–42; FERRY 2003. 12 See RHODES 1995, p. 466.

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Marjorie Woodward Evans: After completing an undergraduate degree at Berkeley, she worked as a research assistant from 1942 to 1945. Her group studied the plutonium extracted from fuel rods and how it might be recovered from a solution. In 1945, she received her Ph.D. from Berkeley, and later she became the Executive Director of the Physical Science Division at the Stanford Research Institute.13 Isabella Lugoski Karle: Born in Detroit to Polish immigrants in 1921, she graduated from the University of Michigan. As a woman, she was denied a chemistry teaching assistantship, but she was able to continue her graduate work with the help of a fellowship from the American Association for University Women. In 1942, Isabella married Jerome Karle, a crystallographer who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. At the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago,14 which had been founded in December of 1941 to develop chainreacting nuclear piles and to devise methods of extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium, she studied the chemistry of transuranic elements and the synthesis of plutonium compounds. She was the first to grow crystals of plutonium chloride. After the war, she returned to the University of Michigan as an instructor of chemistry.15 Nathalie Michel Goldowski: Born in Moscow into the Russian aristocracy in 1908, she fled with her mother in 1917 to Paris to escape the Russian Revolution. Having obtained a Dr.Sc. from the University of Paris in 1935 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1939, she became the Chief of Metallurgical Development for the French Air Ministry. After Hitler’s occupation of France in 1940, she escaped to the United States, where she joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in 1943. This small group, founded by Leó Szilárd,16 worked on the metallurgy of uranium, especially on the corrosion of metals. Goldowski’s non-corroding aluminum coating was critical to the success of the plutonium production project.17 Elizabeth Rona: In 1941, Rona immigrated into the United States, where she worked as an associate professor at Trinity College from 1941 to 1946. Polonium, on which she was the world’s leading expert, became important to the Manhattan Project because it emits alpha particles as it decays. If alpha particles collide with beryllium atoms, neutrons are emitted. These neutrons are needed to ignite the fission chain reaction in a plutonium bomb. After the war, she worked at the Oak

13 See HOWES/HERZENBERG 1999, p. 71. 14 The project leader was the physicist Arthur Compton, who in 1922 discovered X-ray scattering by free electrons. Known as the Compton Effect, this experimentally proved the existence of light quanta (photons) and wave-particle duality. Compton was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927 (see LONGAIR 2013, p. 172). 15 See HOWES/HERZENBERG 1999, p. 74. 16 Born in Budapest, Leo Szilard was one of the leading nuclear physicists (see RHODES 1986, Chapter 1). 17 See HOWES/HERZENBERG 1999, p. 83.

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Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies and subsequently at the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Miami.18 9.2 Dora Leipunskaya’s Family and Education Dora Leipunskaya came from a large and impoverished Jewish family that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, lived in the Polish village of Dragli, which was then part of tsarist Russia. Her father, Ilya Isaakovich Leipunsky, worked as a foreman on road and railway construction projects. Her mother, Sofya Naumovna Leipunskaya (née Shpanina), was orphaned as a child and raised by her relatives, who enabled her to attend a Progymnasium. At the time, Russia was investing widely and heavily in its travel infrastructure, and for this reason the Leipunsky family moved on several occasions to the father’s various workplaces. Dora’s parents had six children together: Alexander (1903), Yakov (1906), Ovsey (1909), Dora (1912), Elisabeta (1918), and Naum (1921). They were also compelled to adopt four additional children, who were oprhaned by the death of a cousin. At the time of Dora Ilyinichna Leipunskaya’s birth in 1912, the family had already moved to Belostok, which today is the Polish city of Biaáystok. The difficult situation of Jews in tsarist Russia is illustrated by two events that affected Dora’s family. First, despite his high examination scores, her older brother Alexander was denied a place at the Gymnasium in Belgorod because the quota for Jewish pupils there had already been reached. It was not until the following year that he was admitted to the school. Second, in 1905 and 1906, the father of the orphaned children mentioned above was a member of an armed selfdefense force that had been assembled to protect the Jewish community from pogroms and police abuse. He fled to America in 1906 and did not return until 1923, after the Russian Civil War had ended. He had brought his two oldest children with him to the United States, where they went on to create an American branch of the family. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Dora’s father Ilya I. Leipunsky was transferred from Belostok to Yaroslavl. This was an old city situated on the “Golden Ring” along the Volga, just north of Moscow. During the famished years of the Civil War (1918–1922), he had also worked along with his oldest son in Rybinsk, in the Yaroslavl District, in order to feed his large family. While in Yaroslavl, the family probably would have been killed in an anti-Semitic uprising had they not been able to hide at the home of a Russian Orthodox neighbor. Three of the six Leipunsky children – Alexander, Ovsey, and Dora – went on to become physicists, and each of them achieved great success as scientists in

18 See HOWES/HERZENBERG 1999, p. 88. For additional information about Rona, see VOGT 2008, p. 156.

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their respective fields.19 Before turning my attention to Dora, I would first like to add a few biographical notes about the other two. Alexander Ilyich Leipunsky is the most renowned member of the family. In 1921, he entered the Physical-Mechanical Faculty of the Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd (later Leningrad), which had been founded by Abram F. Ioffe in 1919 to provide students with a combined education in physics and engineering. After graduating in 1926, Alexander was able to join the Physical-Technical Institute, which was directed by Ioffe himself, to study atomic interactions with electrons and molecules.20 In 1929, he began to conduct research in nuclear physics at the Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute (UFTI ) in Kharkov, where he served as the director from 1932 to 1937. In 1932, the UFTI inaugurated a new physics journal, the Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, and Leipunsky became its managing editor. He visited Germany and England in 1934, and while in England he successfully invited the German physicists Fritz Lange and Fritz Houtermans to work at his institute (both had immigrated to England due to its anti-fascist activities).21 Lange, the inventor of the centrifuge for isotope separation, worked under Igor Kurchatov, who became the scientific director of the Soviet nuclear project from 1943 until his death. Houtermans became a victim of Stalin’s purges in 1937. Alexander Leipunsky, too, lost his post as director and was incarcerated in 1938 for two months. In 1941, he became head of the Institute of Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences until 1949, and he was involved with the Soviet Atomic Project.22 In 1945, he recruited nuclear experts from Germany to work in the Soviet Union.23 Later he would play an important role in the development of nuclear power in the Soviet Union, in particular as a pioneer of fast-breeder reactor technology in Obninsk. In 1931, Ovsey Ilyich Leipunsky graduated from the Physical-Mechanical Faculty of the aforementioned Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad, the same institute at which his older brother Alexander had studied. He also entered the PhysicalTechnical Institute there and worked under Alexander I. Shalnikov (see below) in the department of N. N. Semenov.24 This department was changed into an Institute of Chemical Physics after one year. In 1939, Ovsey Leipunsky theoretically formulated the conditions for the production of synthetic diamonds, and after the outbreak of the war he developed, together with Yakov B. Zeldovich,25 the theory 19 20 21 22 23

See GOROBETS 2007. See HOLLOWAY 1994, Chapter 1 (on Ioffe’s Institute). See GOROBETS 2007, Chapter 1. See DOVBNYA 2011. These German scientists were isolated in special institutes, such as those in Suchumi or Obninsk (see HOLLOWAY 1994, p. 108; HEINEMANN 1992). 24 Nikolai Nikolaevich Semenov became director of the new Leningrad Institute of Chemical Physics in 1931. There he studied chemical kinetics and chemical (i.e., non-nuclear) chain reactions. For these discoveries he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1956. 25 Iakov Borisovich Zeldovich joined the Institute for Chemical Physics in 1931. With Yulii Khariton (the scientific director of Arzamas-16 from 1946 to 1992 and the chief constructor of the first Soviet atomic bomb), Zeldovich conducted important research on nuclear chain

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of combustion for the Katyusha rocket launcher, a mighty Soviet weapon to be used against German troops. In the Atomic Project, Ovsey Leipunsky developed methods for measuring the radioactivity emitted by atomic explosions. Rather early, and before Andrei Sakharov (the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize), Ovsey Leipunsky predicted the lethal effects of nuclear tests. His engagement at the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs contributed to an important East-West settlement, namely the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Figure 9.1: Dora Leipunskaya as a student, 1934 (Source: GOROBERTS 2007, p. 294).

Dora Leipunskaya followed the footsteps of her older brothers and, in the beginning of the 1930s, began to study chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad. After her first year, she transferred to the faculty of physics, where the aforementioned A. I. Shalnikov became one of her most important teachers. Alexander Iosifovich Shalnikov, born in St. Petersburg to a family of Russian intellectuals, was interested in music and literature. One of his childhood friends was the composer Dmitri D. Shostakovich, and he participated in the literary circle of the influential poet Nikolai Gumilev. Shalnikov graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in 1928, after which he worked at the Physical-Technical Institute in Leningrad until 1935. He then moved to Moscow to join the newly founded Institute of Physical Problems at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which was di-

reactions even before the onset of war in 1941. As part of the Atomic Project, he began as the director of the theoretical department at Arzamas-16, a secret location near Sarov in the Volga region. Along with Andrei Sakharov, he was later engaged in the construction of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb.

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rected by P. L. Kapitsa.26 Shalnikov developed many high-precision measurement instruments and obtained reliable experimental evidence for the two-phase nature of the intermediate state of superconductors. At Moscow State University, he organized the laboratory of low temperature physics, and he became a professor there in 1944. Dora Leipunskaya and Shalnikov shared a deep friendship. In 1935, when Shalnikov had been arrested on false accusations of counter-revolutionary activity, Dora Leipunskaya was reproved as well. She was expelled from the Communist Youth Association. However, she was able to complete her studies at the institute, after which she married her childhood friend Lev Petrovich Kononovich and accompanied him to Moscow. She was employed at the Karpov Institute of Physical Chemistry, which, having been founded in 1918, was one of the oldest Russian industrial institutes.27 In the summer of 1941, after the outbreak of the war, the institute was moved to Tashkent. There Dora Leipunskaya was able to complete her doctoral degree. After the Second World War, however, she was forced to leave this institute, and this was likely because of her Jewish ancestry. She was able, in 1946, to find a position at the incipient Soviet Atomic Project. 9.3 Dora Leipunskaya and the Soviet Atomic Project In order to understand Dora Leipunskaya’s position more accurately, it will first be necessary to outline the project as a whole. After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (codename “Little Boy,” with Uranium 235) and Nagasaki (codename “Fat Man,” with plutonium)28 in August of 1945, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to have atomic weapons to avoid an American monopoly and thus to avoid a shift in the balance of power between the USA and the USSR. On August 20, 1945, the Soviet State Defense Committee issued an edict establishing a Special State Committee on Problem Number One: the construction of atomic energy facilities, and the production of an atomic bomb.29 Soviet spies such as Klaus Fuchs, who was right at the heart of the Manhattan Project, had provided details about the Fat Man plutonium bomb design, and this information prompted the physicists Igor Kurchatov and Khariton to build a copy of Fat Man instead of

26 Pyotr Kapitsa (the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics) worked at Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge from 1921 to 1934, at which point Stalin forced him to stay in the Soviet Union. While establishing the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow, Kapitsa applied to develop an independently designed Soviet atomic bomb. He withdrew from the Atomic Project after his proposals had been declined (see BAGGOTT 2009, p. 369). 27 Today this institute is the State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation, a facility belonging to the military-industrial complex of Russia. 28 The first American atomic bomb (codename “Trinity”), which was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, was a plutonium bomb. 29 See BAGGOTT 2009, Chapter 18.

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developing an independent approach to the weapon, as Kapitsa had proposed.30 As early as 1943, however, Kurchatov had had the idea of using plutonium instead of uranium for the bomb,31 but of course he could not foresee the problems that the Americans had faced with some of the peculiarities of plutonium (such problems led to a crisis in Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos laboratory in 1944). Instead of a “gun-type bomb” with uranium, another explosion mechanism for plutonium had to be developed, namely one that created an “explosion toward the inside,” that is, an implosion for activating the bomb.32 In October of 1945, the Soviets received from Klaus Fuchs a meticulous account of how the plutonium bomb was put together. One of the most important sections described how the “Urchin” initiator allowed for a perfect stream of neutrons to activate the plutonium.33 Plutonium was discovered in England and United States in 1940. Above all, the isotope Pu-239, with a mass of 239 and an atomic number of 94, was readily “fissionable” by both slow and fast neutrons. It had the great advantage of being chemically different from uranium, and could easily be separated from it. Plutonium was first produced, isolated, and chemically identified in 1940 and 1941 by the team of Glenn Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley. Early research was continued at the secret Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago,34 and a plutonium production facility was built at the Hanford Engineer Works in Richland, Washington. Glenn Seaborg had earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Berkeley in 1937 with a thesis on the “Interaction of Fast Neutrons with Lead,” in which he coined the term “nuclear spallation”. Looking back to Seaborg’s doctoral advisor, we find a path that leads to Germany: George Ernest Gibson had earned his doctoral degree, in 1911, under the supervision of Otto Lummer at the University of Breslau.35 Two of Gibson’s students were awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry. One of these was Glenn Seaborg, who won the prize for "discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.” Otto Lummer thus became the “great-grandfather” of plutonium. In an article from 1912 about the 30 Klaus Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy in Los Alamos who provided the Soviets with a detailed description of the design of the plutonium bomb. Today we would call him a “whistleblower” (see HOLLOWAY 1994, pp. 222, 138). There are also speculations that a Russian female spy had an affair with Albert Einstein around 1945. Margarita Konenkova, the spy in question, was the wife of the famous Soviet sculptor Sergey Konenkov. The couple lived in the United States from the mid-1920s to 1945 (see TRIFONOVA 2013). 31 See SUDOPLATOW/SUDOPLATOW 1994, pp. 530, 551. 32 At that time, there was no single word for “implosion” in the Russian language. 33 See ALBRIGHT 1997, Chapter 14 (on the implosion principle in particular, see p. 119). 34 Plutonium was also proposed by Houtermans to the German Atomic Project in 1942 (see ROSE 1998, Chapter 9; and BUSSEMER 2013, p. 117). 35 Otto Lummer was a leading expert in optics, particularly in the high-precision measurement of the black body radiation spectrum. He discovered deviations from classical physics, which compelled Max Planck to create the quantum hypothesis in December of 1900 (see BUSSEMER 2013, pp. 7–8). On Lummer’s work at the Physikalisch-technische Reichsanstalt, and on his support of Hedwig Kohn, see also Chapter 2 of the present book. On Gibson’s thesis, which concerned the thermal emission of thallium vapor, see LUMMER 1918, p. 246.

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energy resources of nature, he prophetically foresaw the practical use of radioactive energy: We stand quite powerlessly and helplessly before the problem of accelerating the time of decay and of technically harnessing the energy that such decay releases [...]. In the distant future, it may be an obligation for ideally disposed researchers and discoverers to manipulate radioactive elements [...] in order to make use of their energy supply.36

In the Soviet Union, a nuclear industry had to be established before the bomb could be built.37 For a country which had suffered so much during the war, this was a difficult task. However, the huge project was just the type of endeavor for which the Stalinist command economy was ideally suited. Disregarding the costs, all resources of the socialist economy could be mobilized, including the best scientists and engineers, as well as the slave laborers of the Gulag and prisoners of war, especially Germans. The CIA estimated that about 10,000 technically qualified people were active on the project.38 Although the most important matters had to be approved by Stalin, Beria, and a Special Committee, the practical leadership was undertaken by Boris Vannikov and Igor Kurchatov, who ran the project on a day-to-day basis.39 The Russian reactor F-1, which was roughly similar to Enrico Fermi’s Pile-1 in Chicago, was activated on December 25, 1946. It was the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction ever produced, in the Soviet Union and the United States alike. The production of one gram of plutonium a day requires a reactor that can generate thermal power at the rate of 500 to 1,500 kilowatts, as was known from the Smyth report.40 During the fission of uranium-235, a part of the emitted neutrons is captured by uranium-238 to form uranium-239. With a half-life of twentythree minutes, it decays into neptunium, and this, with a half-time of 2.3 days, decays into plutonium. By means of this decay chain, plutonium can be produced in a nuclear pile. The first production reactor was in the Kyshtym district. The site, which was called Chelyabinsk-40, became the Soviet equivalent to the American complex at Hanford. The Soviet manager and politician Avraamii P. Zaveniagin, in one of 36 Otto Lummer, in Natur. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Naturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft 3 (1912), p. 217. 37 The industrial production of radium began in the Soviet Union in 1929 and 1930 in Moscow’s rare earth factory. The uranium ore was mined at the Tuya-Muyun mine in the Fergana Valley (see ERHOVA 1987, p. 92). 38 See HOLLOWAY 1994, Chapter 9. 39 For an overview of the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, see GONCHAROV 2001. Lavrentii Beria became the Deputy People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1938. He chaired the Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb from 1945 to 1953. Boris Vannikov was appointed the People’s Commissar on Munitions during the war, and from 1945 to 1953 he led the First Chief Administration of the Council of Ministers. 40 The Smyth report, released to the public on August 12, 1945, just days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, was an official U.S. government document concerning the Los Alamos project. A Russian translation was published early in 1946 and distributed widely to Soviet scientists (see SMYTH 1945).

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whose factories Dora Leipunskaya would work,41 put the NKVD major-general Iakov Rapoport in charge of construction. Rapoport was one of the Soviet NKVD officers responsible for building the White Sea Channel in the early 1930s, a pet project of Stalin’s in which hundreds of thousands of workers from labor camps had died. Khariton, the chief designer of the Soviet atom bomb, wrote: Of course, we took no pleasure in seeing the convoys of prisoners who were forced to construct the initial facilities, but all of that faded into the background. These people cared little about the difficulties of daily life and achieved our goals as quickly and effectively as possible. They knew that their country was in danger, and they understood that the state was relying on them and that it would go above and beyond to provide for their work and their daily lives. They accomplished their objective magnificently.42

The production process of metallic plutonium consists of three steps: first, the physical placement of plutonium into a reactor, where it is generated in irradiated uranium oxide; second, the chemical separation of plutonium from uranium oxide, resulting in a concentrate; and third, the production of metallic plutonium from this concentrate. The first step was realized in Igor Kurchatov’s Laboratory No. 2 in the Ural region, twenty kilometers east of Kyshtym and eighty kilometers northwest of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city. The conditions were difficult, as a description from the year 1945 indicates: II. Area “B” – Between Kyshtym and the Ufa River. From the perspective of other uninhabited places, this area proves to be the most isolated of all. It is located at a distance of 20–23 kilometers from the next-largest settlement, Kyshtym. The place [...] is shrouded in mixed forest and surrounded by a polygonous ridge of hills. Regarding the construction of buildings, the relatively flat landscape is somewhat easy to work with. The water supply is a difficult matter because the Ufa River is of course the only source, and for this reason one has to rely on small water tanks. The supply pipeline would have to be five kilometers long. The supply of electricity can be achieved by means of a high-voltage power line of about 20–25 kilometers. Concerning transportation conditions, at the moment the site can only be reached by a narrow path in the forest.43

The reactor building was ready by the end of 1947, and in May of 1948 the basic assembly was complete. In June of that year, the reactor achieved a capacity of one hundred thousand kilowatts, and in July it began to operate according to the plan for plutonium production. The second facility was a radiochemical factory for separating the plutonium from the uranium that had been irradiated in the reactor, and it was located at Chelyabinsk-40. Igor Kurchatov assigned this task to the chemist Vitalii Khlopin and his Radium Institute in Leningrad, where, incidentally, Khlopin also super-

41 Her work at the factory is discussed below. Avraamii Zaveniagin directed the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Corporation in the 1930s, then became the First Deputy People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry. The Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs during the war, he became Vannikov’s deputy during the First Chief Administration (1945–1953). 42 TSCHIKOW 1996, p. 443. According to rough estimates, seventy thousand prisoners were used in the construction of the first Soviet reactor (see TSCHIKOW 1996, p. 497). 43 See RYABEV 2000, p. 247.

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vised women’s doctoral theses (see below).44 However, it was the physical chemist Boris Kurchatov, Igor’s younger brother, and a colleague of his at Laboratory No. 2 who first succeeded in separating plutonium from uranium oxide. This they achieved in the summer of 1947 by using a precipitation method. The minute quantities of plutonium were visible only under a microscope. An experimental semi-industrial plant was built at NII-9 and produced the first Soviet plutonium, less than a milligram, on December 18, 1947. The basic feature of the separation plant at Chelyabinsk-40 was a canyon arrangement, as described in the Smyth report. The separation process was based on the slightly soluble sodium uranyl acetate precipitation from nitric acid solutions of irradiated uranium. The separation plant was ready in December of 1948 and began to produce plutonium during the early months of 1949. The third complex was a chemical-metallurgical plant for converting plutonium into metal for use in bombs. Andrei Bochvar, the director of NII-9, was in charge of the metallurgy of plutonium.45 At the end of February in 1949, the first nitrate of plutonium was produced, and, by the middle of April, pure plutonium dioxide was produced and transferred to the metallurgical department, where it was converted into metal. By June of 1949, enough plutonium had been produced for the first atomic bomb. From 1946 to 1952, Dora Leipunskaya worked at NII-9 in Moscow and partially at the plutonium factory No. 817 in the Ural district.46 NII-9 was founded toward the end of 1944 by Zaveniagin to enhance the metallurgy of uranium and plutonium. The first director of NII-9 was the NKVD engineer-colonel Professor Viktor Shevchenko. The original name of this institute was the “Institute of Special Metals of NKVD,” in Russian: Inspezmet (Institut specialnych metallov NKVD). The first buildings had been constructed in 1945, and it opened on December 27, 1945 with sixty employees. In 1946, the institute had grown to become a great technological-scientific center; its name was changed to NII-9 and its leadership was handed to Andrei Bochvar. The center was part of the Special Metallurgical NKVD complex led by Zaveniagin, which employed 1,200 people. It consisted of thirteen laboratories and a subsidiary facility in Leningrad. The essential production base was concentrated in Factory No. 12, which was situated in the town of Elektrostal, seventy kilometers east of Moscow.

44 Vitalii Khlopin graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1912 and worked in the Radium Institute, where, in 1921, he devised a process for extracting radium from uranium ore. In 1940, he became the chairman of the Uranium Commission and took charge of devising a method for the chemical separation of plutonium. 45 Andrei Bochvar, a famous scientific metallurgist, studied the properties of metals and alloys and wrote important textbooks for this field. In 1946, as part of the Soviet Atomic Project, he became one of the founders of the Soviet nuclear industry. 46 NII is the Russian abbreviation for Nauchno-issledovatelsky institute [Scientific Research Institute]. Today it is the VNIIM, that is, the Vysoko-technologichesky institut neorganicheskych materialov imeni akademika A. A. Bochvara [Bochvar Pan-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Inorganic Materials], which is located in Moscow-Shchukino.

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The laboratory where Dora Leipunskaya was employed was directed by a female researcher, the radiochemist Zinaida Ershova.47 Ershova had earned her doctoral degree under the supervision of Viktor Khlopin, who has been mentioned above. Having completed a degree in radioactivity at the Physical-Mathematical Faculty of the Moscow State University in 1929, Ershova worked at the Moscow Rare Elements Plant, though she remained in contact with her former research institute. As early as 1930, she became the director of a physical laboratory at a company advised by Khlopin. In December of 1936, she was commissioned to work as a guest researcher at Marie Curie’s Radium Institute in Paris. While there, Ershova worked in the laboratory of Irene Joliot-Curie, who was studying the properties of uranium isotopes. In 1937, she attended Irene Joliot-Curie’s first lectures on radioactivity and Frederick Joliot-Curie’s lectures on nuclear physics. After returning to Moscow at the end of 1937, she became involved in geochemical research for uranium mining at the Tabashar Mine in Tadzhikistan. It was in 1943 that she first came into contact with the burgeoning Soviet Atomic Project, and early in 1946 she joined Inspezmet (later NII-9), where she would continue to work until 1989. She was one of the few major female scientists involved with the Soviet Atomic Project; in a film commemorating her one-hundredth birthday, she was referred to as the “Madame Curie of Soviet Union.”48 Because of the secrecy of the Atomic Project, there are no direct testimonies by Dora Ilyinichna Leipunskaya about this time. However, a description of life at NII-9 was written by Ninel Epatova-Dronskaya, one of her female staff members. From this report we also learn that there were several other female researchers, and that there were certain male researchers with anti-feminist attitudes: Nina Kiseleva led me to my first work station at NII-9. Through a decision issued on October 27, 1947 by the Soviet Council of Ministers, a special complex “V” was constructed, the purpose of which was to develop technology for the production of metallic plutonium. Of course, I knew nothing about this; at the time, I was simply content to know that the complex was directed by A. A. Bochvar. Our so-called “hotel” was located near Shchukino, a picturesque village on the banks of the Moscow River [...]. Many years later, in 1993, I discovered with horror that nothing more remains of the village, which is now remembered only by the “Shchukino” metro station. After making my way through the obligatory identification office [...] I introduced myself to L. I. Zuprun, the laboratory director of the metallurgy department. [...] He observed my clothing with dissatisfaction and, without inviting me to sit down, proceeded to ask me a series of stupid questions about electrical engineering. I was so flummoxed with shock that I responded to him as though I were taking a test. As soon as I began to say something, this little, spidery man interrupted me with a shout: “Nonsense! False! I noticed at once that you know nothing at all! It is clear from such utterances that your brain is lacking in the necessary circuitry.” I wanted to cry and run out of the office at once, when suddenly a voice said: “Devushka, please have a seat and don’t be upset! Our boss simply cannot tolerate the presence of women in his laboratory and wants nothing to do with this ‘new and original’ approach to things.” [...] The director listened to me and shook his head with a smile: “I’ll assign you to the laboratory of Dora Ilyinichna Leipunskaya.”

47 See ERSHOVA 1987, p. 85. 48 See also VLADIMIROVA 2004.

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Peter Bussemer Dora Ilyinichna offered me her friendship, and I worked in her laboratory. I remember her clearly to this day and would recognize her at once if I could ever meet her again. She was an enchanting and attractive woman with a flat, oval face with elegant features. At the time, she was certainly not older than forty, though she seemed quite older to my twentythree-year-old self. She was attentive and a genuine leader, and it was fun working with her from the very beginning, even though the work was somewhat outside of my specialty (as an electrical radio engineer, I had to concern myself with radiometry and dosimetry). I investigated the callibration of radiometric and dosimetric samples and recorded their development, and I was able to do this because Dora Ilyinichna recognized in me a propensity for scientific work. The instruments used during those years [...] were not technologically sophisticated. The lab was usually equipped with an pulse-counting ionization chamber, mechanical calculators, and oscillographs. The radioactive source (an alpha-emitter, for instance) was situated in the chamber, and the source’s level of radioactivity was determined by the number of pulses.49

In the same report, Ninel Epatova-Dronskaya described her working conditions, especially her contact with radioactive substances, as follows: We worked with open radioactive sources with our bare hands, without any protective glass or breathing masks. At the time, we were deeply engrossed in our work and had little interest in the effects of ionizing radiation. [...] Because, at the time, alpha particles were neither contained in cartridges nor in dosimetric canisters, we were unaware of their menacing danger. I remember the large and inviting dining hall, in which we were taken care of in a princely manner – lunch consisted of four courses, so that, having just experienced the meager rations of our student years, we felt as though every day were a holiday. For working in especially harmful conditions, we received the so-called “Ration 1” and milk (on our free meal cards, the number 1 designated the most generous ration of all). It must be admitted that the medical doctors observed us with close attention. Of course, we were worthless to them, like guinea pigs. Nevertheless, aside from the harm done to my health, I look back to my time at NII-9 as one of the best periods of my life. I had been active in sports – especially in skiing, iceskating, and rowing – since my childhood; I had spent a great deal of time in the fresh air, and thus I came to work in sound health. And yet, as yearly as January of 1949, I suffered my first heart attack: I lost consciousness and fell over. After various examinations, analyses, and assessments, my first serious diagnosis was that I had heart disease [...]. I only learned in 1993 that, as early as 1948, I had also been diagnosed in a Moscow hospital as having an astheno-vegetative syndrome. For the sake of my health, in January of 1949 I was sent to a sanatorium in Sochi. When I returned from the sanatorium, all of the interns had already been transferred to the complex known as “Majak” (Chelyabinsk-40) [...]. I felt very lonely, and all the more so because Dora I. Leipunskay had also been moved to Majak, where she was given a great deal of responsibility. I also requested from the leadership to be transferred there, but this request turned out to be a great mistake, because Dora Ilyinichna wanted to keep me at NII-9. I would like to end my reminiscences of NII-9 by acknowledging the vast contributions that female interns had made during the development of atomic energetics – having worked selflessly at NII-9, they remain “Unknown Soldiers.” I am convinced that, in an essential manner, dosimetry and radiometry were developed and improved by the interns and scientific assistants at NII-9.50

49 Quoted from GOROBETS 2007, pp. 209–12. 50 Ibid.

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The first Soviet atomic bomb exploded on August 29, 1949, and this was much sooner than American experts had expected. The USSR required about the same amount of time as the United States to build the bomb, and the production of plutonium at Chelyabinsk-40 did not cease after the first bomb had been made. New production reactors were built; in September of 1950, a second uranium-graphite reactor was activated, followed by two similar systems in April of 1951 and September of 1952. Despite this success, however, Dora Ilyinichna Leipunskaya’s time at NII-9 came to an end. Although she was decorated for her excellent work, she lost her position at the radiochemical institute in 1952. No reasons were given for her dismissal, though, rightly or wrongly, her family assigned blame to Zinaida Ershova, her immediate supervisor.51 A deeper reason, of course, could have been her Jewish heritage. In 1948, Stalin initiated an anti-Jewish campaign under the official title “Battle against Cosmopolitans,” the so-called Zdanovshchina. This campaign reached its summit shortly before Stalin’s death in March of 1953.52 The parallels to the fate of Melba Philipps in the United States, who was working at nearly the same time, are striking. After her dismissal, Dora Leipunskaya was without a job. She pseudonymously translated scientific books and wrote scientific articles signed by others.53 9.4 The Contribution of German Scientists to Plutonium Production The contribution of scientists from occupied Germany to the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb has been discussed widely and controversially, especially after 1989 and the partial (and only temporary) opening of Soviet archives.54 Arkadii Kruglov has published a short overview of German nuclear specialists in the USSR.55 Many of them investigated different methods of isotope separation and the production of metallic uranium. The most important contribution to the Soviet Atomic Project was made by Nikolaus Riehl. Born in St. Petersburg (his mother was Russian, and his father a German engineer), he earned his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin in 1927. His research field was nuclear chemistry, and he worked under the guidance of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn.56 Riehl was awarded the Stalin Prize and the honorary title “Hero of Socialist Labor” for his technical contributions to the production of pure metallic uranium. His technology for this procedure, which was implemented at the Elektrostal pro51 Ibid., p. 204. 52 See KOJEVNIKOV 2004, p. 186. 53 On additional contributions of NII-9 to the Soviet Atomic Project after 1952, see KRUGLOV 2002, pp. 213–34. 54 See, for example, HEINEMANN 1992. 55 KRUGLOV 2002, pp. 128–32. 56 Nikolaus Riehl spoke both Russian and German fluently. During the war, he had been responsible at the Auer Company (the German Gas Lighting Corporation, or Deutsche Gasglühlicht A.G.) in Berlin for the purification of uranium (see HEINEMANN 1992, p. 100; RIEHL 1998).

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duction plant, was superior to that of Zinaida Ershova and was favored by Zaveniagin despite the resistance of Soviet specialists. Ershova estimated that Riehl’s innovation had accelerated the production of the Soviet bomb by an entire year.57 The basis of Riehl’s technology goes back to Thuringia; two members of his team, Günther Wirth and Herbert Thieme, procured all the equipment for the production of ether from the Hermsdorf Ceramic Factory.58 Some German physicists, notably Max Volmer and Robert Döpel, had to work as German specialists after the war at NII-9, and thus it is possible that Dora Leipunskaya had known them personally. The objectives of these German specialists were enumerated in an official document, according to which Volmer belonged to the laboratory of Gustav Hertz.59 After working on the production of heavy water in Norilsk, on the Yenisei River in Siberia, Volmer was sent in 1948 to NII-9 in Moscow to investigate the separation process of plutonium from the fission products of uranium. His colleague, Gustav Richter,60 proposed to separate the fission products by means of a centrifuge, which was accomplished in another institute in Moscow. Volmer and Hertz, contrary to most other foreign specialists, were granted full access to information about isotope separation,61 but Volmer’s contribution to the Atomic Project was not honored with a State Prize.62 His Soviet colleagues, however, admiringly remembered the example he had set with his precise experiments; Zinaida Ershova, in fact, confessed that it was Volmer who had taught her how to work.63 Less is known about the work of Robert Döpel at NII-9. His task in the Soviet Union was described as devising a method of using “uranium-heavy water” to derive the explosive plutonium-239.64 In this capacity, he almost certainly had access to all the necessary information, whether from written lectures or from per-

57 See HEINEMANN 1992, p. 122. 58 See OLEYNIKOV 2000, p. 15. 59 See RYABEV 2000, pp. 319–21. After their time in the Soviet Union, Hertz, Volmer, and Döpel returned to East Germany in the middle of the 1950s. Gustav Hertz, the winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics, lost his professorship in Berlin in 1935 because of his Jewish heritage. He then became a research director at Siemens & Halske there. Max Volmer, who had been a full professor of physical chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin since 1922, supported his Jewish colleagues during the Nazi era. He was a known specialist in electrochemistry and the kinetics of phase building. For his part, Robert Döpel had constructed, together with Werner Heisenberg, a preliminary uranium-heavy water reactor at the University of Leipzig. This reactor exploded in June of 1942, an incident that may be regarded as the first nuclear accident in history. 60 During the war, Gustav Richter worked at the research laboratory of Siemens in Berlin, which was directed by Gustav Hertz. Richter had followed Hertz to the Soviet Union to work on the atomic bomb project. 61 See RYABEV 2000, p. 355. 62 See OLEYNIKOV 2000, p. 13. 63 See HEINEMANN 1992, p. 114. 64 RYABEV 2000, p. 320.

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sonal interactions with certain Soviet scientists.65 In his correspondence, at any rate, he never mentioned his work at NII-9.66 9.5 Dora Leipunskaya’s Nonbelligerent Work with Neutrons: Neutron Activation Analysis After finishing her work on the Soviet Atomic Project in 1952, Dora Leipunskaya had to change her scientific career, but she still wanted to apply her knowledge of nuclear physics. At the time, neutron activation analysis (NAA) became popular in the Soviet Union. This chemical method, which was discovered in 1936, is a nuclear procedure for determining the concentration of elements in many materials. Disregarding the chemical form of a given sample, it focuses only on its nucleus. The sample is bombarded with neutrons, which transform its elements into radioactive isotopes. From the known radioactive emissions and decay times for each element, one can study the emission spectra and determine the concentrations within it. This technique is non-destructive and can even be used to analyze works of art and historical artifacts.67 However, it requires a sufficiently strong neutron source, such as a nuclear reactor. The Soviet pioneer of NAA was the famous physicist Georgy Flyorov, who is known for encouraging Stalin in 1942 to build a uranium bomb without delay, despite the critical military situation of the Soviet Union. Flyorov’s letter eventually led to the development of the USSR’s own atomic bomb. In 1947, he proposed NAA as a method for detecting natural resources such as minerals and ore (especially oil and uranium ore). In 1956, a laboratory for nuclear geophysics was established in Moscow, and Dora Leipunskaya soon joined its ranks. She came from a geological institute in Moscow where she had been working for some time after her dismissal from the Atomic Project. This laboratory was housed within the Institute for Chemical Oil Synthesis, which, in 1961, became the State Research Institute of Nuclear Geochemistry and Geophysics. Dora Leipunskaya would work at this institute until the end of her life. The scientific director of the institute was Professor Lev Polak, a man who had suffered tragically during Stalin’s purge. Arrested in 1937, he was deported to Siberia, where he fell in love with a Polish woman and fathered a daughter. After the war, she returned to Poland, where her brother became the chief of the Polish secret service, enabling him to free the daughter from the Soviet Gulag. Polak, however, remained in the Siberian concentration camp, where, as a prisoner from 1950 to 1955, he investigated the physical properties of sediment stones. He discovered uranium ore as a byproduct while searching for oil and gas.68 It was with Polak that Dora Leipunskaya developed quantitative methods for NAA and com65 66 67 68

Ibid, p. 356. See BEITRÄGE 1995, p. 90. See, for example, POLLARD 1996. See GOROBETS 2007, p. 217.

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pleted her post-doctoral dissertation, which she defended in 1966. The results were published in several journals, in the West as well.69 One of Dora Leipunskaya’s female doctoral students described her leadership, the climate of her laboratory, and her legacy as follows: The laboratory group consisted of young specialists who had only recently finished their university degrees. At the laboratory, engineers and laboratory technicians worked alongside geologists, geophysicists, chemists, and instrument specialists. This interdisciplinary configuration allowed us to manage the difficult objectives involved with developing entirely new methods and instruments for neutron activation analysis. Dora Leipunskaya was not only the essential inspiration and source of ideas for all the scientific work in the laboratory. She was also a fantastic person, a woman of great magnanimity. She was our “mother,” as we often called her. She participated in every stage of our work. While camping somewhere on the Kazakh Steppe, she was even able to prepare one-, two-, or three-course meals by the firelight by the light of a blow torch. She would spend the night in a sleeping bag beneath a makeshift shelter or in a tent near the campfire. And yet at international conferences, or while dealing with the scientific administrators of the institute, she would be completely different – strong and outspoken. Her talent and her love for her work allowed her, in collaboration with like-minded scientists from other laboratories, to develop a series of methods of neutron activation analysis and of radiochemical analysis for investigating samples of stone and ore [...]. Dora Leipunskaya founded a scientific school for applying nuclear methods to geophyiscal investigations. In our laboratory alone, ten doctoral dissertations were completed and defended under her supervision [...]. Her numerous articles, monographs, essays, and lectures were published both nationally and internationally. 70

In her sixty-second year, as a consequence of decades of exposure to radiation, Dora Leipunskaya developed a severe case of diabetes.71 Nevertheless, she was able to conceal her illness from her colleagues, but after one year in this condition she suddenly lost all her vision. Even so, she remained a member of the institute, and students and colleagues visited her home to seek her advice. Enduring her illness with grace and patience, she continued her scientific work until nearly the last day of her life. She died in 1978 at a hospital in Moscow, and her remains were buried in the city’s Vostryakovskoe Cemetery. Bibliography ALBRIGHT, Joseph; KUNSTEL, Marcia (1997). Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy. New York: Random House. BAGGOTT, Jim (2009). Atomic: The First War of Physics. London: Icon Books. BEITRÄGE (1995). Beiträge zur Geschichte von Technik und technischer Bildung 13. Leipzig: Hochschule für Technik. BIRD, Kai; SHERWIN, Martin (2005). American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Random House.

69 See, for example, LEIPUNSKAYA/SAVOSIN 1973. 70 Quoted from GOROBETS 2007, p. 216. 71 For an account of this desease, offered by her son Alexander, see ibid., p. 233.

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BUSSEMER, Peter; MÜLLER, Jürgen (2013). “Die Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Thüringen.” PTB-Mitteilungen 123, pp. 5–118. CASSIDY, David (2005). J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. New York: Pi Press. DOVBNYA, Anatoly (2011). Laboratoriya No.1 i Atomny Proekt SSSR 1938–1956 [Laboratory No. 1 and the Soviet Atomic Project]. Kharkov: Fiz. Tech. Institut. EINSTEIN, Albert; MARIC, Mileva (1994). Am Sonntag küss’ ich Dich mündlich. Die Liebesbriefe 1897–1903. Munich: Piper-Verlag. ERSHOVA, Zinaida (1987). “Moi vstrechi s Akademikom V. G. Chlopinym” [My Meetings with Akademik Chlopin]. In Akademik V. G. Chlopin. Vospominanija [Reminiscences]. Leningrad, pp. 85–131. FERRY, Joseph (2003). Maria Goeppert Mayer. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers. FÖLSING, Ulla (1990). Nobel-Frauen. Naturwissenschaftlerinnen im Porträt. Munich: Beck. GONCHAROV, G. A.; RYABEV, L. D. (2001). “The Development of the First Soviet Atomic Bomb.” Physics-Uspekhi 44, pp. 71–93 . GOROBETS, Boris (2007). Troye iz Atomnogo Proekta: Sekretnye fiziki Leipunskye [Three Contributors to the Atomic Project: The Top-Secret Leipunsky Physicists]. Moscow: LKI. HEINEMANN-GRUEDER, Andreas (1992). Die sowjetische Atombombe. Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot. HERMANN, Armin (2004). Einstein. Der Weltweise und sein Jahrhundert. Munich: Piper. HOLLOWAY, David (1994). Stalin & The Bomb. New Haven: Yale University Press. HOWES, Ruth; HERZENBERG, Caroline (1999). Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. KISTIAKOVSKY, Vera (1980). “Women in Physics: Unnecessary, Injurious and Out of Place?” Physics Today 33, pp. 32–40. KOJEVNIKOV, Alexei B. (2004). Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. London: Imperial College Press. KRUGLOV, Arkadii (2002). The History of the Soviet Atomic Industry. London: Taylor & Francis. LEIPUNSKAYA, D. I.; SAVOSIN, S. I. (1973). “Analyse instrumentale par activation aux neutrons de fractions monominerales et d’echantillons geologiques referentatifs.” Journal of Radioanalytical Chemistry 18, pp. 21–30 . LONGAIR, Malcolm (2013). Quantum Concepts in Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LUMMER, Otto (1918). Grundlagen, Ziele und Grenzen der Leuchttechnik. Munich: Oldenbourg [Repr. Saarbrücken: VDM-Verlag, 2007]. OLEYNIKOV, Pavel V. (2000). “German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project.” The Nonproliferation Review 7, pp. 1–30. PANOFSKY, Wolfgang; PHILLIPS, Melba (2005). Classical Electricity and Magnetism. 2nd ed. New York: Dover. POLLARD, A. M.; HERON, C. (1996). Archaeological Chemistry. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry. RAYNER-CANHAM, M. F.; RAYNER-CANHAM, G. W. (1990). “Pioneer Women in Nuclear Science.” American Journal of Physics 58, pp. 1036–43. RHODES, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. — (1995). Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. RIEHL, Nikolaus (1988). Zehn Jahre im goldenen Käfig. Erlebnisse beim Aufbau der sowjetischen Uran-Industrie. Stuttgart: Dr. Riederer-Verlag. RIFE, Patricia (2010). Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age. Boston: Birkhäuser. ROSE, Paul Lawrence (1998). Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture. Berkeley: California Press. RYABEV, L. D., ed. (2000). The Atomic Project of the USSR: Documents and Materials, Vol. 2, 1945–1954, Part 2. Moscow: Nauka [In Russian]. SACHS, Robert G. (1982). “Maria Goeppert-Mayer.” Physics Today 35.2, pp. 46–51.

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SMYTH, Henry D. (1945). Atomic Energy: A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes under the Auspices of the United States Government. Washington, D. C.: Princeton University Press. SUDOPLATOW, Pawel; SUDOPLATOW, Anatolij (1994). Der Handlanger der Macht. Enthüllungen eines KGB-Generals. Düsseldorf: Econ. TENNENBAUM, Jonathan (1994). Kernenergie. Die weibliche Technik. Wiesbaden: Dr. BöttigerVerlag. TOBIES, Renate, ed. (1997). “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz.” Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Campus. TRIFONOVA, Olga (2013). The Last Love of Einstein. Moscow: Izd. AST [in Russian]. TSCHIKOW, Wladimir; KERN, Gary (1996). Perseus. Spionage in Los Alamos. Berlin: Volk & Welt. VLADIMIROVA, M. V. (2004). “Zinaida Vasil’evna Ershova” [Vasilevna Ershovna: The One Hundredth Anniversary of Her Birth]. Radiochemistry 46, pp. 515–19. VOGT, Annette (2008). Wissenschaftlerinnen in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten A–Z. Berlin: Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

PART IV

OPTICAL COMPANIES AND INSTITUTIONS FOR APPLIED OPTICS Renate Tobies In 1916, the Optical Society of America was founded by scientists and instrument manufacturers in Rochester, New York. Later it grew into an international association renamed in 2008 the Optical Society, representing physicists and engineers around the world, and women scientists also became members. In anticipation of its 100-year anniversary in 2016, the Society has launched the website http://www.OSA.org/history, a dynamic archive devoted to the remarkable people who have advanced the fields of optics and photonics. Because female researchers are still in the minority, there are special efforts to document the research careers of successful women.1 In Germany, instrument manufacturers began to use scientific methods much earlier,2 and already in 1881 the German Society for Mechanics and Optics was founded to promote the construction of precision instruments. The Carl Zeiss Corporation is one of the oldest optics manufacturers in the world. It was founded in Jena in 1846 by the instrument-maker Carl Zeiß. Together with the physicist and mathematician Ernst Abbe, who joined the company in 1866, and the chemist Otto Schott, who joined in 1884, they built an exceptional groundwork for modern optical manufacturing.3 Features of their successful corporate policy included the use of scientific methods and the promotion of scientists regardless of their age, race, or religion. They also supported women’s education and regional women’s organizations. Having grown up in modest circumstances, Abbe took a great interest in the social well-being of all employees. Shortly after the death of Carl Zeiß in 1888, Abbe established the Carl Zeiss Foundation (today the Ernst Abbe Foundation), which he expanded over time with his own resources. The foundation serves to promote the development of new inventions, to finance institutions 1 2 3

http://www.osa.org/en-us/membership/grants_recognitions_special_services/mwosa/profiles/. See, for example, JACKSON 2000. See STOLZ/WITTIG 1993; Martin C. Cohen’s online history of the company at http://www.company7.com/zeiss/history.html; and KAPPLER/STEINER 2009.

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and buildings in the city of Jena, and to support the interests of the personnel employed by the optical company and the local university. Chapter 10 concerns the careers of women researchers who were associated with the Carl Zeiss Corporation or the Schott Glass Corporation since the 1920s. At Schott, Marga Faulstich became a director in the research department. She numbered among the forty managerial staff members of the company who had to leave Jena for the American occupation zone in 1945.4 In 1973, she received the IR100 award from the American Industrial Research Council – awarded to commemorate the 100 most significant new technical products – for her development of the SF64 lightweight lens. Chapter 11 analyzes the career of the Russian researcher Maria F. Romanova, who worked in the field of applied optics and who used instruments produced by the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Similar to Marga Faulstich’s path, Romanova’s career began before the Second World War and continued after it. Because of the situation after May 1945 and the division of Germany into zones of occupation, the Carl Zeiss Corporation and the Schott Glass Corporation were each divided into two separate entities. Thus, until 1990, Carl Zeiss-Jena (in East Germany) existed alongside its West German counterpart, namely Carl Zeiss-Oberkochen; for its part, the Schott Glass Corporation had Eastern and Western headquarters in Jena and Mainz, respectively. When the two German nations were unified in 1990, both companies were reconnected. During the 1960s and 1970s, the optical and fine mechanical industry employed more workers than any other industrial sector in both east and west, and this was because of its highly labor-intensive production methods. It was in this industry too, incidentally, that employee turnover was lowest (0.9 %).5 Employees at the companies in question developed and produced a great variety of optical instruments (microscopes, spy-glasses, cameras, etc.), optical measuring instruments (micrometers and colorimeters), eyeglasses, medical devices (cystoscopes, for example), and projection devices. The demanding production methods resulted in the employment of a relatively high number of women. This phenomenon, at least as it applied to Carl Zeiss-Jena in the 1960s and 1970s, will be addressed in Chapter 12. The author Katharina Schreiner was working at the Carl Zeiss company that time. During this same time period, Zeiss-Jena became the largest and almost sole manufacturer of optical equipment, including optical precision instruments. The positions of women at optical companies in West and East Germany did not differ significantly in the first decades after 1945. Since the 1970s, however, the Eastern companies distinguished themselves by implementing new training measures. At one point, for example, 65 % of the women workers in the East possessed a skilled worker’s certificate. Concerning the situation in West Germany, Hans Schedl has likewise noted a disproportionally high fraction of female employees in the precision mechanics 4 5

ZEITLER 2013. See SCHEDL 1980, p. 15.

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and optical industry. In 1974, for instance, 43 % of all West German employees in this industry were women, and yet the average share of women employed in the entire capital goods sector was only 25 %.6 Similarly, whereas the female share of semi-skilled workers and laborers at optical and precision mechanical companies in West Germany was higher than 67 % (in 1974), this percentage throughout the capital goods sector at large was approximately 42 %.7 The main activity of these workers was the installation of small parts. In 1974, 11.6 % of technical staff workers – 13.9 % overall – in optical and fine mechanical industry of West Germany were women; here, 8.1 % of the female workers and 21.2 % of the male workers possessed a skilled worker’s certificate.8 Regardless of the social system, only a few women scientists, researchers, or engineers obtained the highest positions in industry. Chapter 11 and Chapter 13 relate two case studies about the careers of female scientists in East European industry and applied optics. Chapter 13 is an autobiographical essay by a successful female architect, Gertrud Schille, and so it offers the perspective of an eyewitness. Bibliography JACKSON, Myles W. (2000). Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [HOLL, Hans Günter, trans. (2009). Fraunhofers Spektren: Die Präzisionsoptik als Handwerkskunst. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.] KAPPLER, Dieter; STEINER, Jürgen, eds. (2009). SCHOTT 1884–2009: Vom Glaslabor zum Technologiekonzern. Mainz: Schmidt. SCHEDL, Hans (1980). Die feinmechanische und optische Industrie aus der Sicht der siebziger Jahre (Struktur und Wachstum, Reihe Industrie 31). Berlin: Duncker & Humblodt. STOLZ, Rüdiger; WITTIG, Joachim, eds. (1993). Carl Zeiß und Ernst Abbe: Leben, Wirken und Bedeutung (Wissenschaftshistorische Abhandlung). Jena: Universitätsverlag. ZEITLER, Karin (2013). Die lange Reise der Glasmacher. Jena: Verlag Neue Literatur.

6

7 8

In addition to precision mechanical and optical industry, capital goods industries included steel and light-metal engineering, the construction and mechanical engineering sector, vehicle construction and shipbuilding, aircraft construction, electrical engineering, the iron and steel industries, and the manufacturing of office machinery and computers (see SCHEDL 1980, p. 15). Ibid., p. 25. Ibid, p. 27.

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Figure 10.1: Members of the University Observatory in Jena (1930), which was closely associated with the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Ernst Abbe had created the first so-called “Werkssternwarte” (company observatory), and in 1897 the Carl Zeiss Corporation established a special “Astro-Department” for designing astronomical optical instruments. After Abbe, the directors of the observatory were professors of astronomy at the University of Jena, namely Otto Knopf (from 1900 to 1929), Heinrich Vogt (until 1933; Vogt is standing 4th from left), and Heinrich Siedentopf (until 1945; standing 3rd from left). Sitting from the left are: Ingrid Lüppo-Cramer (later Siedentopf, a daughter of the famous photochemist Henricus Lüppo-Cramer); Otto Knopf; the astronomer Helmut Werner, who joined the Carl Zeiss Corporation and became the director of the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena from 1938 to 1945, when he had to leave for Zeiss Oberkochen in West Germany; Miss Poppe; the applied mathematician Dorothea Starke (married Helmut Werner on December 27, 1932); and Herzog Ernst II von Sachsen-Altenburg (Source: SCHIELICKE 2008, p. 204).

10 WOMEN ACADEMICS AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCHERS IN THURINGIA DURING THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY Renate Tobies This section will describe the special conditions in Thuringia that resulted in women’s education and in academic positions being made available there to women. At the heart of this discussion will be the University of Jena, Thuringia’s only university, and the optical and glass industries that rose in conjunction with it. The liberal climate that prevailed there during the early twentieth century is worthy of our attention, for it was this climate that supported the advancement of women in general. In particular, this climate was responsible for the establishment of a girls’ secondary school in Jena, for the enrollment of women at the university, for women earning doctoral degrees, and for their professional inclusion into the local industries and at the university itself. It should be noted right away that, in all of Germany, the first full professorship to be held by a woman was established in 1923 at the University of Jena. 10.1 The Efforts of Local Women’s Associations In 1896, Anna Snell initiated the foundation of a Jena branch of the formally registered society known as Frauenwohl, which was concerned with women’s welfare.1 Anna Snell was the daughter of Karl Snell, who had been a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Jena. The Frauenwohl society, which was inaugurated in Berlin in 1888, had already established branches in numerous German cities. In Jena, the emancipatory aims of this society received staunch support from Anna’s younger sister Elise Abbe (née Snell), from the latter’s famous husband Ernst Abbe, who was a leading figure at the Carl Zeiss Corporation and at Schott Glassworks, as well as from other liberal intellectuals. They were not only calling for better women’s educational and job opportunities; they also demanded equality for women in all spheres of life. The members of Frauenwohl came together to discuss theoretically the inadequacies of society, of course, but they also made efforts to actualize some of their ideas. With their own financial means, for example, they managed to establish a Clinic for Mothers and Infants (Mütter- und Säuglingsheim) in Jena, a facility for single mothers that opened in 1911. The society wanted single mothers and their children to have the same rights as anyone else, and this at a time when “illegitimate” children were frowned upon. Although Anna Snell died in 1915, her sister Elise Abbe remained engaged in Frauenwohl into her widowhood. Unfortunately, the society was forced to end its operations in 1933. Until then, Elise and Ernst Abbe’s socially liberal agenda was 1

PETZOLD 2007, p.10.

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carried on by their daughter Margarete (Grete). In 1894, she had married Otto Unrein, a teacher who became, in 1912, the first principal of the girls’ secondary school in Jena.2 It was at this school that girls from Jena could finally take and pass the Abitur exam for university admission. Today the school, which bears the name “Grete Unrein,” is a so-called “Integrated Comprehensive School” (Integrierte Gesamtschule).3 There was another association that contributed to the founding of Jena’s first secondary school for girls, namely the German Women’s Society for Reform (Deutscher Frauenverein Reform), which had been founded in Weimar in 1888. The latter society was the first to make public demands for the establishment of girls’ secondary schools. The same society, which was represented throughout the Empire and which had changed its name repeatedly, had also founded, in 1900, a local group in Jena called Women’s Schooling – Women’s University Education (Frauenbildung – Frauenstudium). Members of this group helped to ensure that the Thuringian Ministry of Education, which was located in Weimar, would pass a law allowing women enroll at the university. This law was codified on April 4, 1907,4 sometime before the same measure was passed in Prussia, Germany’s largest federal state. The women-friendly environment described above was fostered to a great extent by certain influential representatives from local corporations. Such an environment, in fact, was a precondition to the admission of women to the University of Jena and to their professional participation in the industrial sector. 10.2 The First Women at the University of Jena: Doctoral Students and Professors The first woman to earn a doctoral degree in Jena was a foreigner, a fact that was typical in Germany at the time. As it happened, the academic success of nonGerman female scientists greatly improved the status of German women at universities. Whereas, in Germany at large, the first foreign women to obtain doctoral degrees had done so at the University of Göttingen already in the nineteenth century – their subjects were mathematics, chemistry, and physics – this did not happen at Jena until 1904. This was still well before the enactment of general laws for women’s enrollment in most of the German states. At that time, women could take part in university courses only as auditors, and were typically not allowed to take exams. Although, at the beginning of the twentieth century, certain professors at the University of Berlin did not even allow women to sit in on lectures and seminars, Rudolf Eucken, a professor of philosophy at Jena and the winner of the 1908 No2 3 4

See WITTIG 1989, which is a well-written biography of Ernst Abbe. It should be mentioned here that Grete Unrein supported vulnerable citizens during the Nazi dictatorship, including numerous Jewish families. See for example CHEN 2008.

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bel Prize for literature, was an early supporter of women’s rights. When he was asked, in 1897, what he thought about the right of women to study and achieve academic positions, he argued fervently on behalf of equal rights, and concluded that women should no longer be denied the right to participate in university life.5 Thus it is no surprise that Eucken was the first professor at the University of Jena to supervise the doctoral research of a woman, at least to its completion (Rowena Morse from the United States, see below). Before that, in 1900, an American woman named Lucinda Pearl Boggs had attempted to earn a doctoral degree at the University of Jena, but had failed. Boggs, who had studied Classics at the University of Illinois and had taught Greek and Latin for three years, could not achieve her goals in Jena for nominally technical reasons, but she achieved success one year later at the University of Halle. Although Rudolf Eucken and the majority of Jena’s philosophical faculty had supported Boggs’s efforts, the linguist Berthold Delbrück hindered her progress by not accepting the subjects of her oral doctoral examination. Boggs did not care to resolve such formalities; she completed her degree in Halle, and later enjoyed an academic career in the United States and China.6 It was another American, Rowena Morse – a relative of Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code – who was the first to complete her doctoral studies in Jena. Having studied psychology as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, Morse won a travel grant for the years 1901 to 1904. She came first to the University of Berlin, but soon learned that the authorities there would not grant a degree to a woman. In 1904, however, she earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena (summa cum laude), with a dissertation directed by Eucken. The minor fields of her oral examination were geology and art history.7 It should be stressed once again that foreign women had paved the way in Jena, as had been the case at other German universities. At the University of Jena, the first German women complete their doctorates in 1913. The first of these were Emmy Stein and Luise von Graevenitz, who would become famous for their work in genetics. Altogether, forty-seven women completed their doctorates at the philosophical faculty of the University of Jena by 1918; from 1919 to 1925, an additional ninety-six women would do the same (at the time, the philosophical faculty included science and mathematics).8

5

6 7 8

See Eucken’s remarks in KIRCHHOFF 1897, p. 151. The latter book includes the answers of scientists questioned on a variety of subjects. Here, for instance, you can find Max Planck’s oft-quoted sentence: “It is also against the nature of the Amazons to participate in intellectual life” (Amazonen sind auch auf geistigem Gebiet naturwidrig). Planck adhered to the middleclass conventions of the time by providing only his sons with an early education. He could only imagine women attending university in the most exceptional cases. At the same time, however, all of the mathematicians questioned in the survey had voted in favor the right of women to study. See, for example, HENTSCHEL/TOBIES 2003, pp. 51–57. See ECKARDT 2001; and SINGER 2003, pp. 146–47 See, again, ECKARDT 2001; and SINGER 2003, pp. 147–48. On the history of women at the University of Jena, see HORN 1999; HORN/HELLMANN 2001.

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After the German defeat in the First World War, science was recognized to be a powerful factor in its own right, and women also achieved the right to complete the postdoctoral degree which was the nominal qualification for university teaching (Habilitation) at German universities. This right was granted on February 21, 1920, and in 1923 the University of Jena became the first German university to award a full professorship to a woman.9 Mathilde Vaerting is noteworthy for having studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and for having been actively engaged in promoting the mathematical and scientific education of young women. Her research concerned topics of psychology, the teaching of mathematics, and sociology. Her professorship at the University of Jena, which she held without having earned the Habilitation qualification, was in the field of pedagogy. This position belonged to a program that had been created by Thuringia’s social-democratic Ministry of Education; for the first time, and only at the University of Jena, the training of primary school teachers was made part of the university curriculum. A few other women were given academic positions within this same program. Anna Siemsen, a teacher and education activist, became an honorary professor there in 1923. Annelies Argelander completed her Habilitation in pedagogical psychology in 1926 and thus became the first woman to hold this qualification in Jena. In 1930, she received an unpaid associate professorship.10 After 1933, however, all three of these women were expelled by the Nazi ministry for political or racial reasons. Even if some women were able to receive academic positions during the Nazi era, the important progress in this regard had begun in the 1920s. Such progress included positions for academically trained women in industrial laboratories. 10.3 Female Physicists (and One Mathematician) Associated with the Carl Zeiss Corporation Before the First World War, optical and electrical companies had begun to expand their research institutes from one-man laboratories into multi-divisional facilities that were concerned not only with immediate problems but also with anticipation and solution of long-term scientific and technological problems of the future. After the war had been lost, science became an even more powerful factor in the development of industrial companies, as mentioned above. More scientists, academically trained physicists, chemists, and mathematicians – women included – were recruited. A detailed analysis has already been made of women chemists in the chemical industry at the time, as well as of academically trained women at 9

Until 1945, there was only one other woman who received a full professorship in Germany, namely Margarete von Wrangell, who was appointed to the position on January 1, 1923 at the Agricultural University (Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule) in Hohenheim (see the Introduction to this book). 10 After her compulsory emigration, Argelander became a professor of psychology in the United States.

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German electrical engineering corporations,11 but detailed sources about academic women in the optical industry have only recently emerged. The book on the firm Zeiss published by Falkenhagen and his colleagues (2004) contains many photographs in which several working women are pictured, for instance in the patent department (1915), in the astronomical-optics production department (1922), in several test laboratories, in administration departments, in design departments, and also in Zeiss’s branch offices in New York. None of the women pictured, however, is named. It was Ernst Abbe’s intention in Jena to ensure that the Carl Zeiss Corporation and the University of Jena remained close collaborators after his death. The accomplishments of women scientists at the Carl Zeiss Corporation, as well as the support made available to them by the Carl Zeiss Foundation, derived in large part from Abbe’s and his successors’ unbiased evaluation of scientific achievement (that is, regardless of gender, race, and religion), and also from the newly established right for women to complete university degrees. By examining the archives of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, I was able to identify a number of women who had worked in various capacities at the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Although no documents about this subject are kept in Carl Zeiss’s corporate archives, the women in question listed their professional positions on the curricula vitae that were submitted along with their doctoral theses. From 1925 to 1945, ten women earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Jena, and one woman completed a doctorate in mathematics (her main field was applied mathematics). Beginning with the time of Ernst Abbe, the combination of physics and mathematics had been an important precondition for research at the Carl Zeiss Corporation. In fact, “calculation instead of trial and error” became an essential motto at this company as early as in the last third of the nineteenth century. All ten of the women who earned advanced degrees in physics were also well educated in mathematics. Table 10.1 contains a list of these doctoral theses. Most of them were subsequently published independently or in academic journals. Table 10.1: Women’s Dissertations in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Jena (1925–1945) Kern, Charlotte (1925). Über Floureszenz- und Beugungserscheinungen im Dunkelfeld [On Fluorescence and Diffraction Phenomena in the Dark Field]. Dissertation Jena (54 pp.), and in an abridged form in Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Mikroskopie 43 (1926), pp. 305–37. Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, applied mathematics. Schrammen, Annelise (1927). “Die Hyperfeinstruktur der Terme des Cadmiumspektrums” [“The Hyperfine Structure of the Terms of the Cadmium Spectrum”], in Annalen der Physik 388 (1927), pp. 1161–99. Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, technical physics.

11 See Chapter 7 of this book, which is written by Jeffrey Johnson, and also TOBIES 2012, 2013.

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Starke, Dorothea (1927). “Die Maximalmomentenfläche eines Gerberschen Balkens” [“The Maximum Torque Surfaces of a Gerber Beam”], in Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 9 (1929), pp. 130–51. Examination subjects: applied mathematics, mathematics, astronomy. Blumentritt, Marianne (1928): Das Verhalten verdünnter Elektrolyte bei hohen Feldstärken [The Behavior of Diluted Electrolytes at High Field Strengths], Leipzig: J. A. Barth (100 pp.), and also in an abridged form in Annalen der Physik 390 (1928), pp. 812–30 Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, applied mathematics. Wyneken, Ilse (1928): Neue Anwendungen der photographisch-photometrischen Methode [New Applications of Photographic-Phometric Methods], Leipzig: A. Barth (22 pp.). See also her article “Die Energieverteilung im kontinuierlichen Spektrum des Aluminium-Unterwasserfunkens” [“The Distribution of Energy in the Continuous Spectrum of Subaqueous Aluminum Sparks”], in Annalen der Physik 391 (1928), pp. 1071–88. Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, mineralogy. Völker, Johanna (1929): Die Magnet-Charakteristiken eines Drei-Elektrodenrohres [The Magnetic Characteristics of a Three-Electrode Vacuum Tube], Leipzig: R. Noske (34 pp.). Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, astronomy. Herschkowitsch, Elsbeth (1931): “Systematische Untersuchungen über den Einfluß gasadsorbierter Oberflächenschichten auf die optischen Konstanten von Quecksilber” [“Systematic Examinations of the Influence of Gas-Adsorbed Surface Layers on the Optic Constants of Mercury”], in Annalen der Physik 402 (1931), pp. 993–1016. Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, mineralogy. Damaschun, Irmgard (1932). Der Ramaneffekt in anorganischen Komplexen, insbesondere Koordinationsverbindungen [The Raman Effect in Inorganic Compounds, especially in Coordination Compounds], Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (21 pp.). Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, chemistry. Tolkmitt, Gerda (1939). Absolute Ausbeute der Cadmiumresonanzlinie 2288 Å [The Absolute Yields of the Cadmium Resonance Line 2288 Å], Eisfeld: C. Beck (14 pp.). Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, chemistry. Sohm, Monica (1940). “Über die Absorption von flüssigem H2O und D2O im ultravioletten Spektralgebiet zwischen 5ȝ und 27ȝ” [“On the Absorption of Liquid H2O and D2O in the Ultraviolet Spectral Range between 5ȝ and 27ȝ ”], in Zeitschrift für Physik 116 (1940), pp. 34–46. Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, applied mathematics. Wächter, Eleonore (1942). Untersuchungen über die spektrale Intensitätsverteilung der Röntgenbremsstrahlung [Examinations of the Spectral Intensity Distribution of X-Ray Bremsstrahlung], Dissertation Jena (62 pp.). Examination subjects: physics, mathematics, botany.

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Figure 10.2: A Christmas Party at the Abbeanum, University of Jena, in 1928, with Dorothea Starke (5), Inge Wien (6), the daughter of Max Wien (41), Miss Winkelmann (8), the daughter of Max Winkelmann (20) and his wife (24), Irmgard Damaschun (9), Elsbeth Herschkowitsch (10), Annelise Schrammen (11), Georg Joos (14) and his wife (7), Rudolf Straubel (22), and Oskar Hecker (32) (Source: [UA Jena]).

10.3.1 Charlotte Kern – Darkfield Microscopy Charlotte Kern’s thesis concerned a subject that was relevant to microscopy, which was of course an important field of research at the Carl Zeiss Corporation, where microscopes were designed. Kern was the daughter of a civil engineer in Essen (Rhineland-Westphalia). For five semesters, beginning in 1919, she studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After this she moved to the University of Jena, where she had to postpone her studies in 1923 (on account of her father’s untimely death). In April of the same year she successfully applied for a position as a research assistant at the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Her dissertation was supervised by Hermann Ambronn. A botanist, he had received a newly established professorship of scientific microscopy at the University of Jena in 1899, a position supported financially by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. A few decades before that, it was another professor of botany, namely Matthias J. Schleiden, who had been Carl Zeiss’s main consultant for the testing and construction of microscopes. Ambronn, for his part, worked simultaneously as a university pro-

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fessor and as the director of Zeiss’s department of microscopy, a joint appointment organized by Ernst Abbe himself. On March 4, 1925, Ambronn ultimately accepted Kern’s doctoral thesis and thus certified her scientific qualifications. Her research solved a previously unanswered question in optics that concerned darkfield microscopy.12 Kern sat for her oral doctoral examination on July 22, 1925. Two professors of physics, Ambronn and Max Wien, examined her in her main subject. Ambronn evaluated her knowledge of microscopy and imaging as “very good,” whereas Wien, a specialist in high-frequency physics, graded her as merely “sufficient” (genügend). She received this same grade in her minor fields, namely applied mathematics (examined by Max Winkelmann) and mathematics (examined by Robert Haußner). Her overall grade was thus cum laude, which was not high enough for her to go on to pursue the Habilitation. It should not be forgotten, however, that her doctoral thesis was not only published as a separate booklet but also in a journal for scientific microscopy (see Table 10.1). Moreover, she went on to write a popular technical book for adolescents.13 10.3.2 Spectroscopy Spectroscopy, which was likewise important to the optical industry, was a research field in which many doctoral theses were written at that time, by men and women alike. It covers the measurement and analysis of the wavelengths and intensities of the more or less discreet emission and absorption features of all materials under a broad range of conditions which reveal the quantum nature of matter, and in particular the interactions between electrons and nuclei of atoms, which determine the structure and behaviour of matter in all phases. It was crucial for achieving advances in atomic and molecular theory. An analysis of dissertations completed in physics by women at German universities until 1933 reveals that a high percentage were completed in this field: 66% until 1919 (26 of 39), and 28% from 1920 to 1933 (23 of 80).14 At the University of Jena, at least six of the ten women’s doctoral theses were based on spectroscopic methods. The professors of theoretical physics at the university worked in close cooperation with the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Georg Joos, who was an associate professor there as of 1924 and a full professor of theoretical physics as of 1927, was the successor of Felix Auerbach, who, thanks to Ernst Abbe’s support, had been the first Jewish full professor at the University of Jena. From 1927 to 1930, while Joos was supervising Annelise Schrammen and other doctoral students, he reproduced the famous Michelson-Morley experiment with more advanced equipment and confirmed the 12 See [UAJ] Bestand N, No. 01, p. 193. Ambronn’s comments on Kern’s thesis are published in TOBIES 2007. 13 Charlotte Kern, Peddigrohrflechten, Technische Jugend-Bücherei 28 (Mühldorf-Oby: D. Geiger, 1927). 14 See TOBIES 1996, p. 89.

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original results at Carl Zeiss’s industrial laboratories.15 His textbook on theoretical physics, which first appeared in German in 1932, was translated into English and inspired generations of students. Although he left for Göttingen in 1935 to fill James Franck’s position, he returned to Jena in 1941 to become the chief physicist at the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Joos’s academic successor at the University of Jena was Gerhard Hettner, who had studied under Heinrich Rubens in Berlin. Like his predecessor, Hettner cooperated closely with Zeiss and also directed women’s dissertations in the field of spectroscopy. Annelise Schrammen made a valuable contribution to the theory of optical instruments that dealt with spectroscopic problems. She was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg; her parents were Jakob Schrammen, a government minister, and his wife Elise (née Wolf). After attending women’s schools in Berlin, she transferred to a school in Weimar, where she passed examinations qualifying her to teach the German language, English, and French in 1919. After three additional years of schooling she took the Abitur at the Realgymnasium in Weimar and enrolled at the University of Jena in the summer of 1922. Excluding a break of two semesters in Munich, where she attended lectures in mathematics and physics by Eduard Rüchardt, Arnold Sommerfeld, and Wilhelm Wien, she stayed in Jena. There it was common to take a so-called “preliminary examination” (Vorprüfung) in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. This she passed, and she received a topic for her doctoral thesis in May of 1925. Her dissertation and a separate article by her were published in the journal Annalen der Physik.16 In his evaluation of her work, Joos acknowledged her outstanding experimental and theoretical skills and noted that her dissertation offered far more than what was typical.17 Her bibliography included an important paper by Carl Pulfrich, who directed the department of optical instruments at the Carl Zeiss Corporation.18 Schrammen’s findings, in fact, were significant enough to be cited in a book published by Joos and two other physicists.19 She passed her oral doctoral examination with the grade of magna cum laude. Even before passing this examination, Schrammen was able to work as an assistant at the University of Jena’s physics department. Max Wien, the department chair, ensured hired her as a so-called Hilfsassistentin on April 1, 1927. From the beginning of October, in the same year, until the end of May in 1930, she earned a full salary and resided in the assistant’s apartment at the institute. Although she married Gerhard Hansen (a 15 See JOOS 1932. Incidentally, the American scientist Albert Abraham Michelson, who won the Nobel prize in 1907, had not only conducted his experiment in Germany, but he also worked as a visiting professor at the University of Göttingen, where certain women, too, attended his lectures (see TOBIES 2012, p. 76). 16 Annelise Schrammen, “Die Struktur der Grundlinie und einiger anderer Linien des Cadmiumspektrums,” Annalen der Physik 392 (1928), pp. 638–52. 17 [UAJ] Bestand N, No. 03, p. 416. 18 The article in question is Carl Pulfrich, “Ueber den Einfluss der Temperatur auf die Lichtbrechung des Glases,” Annalen der Physik 281 (1892), pp. 609–65. 19 See Georg Joos et al., Anregung der Spektren, Spektroskopische Apparate und Starkeffekt (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1927).

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physicist who conducted research at the Carl Zeiss Corporation), she kept her university position for an additional two years.20 Ilse Wyneken, another of Joos’s doctoral students, completed her doctorate in 1928. She was the daughter of the educational reformer Gustav Wyneken and his wife Luise (née Dammermann), and she attended reform schools in Jena. After taking the Abitur at the Realgymnasium in Jena in 1922, she worked as an assistant at her mother’s private school for one year and then studied at the University of Jena (with a one-semester exchange at the University of Göttingen). During the Easter break of 1923, she worked as student intern (Werkstudentin) at Carl Zeiss. After passing her preliminary examination, she received a subject for a dissertation, and she completed her oral examinations with the grade of cum laude. For her doctoral thesis, she employed an experimental process developed by Gerhard Hansen, who was then the director of the department of analytical measuring equipment at Zeiss.21 In her published thesis she not only referred to Hildegard Stücklen’s similar results,22 but she also thanked – in addition to Joos – Max Wien, Annelise Schrammen, and Dr. G. Hansen (from the Carl Zeiss Corporation) for their helpful guidance.23 Born in Berlin, Irmgard Damaschun was the daughter of a teacher for the hearing impaired. She studied at the Universities of Berlin and Jena from 1926 to 1931, and she completed her dissertation under Joos using Raman spectroscopy to analyze inorganic complex compounds. Joos considered her results to be highly significant.24 Gerda Tolkmitt, the daughter of an engineer from Wilhelmshaven, began her studies in 1930 at the University of Göttingen, where she spent one semester. This was followed by two semesters in Berlin and eight at the University of Jena, where she wrote a dissertation under the direction of Wilhelm Hanle, who had been a professor of physics there since 1929.25 Her analysis of a Cadmium resonance line (2288 Å) was important to further structural analyses in chemistry. Tolkmitt became an editorial staff member for the third volume of the Gmelin Handbook of Inorganic and Organometallic Chemistry, a renowned multi-volume collection of data on chemical compounds published by Springer. Monica Sohm was born in London, but later moved with her parents – Paul Sohm, a business manager, and his wife May (née Ireland) – to Jena, where she attended schools and studied at the university from 1934 to 1939 (with a semesterlong exchange at the University of Tübingen in 1936). In her dissertation she thanked her supervisor Gerhard Hettner for valuable advice, Helmuth Kulenkampff for the opportunity to use the equipment at the Institute of Physics, and the 20 [UAJ] Bestand D, No. 1080. 21 Ilse Wyneken, “Die Energieverteilung im kontinuierlichen Spektrum des Aluminium-Unterwasserfunkens,” Annalen der Physik 391 (1928), pp. 1071–88, at p. 1073. 22 Hildegard Stücklen, “Über den Einfluß von Wasserdampf auf das Funkenpotential,” Annalen der Physik 379 (1921), pp. 369–377. 23 Wyneken, “Die Energieverteilung,” p. 1087. 24 [UAJ] Bestand N, No. 12. 25 [UAJ] Bestand N, No. 25, Bl. 159–72.

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Carl Zeiss Foundation for donating a spectrometer to the university. Hettner was impressed by her findings. In his review of her dissertation, he wrote that she had used a novel experimental method and discovered a previously unknown series of absorption lines. Hettner predicted that Sohm’s results would have a significant effect on the theory of the structure of water.26 The infrared technology that she employed was useful for several applications. At the Carl Zeiss Corporation, for instance, the Ukrainian physicist Olexander Smakula, who is known for his invention of anti-reflective lens coatings based on optical interference, made use of infrared technology during the Second World War, and he later continued this work for the United States Air Force. Sohm’s doctoral thesis was cited quite often, and as late as 1954.27 In 1942, Lore Wächter earned her doctorate under the direction of Helmuth Kulenkampff, who was mentioned above. An experimental physicist, Kulenkampff was the successor of Max Wien at the University of Jena. Wächter was born in Hattingen, and her father was the rector of a teachers’ college. After passing an examination to become a primary school teacher, she went on to study, from the years 1936 to 1940, at the Universities of Tübingen, Göttingen, and Jena. During the Second World War, when there was a shortage of men, she was able to continue as assistant at the university, for which she led a practicum on experimental physics. She received her doctorate, with distinction, in June of 1942, with work, which concerned the spectral intensity distribution of x-ray Bremsstrahlung. Along with another woman, Lore Schmidt, Kulenkampff also published an article on the same topic. The latter study was written for the seventyfifth birthday of Arnold Sommerfeld, and was thus an indication of Kulenkampff’s anti-Nazi sentiments.28 Kulenkampff had defended the independence of physical research from politics in 1939, namely in a speech given on the fiftieth anniversary of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.29 10.3.3 A Career Cut Short: The Research of Marianne Blumentritt Another doctoral student of Georg Joos, Marianne Blumentritt, made outstanding findings, but her promising career ended with her marriage. Blumentritt was born in Gera (Thuringia), where her father Otto Blumentritt worked as a tradesman. After passing her Abitur at the Realgymnasium in her home town, she began her studies in 1923 at the University of Jena. There she received a subject for a doc26 [UAJ] Bestand N, Nr. 32. 27 See Earle K. Plyler and Nicolo Acquista, “Infrared Absorption of Liquid Water from 2 to 42 Microns,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 44 (1954), p. 505. 28 Helmuth Kulenkampff and Lore Schmidt, “Die Energieverteilung im Spektrum der RöntgenBremsstrahlung,” Annalen der Physik 43 (1943), pp. 494–512. 29 Helmuth Kulenkampff, “Das Zusammenwirken von Wissenschaft und technischer Kunst,” in Zum fünfzigjährigen Bestehen der Carl Zeiss Stiftung, Jenaer Akademische Reden 27 (Jena, 1939), pp. 25–44. See also JOHN/ULBRICHT 2007, p. 494. It should be noted that neither Kulenkampff nor Hettner joined the Nazi party (see HOßFELD et al. 2005, p. 95).

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toral thesis after seven semesters. As early as 1927, Blumentritt presented an important finding in theoretical physics that concerned the so-called “boundary effect” (Grenzeffekt) of Max Wien, who had been a professor in Jena since 1911. According to this effect, the conductivity of electrolytes increases at strong field strengths until a constant value is reached. Blumentritt interpreted this boundary effect in theoretical terms. In 1927 she published her results in an article co-authored with Joos; it appeared in volume 28 of the journal Physikalische Zeitschrift. For her doctoral thesis, which is one hundred pages long, which for a theoretical work is very long, she further elaborated her theory and published the findings in Annalen der Physik (see Table 10.1). In 1929 she published another article on her calculation of Wien’s voltage effect.30 Her contributions were quoted widely for several years.31 Blumentritt was well trained in mathematics and its applications. She had a sound command of the numerical and graphical methods that she had learned from Max Winkelmann, a professor of applied mathematics in Jena and a former doctoral student of Felix Klein. In 1928, Blumentritt passed teaching examinations in physics as well as in pure and applied mathematics. Until recently, no sources could be located concerning her activity from 1929 to 1936. During the latter year she married Wolfgang Haack, who, in 1926, had earned a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Jena. However, from a relatively recent tribute to her husband we learn that she had been a student not only of Georg Joos but also of the famous theoretical physicists Friedrich Hund and Peter Debye. We also learn, moreover, that she had worked closely with Wolfgang Haack at the expense of her own career: In the year 1936, he [Wolfgang Haack] married the physicist Dr. Marianne Blumentritt, a student of Friedrich Hund, Georg Joos, and Peter Debye. In all of his scientific projects, she was a competent collaborator, inspiration, and conversation partner, especially so in the field of gas dynamics. Haack reported in his memoires: “[...] We were working as three on this jet nozzle, and my wife dealt with [modeling mathematically] the transonic area around at the narrowest cross-section by introducing a series expansion [...].” For the sake of her husband she gave up her own promising career. 32

30 Marianne Blumentritt, “Genauere Berechnung des Wienschen Spannungseffektes bei Elektrolyten,” Annalen der Physik 393 (1929), pp. 195–215. 31 See, for example, Wilhelm Fucks and Klaus Tesch, “Elektrische Leitfähigkeit in Elektrolyten bei hohen Feldstärken. Grenzeffekt. Höhere Konzentrationen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 148 (1957), pp. 53–60. 32 Quoted from J. Grosche et al., “Wolfgang Haack zum Gedächtnis,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 75 (1995), pp. 115–28.

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10.3.4 Dorothea Starke and Applied Mathematics Dorothea Starke was the only woman to obtain a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Jena before 1945, and she did so summa cum laude.33 Born in Chemnitz, where her father was a secondary school teacher, she completed her Abitur there in March of 1922. She then went on to study for seven semesters at the University of Jena, two at the University of Berlin, and one more in Jena, where she wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Max Winkelmann, the chair of the Institute of Applied Mathematics. Her dissertation was published in the famous Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (see Table 10.1), which had been founded and edited by Richard von Mises. After passing her doctoral examination with distinction (her main subject was applied mathematics; mathematics and astronomy were her minor subjects), Starke was able to continue her work at Winkelmann’s institute. She became an assistant there in 1928, a position that was supported financially by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. She also passed her examination to teach mathematics and physics at secondary school, she held lectures, published articles,34 and supported Winkelmann’s other doctoral students. Walter Frotscher, for example, thanked Starke for her guidance in his 1931 dissertation on fault analysis.35 Starke was ultimately married to the astronomer Helmut Werner in 1932 (see Figure 10.1), who was also closely associated with the Zeiss Corporation.36 Even after her marriage, she continued to publish articles on applied mathematics, astronomy, and the history of science, but unfortunately she died prematurely from cancer. A year before her tragic death on March 16, 1943, she published a two-page article in Zeiss-Notizen (1942, Issue 41), the Zeiss Corporation’s in-house journal on the history of science. There, in an issue commemorating the three hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s death, she heralded him as a pioneer of optical astronomical research. 10.3.5 Elsbeth Herschkowitsch, the Daughter of a Famous Researcher at Zeiss Elsbeth Herschkowitsch was born in Jena on April 10, 1904; her father was the famous Jewish physical chemist Mordko Herschkowitsch, who had come to Jena a few years before her birth. Many intellectuals, including Jewish scientists, had been attracted there by the industrial boom and by the liberal atmosphere inspired 33 [UAJ] Bestand N, No. 05, pp. 466–77. For detailed information about Dorothea Starke, see the master’s thesis of my student Thomas Bischof (BISCHOF 2013). 34 See Dorothea Starke, “Ein graphisches Verfahren zur Auflösung eines linearen Gleichungssystems mit komplexen Koeffizienten,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 11 (1931), pp. 245–47. 35 Walter Frotscher, Fehleruntersuchungen zur numerischen Differentiation (Jena: University Press, 1931). 36 Regarding Helmut Werner’s work, see for instance his book From the Aratus Globe to the Zeiss Planetarium, trans. A. H. Degenhardt (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1957).

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by Ernst Abbe. Jewish families had been settling in Jena since the nineteenth century and had integrated well into the community. The Russian-Jewish chemist Mordko Herschkowitsch was hired by Schott Glassworks in 1898, and he transferred to the Carl Zeiss Corporation in 1902. He patented several important inventions throughout his career. Having died in 1932, he did not have to endure the Nazi dictatorship, but his family was nevertheless in danger. With the support of the Zeiss Corporation, his wife Annette (née Leviasch) was able to immigrate to the United States as late as 1939.37 Their daughter Elsbeth and her family suffered a cruel fate. After completing her Abitur at the Realgymnasium in Jena in 1924, Elsbeth Herschkowitsch studied for two semesters at the University of Zurich and then in Jena. There she passed her preliminary examination and received a topic for her doctoral thesis. Arthur R. von Hippel, who was still a Privatdozent at the time, proposed an experimental subject to her.38 While at the University of Jena, von Hippel had designed a mercury high-pressure lamp that remained in production at Schott Glassworks until 1991. Because von Hippel returned to Göttingen in 1929, Wilhelm Hanle – another former doctoral student of James Franck – assumed the duties of supervising Elsbeth Herschkowitsch’s doctoral research. The records concerned with Herschkowitsch’s doctoral studies (Promotionsakte) indicate that the candidate worked independently and was unfazed by having to change advisors. She resolved the problems set before her and refined an optical method of measuring metallic reflections.39 Elsbeth Herschkowitsch fled to the Netherlands and married Hans Danziger, a Berliner who opened a Jewish boarding school in Scheveningen in the fall of 1933. Elsbeth Danziger, as she was then called, was murdered at Auschwitz on October 5, 1942, at the age of 38. Her daughter Evelijn Esther Danziger and her son Harry Mordechai Danziger died at the same place on the same day. On February 23, 1943, Hans Danziger’s life came to a violent end as well.40 10.4 Marga Faulstich: An Inventor and Manager at Schott Glassworks Marga Faulstich, who was born in Weimar on June 16, 1915, held management positions at Schott Glassworks in Jena and Mainz without ever having earned a formal academic degree. She is famous for ten patents of her own and twenty-six others that she developed together with colleagues. Her specialty was designing

37 This information is taken from the personnel files held at Zeiss’s corporate archives. 38 Arthur von Hippel completed his doctorate under the supervision of James Franck in Göttingen, and in 1930 he married Franck’s daughter (she was his second wife). Because of his wife’s Jewish heritage, von Hippel fled with his family to Turkey, Denmark, and ultimately to the United States during the Nazi dictatorship. 39 [UAJ] Bestand N, No. 10. 40 See http://www.joodsmonument.nl/person/548275?lang=en; and CRANE 2005.

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glass lenses for optical and ophthalmological purposes, and for this she was honored with the IR-100-Medal, which was awarded in Chicago in 1973.41

Figure 10.3: Marga Faulstich (Source: [SCHOTT Archiv Jena]).

Faulstich was the middle child of three siblings. Her father had to leave for the First World War, and thus her mother had to work in a law firm to earn the money for the family. She attended a Kindergarten and was very self-reliant from an early age. In 1922 the family moved to Jena, where her interest in science was promoted at the Realgymnasium. She passed her Abitur in 1934. A good teacher there had developed experiment-based chemistry lessons, and these she never forgot. She assisted his preparation of the experiments and took part in extra experimental courses in her free time. Although she intended to study chemistry, her family could not afford a university education for her, and so she decided to apply for a position as a laboratory assistant at Schott Glassworks. At that time, the physicist Walter Geffcken, who directed the physical-chemical research laboratory there, was looking for a new assistant, and he responded positively to Faulstich’s application. She was able to start her job on July 24, 1935, and she immediately contributed to the research being conducted in the new field of thin-film optics. Faulstich remained grateful to Geffcken for the intensive scientific training that he provided, but her mastery of experimental skills and theoretical knowledge was more or less achieved autodidactically. Her work ethic, initiative, and ideas 41 This section is based on a four-hour interview that the author conducted on October 16, 1994 (see TOBIES 1995).

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led to her appreciation at the company, and thus her routine duties were reduced so that she could develop new objectives and supervise younger employees. She was able to advance from being Geffcken’s assistant to becoming his professional equal. After her fiancé had died in 1942 in the Second World War, the thought of a future marriage seemed hopeless to her, and so she decided to perfect her theoretical knowledge at the University of Jena. With great alacrity, she attended lectures, seminars, and physics and chemistry labs there during the winter semester of 1942-43. Her approach was so energetic that, in one physical-chemical lab, she even finished the work of two semesters in a single term. She was unable to complete a degree, however, because her presence was needed at Schott. During the summer semester of 1943, she was able to return to the university, but only as an auditor. The war then came crashing back to Germany, and the university had to close its doors. After the war, moreover, she had to leave Jena altogether. At the end of June in 1945, when the American occupying forces left Thuringia for another part of Germany – the Russians took over the region – Faulstich numbered among forty-one managers at Schott Glassworks who, in short order, had to load their belongings onto a truck in order to leave for Bavaria. Her boundless energy, her steady stream of scientific ideas, and her collegiality ensured that she was able to continue her research in new and difficult environments, first in Heidenheim, then in Landshut, and as of 1953 at the West German headquarters of Schott Glassworks, which had just opened in Mainz. After deciding to stay in the West, she familiarized herself with the international trends in optical glass research. Basing her work on the latest knowledge in the field, she began with colleagues to develop novel production methods for special types of glass. One such method, for instance, involved the use of melting techniques in platinum crucibles, an approach she had learned from studying American research. This technique replaced an older method that had been developed by Otto Schott himself. While in Mainz, Faulstich worked as the manager of Schott’s Glass Melting Department (Department Sonderschmelze) from 1953 to 1969, at which time she became the director of the Department of Optical Glass Development (II). She led her own research laboratories, in which many innovative types of optical glass were developed and patented. The products were used in a wide range of optical instruments, and contributed to advances in geographic mapping, photogrammetry, astronomy, and laser technology. The IR-100-Medal, which, as mentioned above, she was awarded in Chicago in 1973, was given to Faulstich for her design of an eyeglass that was both highly refractive and lightweight. Research for this project was begun under her leadership in June of 1971. At the heart of the new product was her idea to replace heavy oxides from the sixth row of the periodic table (of lead, barium, lanthanum) with highly refractive lighter transition metal oxides, such as that of titanium, in the fourth row of the table. Faulstich participated in international conferences in Brussels (1959), London (1968), San Francisco (1979), Beijing (1981), and also in Moscow. Her research was published not only in conference proceedings, but also in books edited by the

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American Optical Society and in peer-reviewed international journals.42 When I asked her if she could explain her success, she replied: “It was easy for me. I was accepted by men because of my results. Of course, it was a gradual development. It is difficult to describe. Everyone came to me asking for advice, and I liked to share my knowledge with colleagues. This was a favorable precondition for making important new discoveries.”43 Norbert Neuroth, one of Faulstich’s colleagues, wrote the following about their collaborative research: “After we developed a new type of glass, Marga Faulstich would melt it, Franz Reitmayer would measure the influence of temperature on the refractive index, Mr. Mueller would determine its crystallization at the mineralogical laboratory, and Mr. Lindig would measure its heat conduction.”44 On the occasion of Faulstich’s twenty-fifth anniversary at the company, Erich Schott, the son of Otto Schott and then the chief executive of Schott Glassworks in Mainz, praised her ability to employ both “male” and “female” styles of leadership. That is, she was just as effective with the hardened veterans manning the glass furnace as she was with young employees in need of direction. She possessed a combination of authority and strong will alongside patience, understanding, and empathy. Having worked at Schott for forty-four years, Faulstich developed more than three hundred kinds of optical lenses. She was the first female executive at the company’s West German headquarters, and even in retirement she was often invited back to offer her advice. Bibliography [Carl Zeiss Archiv] Archive of Carl Zeiss Corporation Jena, Personalakten: Herschkowitsch, Pulfrich et al. [SCHOTT Archiv] Archive of SCHOTT Jenaer Glas GmbH. [UAJ] Archive of Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Promotionsakten; Personalakten. BISCHOF, Thomas (2013). Angewandte Mathematik und die Ansätze des mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Frauenstudiums in Thüringen. Master’s Thesis (Staatsexamensarbeit), Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. CHEN, Eva V. (2008). Beruf: Frau. Arbeitsbiographien in Jena vom Beginn bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Studien zur Volkskunde in Thüringen 2). Münster: Waxmann. CRANE, Peter (2005). „Wir leben nun mal auf einem Vulkan.“ Briefe von Sibylle Ortmann 1932 bis 1946 über Jüdisches Leben, Emigration und Exil. With a Foreword by Walter Laqueur. Bonn: Weidle. ECKARDT, Birgit (2001). “Zwei Amerikanerinnen in Jena – Lucinde Pearl Boggs und Rowena Morse.” In HORN/HELLMANN, pp. 235–44. 42 These articles are mentioned in TOBIES 1995; see, for example, Marga Faulstich et al., “Highly Transparent Glasses for Producing Optical Fibers for Telecommunication,” in Optical Fiber Transmission: A Digest of Technical Papers, edited by the Optical Society of America (Washington, D.C.: Optical Society of America, 1975), No. TuB 5–1. 43 See TOBIES 1995, p. 363. 44 Norbert Neuroth, “Heißer Blitz aus kaltem Glas,” Werkszeitung der Glaswerke Schott & Gen. 4 (1970), p. 19.

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FALKENHAUSEN, Franz-Ferdinand von et al. (2004). Carl Zeiss in Jena 1846 –1946. Erfurt: Sutton. HENTSCHEL, Klaus/TOBIES, Renate, eds. (22003). Brieftagebuch zwischen Max Planck, Carl Runge, Bernhard Karsten und Aldolf Leopold (Berliner Beiträge zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik 24). Berlin: ERS-Verlag. HORN, Gisela, ed. (1999). Die Töchter der Alma mater Jenensis. 90 Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität von Jena. Rudolstadt: Hain. HORN, Gisela; HELLMANN, Birgitt, eds. (2001). Entwurf und Wirklichkeit. Frauen in Jena 1900 bis 1933. Rudolstadt: Hain. HOßFELD, Uwe; JOHN, Jürgen; LEMUTH, Oliber; STUTZ, Rüdiger, eds. (2005). „Im Dienst an Volk und Vaterland“: Die Jenaer Universität in der NS-Zeit. Cologne: Böhlau. JOHN, Jürgen; ULBRICHT, Justus H., eds. (2007). Jena: Ein nationaler Erinnerungsort? Weimar: Böhlau. JOOS, Georg (1932). Lehrbuch der Theoretischen Physik. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (many further German editions). In English: Theoretical Physics (in collaboration with Ira M. Freeman). 3rd ed. New York: Dover Books, 1987. KIRCHHOFF, Arthur, ed. (1897). Die Akademische Frau. Gutachten hervorragender Universitätsprofessoren, Frauenlehrer und Schriftsteller über die Befähigung der Frau zum wissenschaftlichen Studium und Berufe. Berlin: Steinitz. PETZOLD, Lali (2001). “Die Anfänge organisierter bürgerlicher Frauenbewegung.” In HORN/ HELLMANN, pp. 9–34. SCHIELICKE, Reinhard (2008). Von Sonnenuhren, Sternwarten und Exoplaneten. Jena: Bussert & Stadeler. SINGER, Sandra L. (2003). Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868 – 1915 (Contributions in Women’s Studies 201). London: Praeger. TOBIES, Renate (1995). “Eine Frauenkarriere in der Industrieforschung: Marga Faulstich zum 80. Geburtstag.” In 21. Kongress von Frauen in Naturwissenschaft und Technik, 25.-28. Mai 1995, Karlsruhe. Dokumentation. Ed. R. MICHEL. Darmstadt: Frauen in der Technik, pp. 356–67. — (1996). “Physikerinnen und spektroskopische Forschungen: Hertha Sponer (1895-1968).” In Geschlechterverhältnisse in Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik. Ed. C. MEINEL and M. RENNEBERG. Stuttgart: GNT-Verlag, pp. 89–97. — (2009). “Physik: Berufsfeld für Frauen. Trends seit 1900, unter Berücksichtigung der ersten promovierten Physikerinnen in Jena.” In 100 Jahre Frauenstudium in Jena. Bilanz und Ausblick. Ed. E. WENDLER and A. ZWICKIES. Jena: Garamond, pp. 55–81. — (2012). Iris Runge: A Life at the Crossroads of Mathematics, Science, and Industry (Science Networks/Historical Studies 43). Trans. Valentine A. Pakis. Basel: Birkhäuser. — (2013). “Chemikerinnen in der elektrotechnischen Industrieforschung vor 1945.” In Akademische Karrieren von Naturwissenschaftlerinnen gestern und heute. Ed. U. PASCHER and P. STEIN. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. WITTIG, Joachim (1989). Ernst Abbe (Biographien hervorragender Naturwissenschaftler, Techniker und Mediziner 94). Leipzig: Teubner.

11 MARIA F. ROMANOVA AND HER RESEARCH ON APPLIED OPTICS IN RUSSIA AND GERMANY Peter Bussemer Maria F. Romanova’s life and scientific activity reflect the political and social upheavels that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. A scientifically gifted woman who, against considerable odds, was able to study in tsarist Russia, Romanova lived through the turmoil of the October Revolution, the economic revival of the Stalin era, the pre- and postwar periods, and the Krushchev Thaw. This chapter will examine Romanova’s career path against the background of the beginnings of the optical industry in St. Petersburg (as the city is called again today).1 At the heart of my examination will be the German-Soviet scientific relations of the time and the political contexts that shaped them. In the 1920s, Romanova was able to conduct research at the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt), or PTR. The latter institution was founded in 1887 by Hermann von Helmholtz, the “chancellor of German physics,” and was based in Berlin (today it exists as the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, headquartered in Braunschweig). The PTR was the national institute for engineering and the natural sciences in Germany, where it was also the highest authority on weights and measures and safety engineering. Romanova remained in contact with representatives of the PTR even after the Second World War, and she is known for her novel application of optical methods to the field of metrology. 11.1 Romanova’s Path to the State Optical Institute The scientific education of Maria Romanova reflects the tradition of the tsarist period in Russia, with its short attempts to eliminate restrictions for women at universities followed by long periods of stagnation and repression. Under the reign of Catherine the Great, in 1783, the princess Catherine Dashkova (née Vorontsova) became the Director of the Academy of Sciences – a unique event in Eastern and Western European academies alike.2 Under the reign of Alexander I (1801–1825), a ministry of education was created. It adopted the model of the French Revolution to open the Russian educational system to all social classes and to both sexes. Yet the system never worked in practice, for not a single woman gained access to university.3 In the late nineteenth century, some reformers pro1 2 3

It might not be frivolous to note that, from 1914 to 1923, the city was known as Petrograd, and that, from 1924 to July of 1991, its name was Leningrad. On the history of women in Russia between 1700 and 2000, see Engel 2004. For a German translation of Catherine Dashkova’s memoires, see DASHKOVA 1857. See GRAHAM 1993, p. 33.

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posed the idea of admitting women to the universities, but without success. Instead, special “higher courses for women” were established apart from the universities but taught by university faculties. The role of women is a striking feature of the history of Russian science. Some of them were among the first in the world to receive doctorates in mathematics, chemistry, and other fields.4 For example, Sofia Kovalevskaya became the first distinguished woman mathematician since antiquity.5 To satisfy Russia’s pressing need for trained medical personnel, the government established courses for so-called “learned midwives” in St. Petersburg. In 1878, Konstantin Nikolayevich Bestuzhev-Ryumin, one of the most popular Russian historians of the nineteenth century, opened in St. Petersburg the largest and most prominent institution for women’s higher education in Imperial Russia, known as the Bestuzhev Courses. Its professors included, among others, the chemist Alexander Borodin, better known as a Russian composer, and the famous chemist and inventor Dmitri Mendeleev, who formulated the Periodic Law of elements.6 The economic development around 1900 and the revolution of 1905 also brought important changes to women’s education. A number of private co-educational universities were established with expanded curricula. The number of female students increased exponentially from 2,600 in 1900 to 44,000 in 1916.7 However, the status of women’s education remained insecure due to a paucity of employment opportunities. Maria Fyodorovna Romanova was born on June 8, 1892 in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where her father was a professor of medicine at the local university.8 Her upbringing, and that of her siblings (she had one brother and two sisters), was managed by her mother. All three of the daughters shared their father’s interest in the natural sciences: Tatiana became a biologist; Olga a physician; and Maria, the eldest, became a physicist. In 1906, after the family had moved to Belgorod, Maria graduated there from the secondary school for girls. In 1910, she began her studies in St. Petersburg, participating in the aforementioned Bestuzhev Courses, but after one year she transferred to the Women’s Pedagogical Institute. The latter was established in 1903 on the basis of the pedagogical courses of St. Petersburg’s

4 5 6

7 8

Ibid., p. 37. See Cordula Tollmien, “Zwei erste Promotionen. Die Mathematikerin Sofja Kowalewskaja und die Chemikerin Julia Lermontowa,” in TOBIES 1997, pp. 83–129. For a modern presentation of the history of women’s rights in tsarist Russia, see RUTHCHILD 2010. Among the graduates of the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg was Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Bolshevik revolutionary and politician who, in 1898, married the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Another noteworthy graduate was the applied mathematician Pelageya Yakovlevna Kochina, who became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For her autobiography, see KOCHINA 1988, esp. pp. 45–55 (on women’s education in Russia). See ENGEL 2004, p. 121. See GRUSDEVA 2012.

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secondary schools for girls.9 It consisted of two departments: the Department of Philology and the Department of Physics and Mathematics. The institute trained teachers for women’s educational institutions and for boys’ middle schools. Admission was competitive, based on references and examination results. Maria was admitted without examination due to the gold medal that she earned at her secondary school, and she chose to enroll in the Department of Physics and Mathematics. She graduated from the Women’s Pedagogical Institute in 1915, and she did so with high honors. Having then become an assistant at this institute, Romanova chose to focus on optics as a field of study concentrating especially on the phenomenon of light interference. During the 1920s, she taught physics at various institutions in Petrograd, among them the Technological Institute (1920–1921), the Institute for Electrical Engineering (1921–1930), and the University (1923–1930). In 1922, Romanova’s industrial career began at the State Optical Institute, which was also located in Petrograd. 11.2 The Rise of the Optical Industry in Russia and Its Contact with Germany The beginnings of the State Optical Institute were closely connected with the rapid economic development in Russia that took place after 1900. Yakov Perepelkin, a graduate of the Artillery Academy, came to the Obukhov Steel Works in St. Petersburg to organize the production of modern optical sights for naval and coastal artillery.10 By 1912, the optical factory produced a great assortment of military optical devices and employed around 150 workers. The physicist Aleksandr Gershun, who would later serve as the director of the Institute until his death in 1915, expanded the staff to nearly 700 workers during the First World War. 11 He also started another, private optical factory under the framework of the Russian Optico-Mechanical Corporation. The shortage of optical glass was one of the main problems of the Russian Army Administration during the Great War. In the pre-war period, Germany had practically a world-wide monopoly on high-quality optical glass. The optical company Carl Zeiss had two subsidiaries in Russia. The first one was opened in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1903, and the second in Riga.12 Both were sequestered in 1914 after the outbreak of the war, and the company Optische Anstalt C. P. 9

In 1922, the Women’s Pedagogical Institute was united with the A. I. Herzen Pedagogical Institute. This, in turn, became the State Russian Herzen Pedagogical University, which is one of the largest Russian universities today. 10 Obukhov Steel Works was founded in 1863 by the metallurgist P. M. Obukhov as a reaction to Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856). In part, this defeat was due to Russia’s lack of weapons made of high-quality steel. 11 Aleksandr Gershun was one of Romanova’s teachers at the Women’s Pedagogical Institute. 12 A picture of the St. Petersburg office (ca. 1914) can be found online at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeissmicro/8678270150. For a list of the products made at these facilities, see SEEGER 2010.

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Goerz met the same fate. Founded by Carl Paul Goerz in Berlin in 1886, the latter became one of the leading German companies for precision mechanics and optics, with production offices in St. Petersburg (est. 1905) and Riga (est. 1909).13 After the war, in 1928, C. P. Goerz and other companies merged with the Carl Zeiss Corporation. Russia had to undertake urgent measures to start its own glass production, which it did at the Imperial Porcelain and Glass Factory in St. Petersburg. The chief engineer, Nikolai Kachalov, appointed several young and talented scientists, including the chemist Ilya Grebenshchikov, who directed the optical glass factory, and the physicist Dmitry Sergeevich Rozhdestvensky. Rozhdestvensky was the son of a history teacher who later became a highlevel official at the Ministry of National Enlightenment in St. Petersburg. In 1894, he graduated from secondary school with a silver medal and entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg. He completed his university degree in 1900 with an excellent diploma and became a laboratory assistant to the experimentalist Nikolai G. Egorov, a professor at the Military Medical Academy who taught a course on spectral analysis at the university. Like most promising young scientists, he went abroad for his studies. From 1901 to 1903, he completed his education in Germany, first at the University of Leipzig in the laboratory of the physicist Otto Wiener, known for his experimental verification of standing light waves, and later in Gießen in the laboratory of Paul Drude, one of the founders of classical electron theory. From 1903 to 1931, Rozhdestvensky worked at the Physical Institute at the University of St. Petersburg. His master’s thesis, which he submitted in 1912, provided a new method for investigating the anomalous dispersion of light. Together with his friend Abram F. Ioffe, Rozhdestvensky participated in the famous kruzhok (‘circle’) in St. Petersburg, a group of young scientists initiated by Paul and Tatiana Ehrenfest to promote a new research and educational style in physics. Paul Ehrenfest, a student of Ludwig Boltzmann from Vienna, went to St. Petersburg and married the Russian mathematician Tatiana Afanasieva, whom he had met at the University of Göttingen. They lived together in Russia from 1907 to 1912, at which time Paul was invited to succeed Hendrik Antoon Lorentz at the University of Leiden. In 1915, Rozhdestvensky became the director of the university’s Physics Institute and supervised, as a consultant, the production of optical glass at the Imperial Porcelain Factory, which delivered its first shipment of glass in the spring of 1916. The February and October Revolutions – and the chaos that ensued – practically stopped all glass production by the end of 1917, but Rozhdestvensky managed, in May of 1918, to transform the research branch of the enterprise into the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces. This commission was founded in 1915 by the geologist and geochemist Vladimir I. Ver13 See NDB 1964, p. 540. In 1895 Goerz also founded a branch in New York that, in 1905, was to become the C. P. Goerz American Optical Co. This company continued to operate independently in the U.S. until 1972.

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nadsky for the study of all kinds of national resources. Following Vernadsky’s proposals, the Imperial Academy of Sciences abandoned its long tradition of concentrating on pure science; in many senses, this was a prefiguration of the Soviet system of planned and state-sponsored research and development. Nikolai P. Gorbunov, the secretary to the chairman of the Soviet government, Vladimir Lenin, ensured in 1919 that the new agenda of the Communist Party contained a link between research and industrial production, thus creating an “entire network of new scientific applied institutes, laboratories, experimental stations, and testing facilities.”14 In 1918, Rozhdestvensky received another offer from the radiologist Mikhail I. Nemenov, a graduate from the University of Berlin who wanted to turn his Xray laboratory at the Women’s Medical Institute into a radiological institute.15 The Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, supported this project. The State X-Ray and Radiological Institute separated completely from the Women’s Medical Institute in October 1918, and this resulted in the separation of teaching and research. 11.3 The Directors of the New State Optical Institute and Their German Contacts The leading figure in Russian physics at the time was Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe, who was later called “the father of Soviet physics.” Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he graduated in 1902 from the St. Petersburg State Institute of Technology. After that he spent two years in Munich as an assistant to the Nobel laureate Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, and completed his Ph.D. in 1905. In 1918, Ioffe became a director of the Physics and Technology Department at the State Institute for X-Rays and Radiology. He convinced Bolshevik leaders to support the creation of several research institutes. These facilities – the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute,16 the State Optical Institute, the Radium Institute, and the Institute of Physics and Biophysics, among others – became the locus of physics research in the Soviet Union. As of 1921, Ioffe was the director of the Leningrad PhysicalTechnical Institute. He lost this position in 1950 during Stalin’s campaign against so-called “rootless cosmopolitans,” that is, Jews.17

14 See KOJEVNIKOV 2004, Chapter 2. 15 The Women’s Medical Institute, founded in 1897 in St. Petersburg, was one of the first of such institutes for women at the university level, giving Russia a far larger number of female physicians than other European nation (see ENGEL 2004, p. 79). Its successor today is the St. Petersburg State Medical University. 16 On the role of Ioffe as the founder of the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute, see JOSEPHSON 1991, Chapter 3. There are many articles about Ioffe, especially in Russian. Insightful German sources about him include KOMKOV et al. 1981 and KANT 1989. For a convenient Russian biography, see ANSEL’M et al. 1981. 17 On the persecution of Soviet Jews, see especially RAPOPORT 1991 and RUBENSTEIN/NAUMOV 2001.

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The State Optical Institute (Gosudarstvennyi opticheskii institute, or GOI) was founded in Petrograd in December of 1918. Its director and scientific leader was Rozhdestvensky, and it was one of the first state institutes established by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution in 1917. Analogous in structure to Helmholtz’s PTR, the GOI was divided into two departments: a scientific research institute (NIS) for fundamental physics and a constructers’ bureau (OKR) for more advanced studies. Concerning scientific aims and themes, there was relative freedom for the institute’s staff. In 1919, for instance, Rozhdestvensky was able to organize an Atomic Commission there to promote investigations into Bohr’s theory of the atom. No funding was spared to equip the new Optical Institute with instruments, materials, and a research library. The state allocated a remarkable sum of 80,000 dollars for such purposes, and it did so because most of the necessary purchases could only be made abroad. After the civil war had ended, scientists were allowed to travel to Western nations, and among those to do so were Ioffe and Rozhdestvensky. Because they were dealing in dollars, they were able to evade the inflationary threats of the German currency. In other words, they were able to spend their money effectively.18 This trip can also be regarded as a continuation of the intensive scientific contacts between German and Russian physicists that had already existed before the First World War. This scientific relationship is reflected, for instance, in a letter from Friedrich Paschen, the leading German specialist at the time in optics and spectroscopy, to Rozhdestvenky (dated May 29, 1921): Dear Professor Rozhdestvensky! I have fond memories of the hours of your friendly visit. The pleasure that your stay with us aroused leads me to maintain that no other visit has left such a deep impression as yours. If the circumstances allow, I intend to visit you and enjoy the opportunity of touring your outstanding institute in Petrograd. [...] I would like to express to you my heartfelt thanks for the honor of bestowing us with your visit and for the scientific enthusiasm with which you irradiated us during your time here.19

The Optical Institute served as a prototype for a number of state institutions that came to characterize the Soviet approach to modernizing the economy. This approach was far less concerned with market mechanisms than it was with satisfying the requirements of science. In 1919, the State Optical Institute began to publish a book series under the name “Works of the GOI” (Trudy GOI). When, in 1922, Maria Romanova began to work at the Optical Institute, she was placed under the supervision of A. A. Lebedev, whose research team was attempting to develop a model for the International Prototype Meter (Urmeter). Their goal was to base their design on spectroscopic principles, in that the model was meant to compare wave lengths. Since 1917, experiments of a similar sort had been conducted at the PTR in Berlin, particularly in the linear measurement laboratory directed by Wilhelm Kösters.

18 See KOJEVNIKOV 2004, p. 41. 19 FRENKEL 1987.

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Kösters’s intention was to base the measurement of ground dimensions on a fundamental measurement in nature and thus to replace the former standard of measurement with that of a spectral line.20 In1920, he invented the so-called interference comparator (Interferenzkomparator) that would later be known by his name, and this devise was put into production by the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena. The fundamental idea behind this instrument derives from Ernst Abbe’s comparator principle.21 From 1950 to 1954, Zeiss produced a line-scale gaugeblock comparator (Strichmaß-Endmaß-Komparator) for the German Office of Weights and Measures in Weida. Before then – that is, just after the end of the Second World War – this office had been using a mostly self-built instrument for the 200-millimeter measurement range. In 1932, Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov followed Rozhdestvensky’s footsteps and became the director of the Optical Institute.22 Vavilov is famous for founding the Soviet school of physical optics. In 1932 as well, Vavilov became head of the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and thus directed both institutions simultaneously. In Moscow, Vavilov supervised Pavel A. Cherenkov, and they co-discovered the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect, a discovery for which Cherenkov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1958 (Vavilov had died in 1951). Vavilov’s role in the development of Stalinist science policy is regarded as influential but typical. He was also named, in 1945, the president of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.23 11.4 Scientific Exchange between Germany and Russia In order to familiarize herself with the scientific work taking place in Germany, and to make use of it in her own work, Maria F. Romanova was sent to Berlin in the year 1928. This was not unusual at the time. Beginning in 1923, for instance, Russian mathematicians had been travelling frequently to Göttingen, which was then the international center of mathematics. Other Russian scientists went regularly to other German cities during the 1920s.24 After the First World War, one of the German scientists who sought to re-establish scientific relations between Germany and Russia was Wilhelm Westphal, a physicist who, in October of 1922, was sent to Moscow and Petrograd as a representative of the Prussian Ministry of Culture.25 In his travelogue, he praised the

20 See KERN 1994. 21 See STEINBACH 2005. Regarding other post-war developments at the Office of Weights and Measures in East Germany, see TSCHIRNICH 2011. 22 Having resigned from the Optical Institute, Rozhdestvensky devoted his final years to biology – an old hobby of his – and to the theory of image formation in microscopes. Inconsolable after the death of his wife in 1939, he committed suicide in 1940. 23 See SCHPOL 1997. 24 See HEEKE 2003. 25 Westphal was known for his widely-used physics textbook; see WESTPHAL 1928.

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vivid desire for good relations between German and Russian academic circles.26 In September of 1925, Max Planck participated, as the secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, in the 200th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.27 It was not only the case that “the interesting experiment of Bolshevism” was on everybody’s mind, as can be gathered from Iris Runge’s correspondence.28 Moscow also played host, in January of 1929, to a “Week of German Engineering” under the auspices of Albert Einstein.29 The Association of German Engineers agreed on a collaboration with Russian colleagues that resulted in engineering conferences, attended by German representatives, being held twice a month on Soviet soil. Hans Rukop, who oversaw electron tube research at Telefunken, accepted an invitation in October of 1929 from the Soviet Commission for National Education to give lectures in several cities in the Soviet Union, and these would not be his first trips to the east.30 Among the many others to travel to Russia during these years can be counted the mathematician Richard von Mises and the physicist Max Born (who both attended the Sixth Congress of Russian Physicists in August of 1928); the mathematicians Emil Julius Gumbel and Emmy Noether (a guest professor in Moscow in 1928/29); as well as Arnold Sommerfeld, Peter Debye, and Peter Pringsheim, who participated with Max Born and other German scientists in the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Physicists, which took place in Odessa during the late summer of 1930.31 In 1928, while visiting the PTR in Berlin, Romanova became personally acquainted not only with Kösters, but also with August Wetthauer, the director of the optical laboratory there.32 Wetthauer, in fact, she would later meet again (see Section 11.5); his daughter mentioned Romanov in her later writings about her father, here for instance in her reflections on the German invasion of Russia during the Second World War: Today it is hardly imaginable that, in 1928, a young Russian female scientist had worked in his laboratory at the request of the Russian government and the German Foreign Office and was given access to the laboratory’s research findings. And now the homeland of this highlyesteemed colleague, Mrs. Maria Fedorowna Romanowa, has been invaded.33

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

FRENKEL 1987, p. 420. KOMKOV 1981, p. 31. TOBIES 2012, pp. 340–44. HEEKE 2003, p. 66. Einstein, famous for his contributions to theoretical physics, was also accomplished in the field of engineering. He himself did not attend the event in Moscow. The letter of consent that Rukop received from the German Office of Foreign Affairs to travel to Russia, which was dated August 16, 1929, began with these words: “Because you are already familiar with Russia […]” (quoted in TOBIES 2012, p. 342). For a discussion of the contacts between Germany and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, see KOMKOV 1981, pp. 19–38; and VOGT 1991, pp. 81–164, 251–63 (notes). See GÖWERT 2013. See GÖWERT (undated), p. 7.

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Figure 11.1: Maria Romanova (Source: GINAC 2012).

11.5 Romanova as Deputy Director and the Results of Her Research In 1933, Maria Romanova became the deputy director of the laboratory for applied physical optics. The focus of her research was the conversion of the definition of the meter to the wave-length standard, but her work did not proceed without complications. She was not able to live unscathed, for instance, through the infamous year of 1937, the highpoint of Stalinist repression: Her brother, an officer in the Red Army, was incarcerated and sentenced in Moscow, and she had to take over the care of his young son. In September of 1937, she was ultimately let go from the Optical Institute, though no reason was given for her dismissal. In the following year, however, she was able to continue her scientific work at another institution, namely at the State All-Union Institute for Metrology in Leningrad, where she also had the opportunity to obtain a Ph.D. (in Russia, the precise title conferred is “Candidate of Sciences”). After the Soviet Union had been attacked by the Nazi army, the metrological institute was evacuated to Sverdlovsk.34 Two of Kösters’s interferometers were brought along and set up there, and thus work was able to continue. In December of 1945, shortly after the institute had returned to Leningrad, Romanova completed her post-doctoral thesis, the title of which was “Testing Gauge Blocks with the Assistance of Light Waves.”

34 Sverdlovsk was the name of this city from 1924 to 1991, at which point its name was restored to Yekaterinburg, as it was known before 1924.

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After the end of the war, numerous scientists were sent from Russia to the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany. Their task was to see whether any scientific apparatuses, instruments, facilities, and even people could be appropriated as war reparations. Among the experts sent, for instance, was the physicist Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz, who is known as the co-author of the Landau-Lifshitz textbook series. With the same objective, Romanova was also sent to Germany, particularly to Thuringia. As an expert in optics, and as someone familiar with the PTR, Romanova was charged with inspecting the equipment of the latter institue that, in 1943, had been evacuated from Berlin to Thuringia, which was part of the Soviet Occupation Zone. In Weida, a small town in eastern Thuringia, the aforementioned inventor and designer August Wetthauer had directed, during the war, a laboratory belonging to the German Air Force. Many years earlier, in 1916, he had invented a three-color camera and projector that was useful for analysing aerial photographs. As of 1922, Wetthauer led the optical laboratory of the PTR, where Romanova had worked with him. During the war, Wetthauer’s objective testing instrument and his eponymous testing methods became the exclusive intellectual property of the German Air Force’s central laboratory in Weida. At the beginning of 1946, and under Maria Romanova’s supervision, the laboratory in Weida was fully dismantled and relocated, along with its director, to Moscow. While there, Wetthauer was assured good working conditions and the directorship of the newly rebuilt laboratory; these terms were comparable to those offered to the many other German scientists who were brought to work in the USSR. Because Romanova had known Wetthauer since her 1928 stay in Berlin, she dissuaded him from signing such a contract. He was ultimately able to stay in East Germany, but this was allowed on the condition that he oversee, in 1947, the reconstruction plans for the optical laboratory in Moscow. Wetthauer was also able to keep one of his objective testing instruments from falling into Russian hands; today, in fact, it remains in the possession of his daughter, Ingrid Göwert, in Freiburg. She has written the following about these events: The dismantling of the laboratory, which was being undertaken under the supervision of Professor Romanova, his former colleague, was nearly 100% complete. Her objective was to transfer him and his laboratory to Moscow, where he was offered very good conditions for directing the reconstructed laboratory. His knowledge of the Russian language, however, enabled him to understand Professor Romanova’s warning to back out of the situation. And thus their friendly collaboration in the year 1928 ultimately came to his rescue, and he remained in East Germany. Nevertheless, he was not completely free, for shortly thereafter, under the coercion of Professor Turin, he had to produce plans for the reconstruction in Moscow. The Russians appeared to be grateful, and on October 1, 1946 he became affiliated, by order of General Kolesnitshenko, with the University of Jena.35

For nearly twenty years at the Metrological Institute in Leningrad, Maria F. Romanova led the work on the transition of the meter convention to units of wave lengths. Her suggestion to use the orange-colored specral line of krypton 86 for 35 GÖWERT (undated), p. 9

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this was accepted internationally. After the new meter standard had been established internationally, a celebration was held at the Institute. At this event, the old standard, namely the Urmeter consisting of a platinum-iridium alloy, was burnt in a symbolic ceremony. Unfortunately, Romanova did not live to experience the decision of the 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which took place in 1960 in Geneva, and where the definition of the meter was officially finalized. She had died on March 1, 1959. Her former institute in St. Petersburg, which is today the D. I. Mendeleev Institute,36 carries on the tradition of German-Russian scientific cooperation in the field of metrology. It was the famous chemist Mendeleev who, in 1893, had founded this institution on the model of the PTR in Berlin, which he had visited on several occasions.37 Bibliography ANSEL’M, A. I. et al. (1981). Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, 1880–1960 (Materialy k biobibliografi uchenykh SSSR: Seriia fiziki 25). Moscow: Nauka. DASHKOVA, Catherine (1857). Memoiren der Fürstin Daschkoff. Zur Geschichte der Kaiserin Katharina II. With an Introduction by Alexander Herzen. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe. ENGEL, Barbara Alpern (2004). Women in Russia, 1700–2000. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. FRENKEL, Viktor J.; HOFFMANN, Dieter (1987). “Traditionen wissenschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit. Deutsch-sowjetische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen in der Physik.” Physik in der Schule 25, pp. 417–21. GINAK, Elena Borisovna (2012). “Russian-German Scientific Cooperation in Metrology.” Mir Izmerenii 2, pp. 54–61. GÖWERT, Ingrid (undated). August Wetthauer 1887–1964. Das Leben eines Wissenschaftlers während des 3. Reichs. Erinnerungen der Tochter Ingrid an ihren Vater (online version, preserved in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz). GÖWERT, Ingrid; GÖWERT, Edgar; MÜLLER, Jürgen (2013). “August Wetthauer. Aus dem Leben eines PTR-Wissenschaftlers im Dritten Reich – Eine Bildgeschichte.” PTB-Mitteilungen 123, pp. 54–61. GRAHAM, Loren R. (1993). Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. GRUSDEVA, Elena Nikolaevna; GINAK, Elena Borisovna (2012). Maria F. Romanova (for the anniversary of her 120th birthday). Preprint, St. Petersburg (6 pp.). GRUSDEVA, Elena Nikolaevna; GINAK, Elena Borisovna; BUSSEMER, Peter (2013). “Maria F. Romanova – Deutsch-sowjetische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen vor und nach dem Krieg.” PTBMitteilungen 123, pp. 62–64. HEEKE, Matthias (2003). Reisen zu den Sowjets. Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921– 1941. Mit einem bio-bibliographischen Anhang zu 96 deutschen Reiseautoren (Arbeiten zur Geschichte Osteuropas 11). Berlin: LIT. 36 After the war, several of the instruments at Weida were brought to this institute as war reparations. A photograph of the institute, taken in 1968, can be seen in MÖBIUS 2013, p. 96. 37 See GINAK 2012. In 1893, at the recommendation of the finance minister, Mendeleev was made the director of the Russian Office for Weights and Measures, and as such he introduced the metrical system to Russia.

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JOSEPHSON, Paul R. (1991). Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. KANT, Horst (1989). Abram Fedoroviþ Ioffe (Biographien hervorragender Naturwissenschaftler, Techniker und Mediziner 96). Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. KOCHINA, Pelageya Yakovlevna (1988). Nauka, liudi, gody: Vospominanija i vystuplenija [Scholarship, People, Years: Reminiscences and Presentations]. Moscow: Nauka. KOJEVNIKOV, Alexei B. (2004). Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. London: Imperial College Press. KOMKOV, G. D. et al. (1981). Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der UdSSR. Berlin: Akademie. KERN, Ulrich (1994). Forschung und Präzisionsmessung. Die PTR zwischen 1918 und 1948. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag. MÖBIUS, Klaus (2013). “PTR-Jubiläen in Ost und West.” PTB-Mitteilungen 123, pp. 96–98. NDB (1964). Neue Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 6. Munich: Bayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften. RAPOPORT, Yakov (1991). The Doctors’ Plot of 1953. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. RUBENSTEIN, Joshua; NAUMOV, Vladimir P., eds. (2001). Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. New Haven: Yale University Press. RUTHSCHILD, Rochelle Goldberg (2010). Equality & Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. SCHPOL, S. E. (1997). Helden und Verbrecher der russischen Wissenschaft (Russian). Moscow: Kron-Press SEEGER, Hans (2010). Zeiss Feldstecher: Modelle – Merkmale – Mythos. Jena: TeGeJena e.V. STEINBACH, Manfred (2005). “Ernst Abbes Komparatorprinzip.” Jenaer Jahrbuch Technikgeschichte 7, pp. 9–69. TOBIES, Renate, ed. (1997). “Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz.” Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Campus. — (2012). Iris Runge: A Life at the Crossroads of Mathematics, Science, and Industry. (Trans. Valentine A. Pakis). Basel: Birkhäuser. VOGT, Annette, ed. (1991). Emil Julius Gumbel. Auf der Suche nach Wahrheit. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. TSCHIRNICH, J. (2011). “Die Normalmeßeinrichtung ǥAutomatischer Interferenzkomparator’ (1975–2000).” Jenaer Jahrbuch Technikgeschichte 14, pp. 223–53. WESTPHAL, Wilhelm (1928). Physik. Ein Lehrbuch. Berlin: Springer.

12 FEMALE EMPLOYEES AT CARL ZEISS-JENA DURING THE 1960S AND 1970S Katharina Schreiner For two reasons, the focus of this chapter will be on events that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. First, it was during these decades that noteworthy social advances were made both in greater East Germany and, in particular, at the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena (it was then a state-owned Kombinat), and second because I experienced these years firsthand. Below I will be less concerned with examining the career paths, successes, and difficulties encountered by individual women researchers, about which there are many stories to tell (see Section 12.3). My attention will rather be directed toward the issue of how women were integrated more fully into the operations at Carl Zeiss and how a policy of equal opportunity eventually enabled them to achieve higher positions within the company. My investigation is supported by primary sources from Zeiss’s corporate archive in Jena and also by more recent secondary literature. In 1976 I became an advisor for women’s affairs and gender equality at Carl Zeiss in Jena, and as such I was responsible for the “gender policy” at the company. This policy included a number of measures intended to promote and support working women; it was concerned with such matters as continuing education, the procurement of adequate living spaces, and childcare facilities.1 Zeiss-Jena, which produced advanced technology in the field of applied optics, was at that time one of the most significant commercial enterprises both in East Germany and in the entire Eastern Bloc. As information technology gained more and more international importance, the company found itself at the center of East German economic policy. I reported directly to Wolfgang Biermann, who had been named the chief executive of Zeiss-Jena in 1975 and who, in that position, wielded a considerable amount of authority.2 For fifteen years I worked in various capacities under his supervision. As a chief executive, Biermann soon gained the reputation of a manager who did not shy away from challenges and who had extremely high expectations of his subordinates. Needless to say, his notoriously draconian managerial style did not escape criticism.3 My experience of him was as a difficult and yet effective boss who expected concrete results in all aspects of the business, including its gender policy. At that time, the notion of gender policy was encompassed by the broader idea of “social policy.” In East Germany, the latter policy was understood to in1 2 3

See HERBST et al., vol. 1, pp. 284–91. See REMY 2005. On February 9, 1990, Wolfgang Biermann moved to Saarbrücken (West Germany). He was later employed by Special Air Transport, an airline company based in Cologne (see MÜLLER-ENBERGS et al. 2010, vol. 1, p. 127). I was critical of him myself, and it was for this reason that I was placed under his direct supervision. The reasoning was that, by having his ear, I could influence the company’s operations in an effective manner.

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clude measures for promoting the welfare of employees, an agenda that was also thought to enhance company performance. In addition to gender policy, social policy was concerned with issues of youth employment, athletic competition, cultural activity, and public service. During the 1970s, the national planning committee of East Germany issued a new set of objectives to the Carl Zeiss Kombinat.4 According to the committee, the business should endeavor to become the largest supplier of precision-engineered optical instruments to research and manufacturing facilities in East Germany, in other Comecon nations, and even beyond. This objective resulted from the strategic decisions made at the ninth convention of the Socialist Unity Party, or SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), which had taken place in May of 1976 in East Berlin. Here it was determined to implement the so-called “unity of economic and social policy,” an agenda that had already been announced five years earlier (when Erich Honecker had taken over Walter Ulbricht’s position as the leader of the SED). The goal of this political agenda was to devote greater attention to social issues, including “women’s issues,” in order to accomplish economic objectives more effectively. At its headquarters in Jena, Zeiss was faced with accomplishing a number of objectives both quickly and simultaneously. Here I would like to discuss three of these with which I was immediately involved as an advisor for women’s affairs: First, between 1968 and 1972, several highly expensive new facilities had been constructed for Carl Zeiss in Jena. This took place under the political leadership of Walter Ulbricht, and it was done so as part of a broader policy aimed at building a “new economic system.” By the year 1976, however, these new facilities had not yet been fully paid for, and thus the business was faced with the urgent directive to earn higher profits by meeting the growing demand for precisionengineered optical instruments. Second, it was determined that Carl Zeiss, along with its subsidiary businesses, should be expanded into one of the largest state-owned enterprises in East Germany. Until the time of German reunification, there were twenty-five of such subsidiaries, and they were located throughout the entire country. Whereas in 1965 the headquarters in Jena had employed 17,000 people, by 1976 this number had increased to approximately 30,000. By the year 1989, the number of employees at the Zeiss conglomerate (including all subsidiaries) had grown to nearly 69,000. The third objective consisted of enacting the social policy mentioned above. Above all, this task involved the following measures: treating the labor force, women included, reasonably and equitably; constructing and allocating apartments for Zeiss employees5; constructing childcare facilities to improve working 4 5

In East Germany, business objectives were formulated in so-called “national plans” (Staatspläne); see HERBST et al. 1994, vol. 2, pp. 1157–67. Because of a general housing shortage, apartments in East Germany were predominantly allocated by national or municipal authorities. According to official social policy, large businesses were expected to construct, allocate, maintain, and manage employee housing. Such

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conditions for women6; instituting continuing education programs, especially for female employees; and training and recruiting thousands of apprentices. East Germany suffered perpetually from workforce shortages,7 and therefore apprentices and extended secondary-school graduates (Abiturienten) were recruited to Jena from all areas of the country.8 Special incentives for women to move there were also introduced. Early in my tenure as an advisor for women’s affairs at Zeiss, I created a modern working committee called “The General Director’s Task Force for Women” (Frauenarbeitsgruppe des Generaldirektors). The purpose of this group was to identify and possibly solve the problems that women faced throughout the entire organization. Women’s representatives from Zeiss’s subsidiary companies participated regularly on the committee. Just as I reported directly to the general director, these representatives likewise reported to the directors of their respective companies. My female colleagues had immediate experience with the specific problems encountered by working women, and so, in an unprecedented manner, the task force succeeded in implementing feminist interests with the backing of company and political leadership. Before the establishment of this task force, women’s issues had been addressed exclusively by union and party officials.9 The ambitions of our state-affiliated task force had to be oriented toward accomplishing professional objectives, that is, they had to address the issues laid forth in the national plan for the Zeiss Kombinat. Above all, these issues concerned the development and production of scientific instruments. With this in mind, our primary questions were as follows: What must we do to ensure equitable working conditions for women in this industrial environment and how can we utilize the per-

6 7

8

9

enterprises thus possessed contingents of apartments that were somewhat more modern and better equipped than typical government housing. In East Germany, private home and apartment ownership existed only to a small extent, and mostly in the countryside. Large businesses were then required to build, maintain, and finance childcare facilities for their employees. These were divided into Kinderkrippen (for infants to three-year-olds) and Kindergärten (for children three to seven). These shortages were brought about, in part, by the flight of East German citizens to West Germany. From 1949 until the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the number of those who fled reached approximately 2.7 million. The Zeiss company, too, lost nearly a fifth of its workforce during this period (see HELLMUTH/MÜHLFRIEDEL 2000, p. 365). The majority of those who left were skilled workers with good chances of finding “white-collar” employment in West Germany. It was frequently the case that they could simply transfer their skills to the newly established (and independent) Zeiss facilities in the West, which had been built after 1945 in Oberkochen (see SCHREINER/GATTNAR/SKOLUDEK 2006 and SCHREINER 2012). Participation in the East German educational system was mandatory. Most pupils attended polytechnical secondary school for ten years. This could be followed by the attendance of an extended secondary school, from which one could earn a diploma (Abitur). Graduates of such programs were called Abiturienten. The same organizational structures existed at every business, school, university, and so on. There were unions with their own officials, officials of other organizations (the youth organization, for instance), and SED officials. Within the Zeiss conglomerate, there was a large SED organization with many subdivisions as well as a large union organization with subdivisions of its own.

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formance capacity of women in an optimal way? In other words, we were concerned both with the further emancipation of women as well as the economic factor of female labor. In East Germany at the time, the latter was the more urgent consideration. East Germany was always faced with economic problems. On the one hand, these were based on the workforce shortage mentioned above. On the other hand, the technology held by many firms was vastly insufficient. This insufficiency was often compensated for by an increased labor quota, which in turn resulted in lower workplace productivity. Many economic sectors of East Germany lagged behind those of Western industrial nations, especially those of West Germany. In order to classify and evaluate Zeiss’s gender policy properly, certain aspects will have to be considered in closer detail. These concern certain fundamental issues of women’s emancipation, as reflected in East German law, and also certain measures that were taken to promote the integration of women into the labor force, namely: (1) women’s right to work, (2) the fundamental idea of “equal pay for equal work,” (3) the existence of special qualification and training opportunities for women, and (4) the issue of balancing work life and family life, especially as regards childcare. In what follows, it will also be asked to what extent these ideal goals were achieved in reality. 12.1 Women’s Right to Work The gender policy enacted by businesses was based on certain articles in the East German constitution as well as on corresponding laws. The legal and political equality of men and women was codified as early as the 1949 constitution. Article 7 of the latter document reads as follows: “(1) Men and women have equal rights. (2) All laws and regulations that conflict with the equality of women are abolished.”10 Article 18 states: “(4) Men and women, adults and juveniles are entitled to equal pay for equal work. (5) Women enjoy special protection in employment relationships. The laws of the Republic will provide for institutions that will allow for women to balance their tasks as citizens and workers with their duties as wives and mothers.” Article 33 begins: “During maternity, women have a rightful claim to the special protection and care of the state.” Finally, the first paragraph of Article 33 states the following: “Extra-marital birth is to be no ground for discrimination against the child or its parents.”11 10 The second clause is meant to address discriminatory laws and regulations from the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi regime, for instance the regulation stipulating that women in public service (including teachers) could only receive 70% of a man’s salary. See also Article 30 of the same constitution: “(2) All laws or regulations that impair the equal family rights of men and women are abolished.” 11 See http://www.documentarchiv.de/ddr/verfddr1949.html. For the English translation upon which the translation here is based (with slight modifications), see: http://www.cvce.eu/obj/constitution_of_the_german_democratic_republic_7_october_1949en-33cc8de2-3cff-4102-b524-c1648172a838.html.

217

12 Female Employees at Carl Zeiss-Jena

In the subsequent years, additional laws and ordinances with detailed provisions were ratified, among them the Law for the Protection of Mother and Children and the Rights of Women (1950), the Book of Family Law (1965), the Law on the Integrated Socialist Educational System (1965),12 the Law for the Training and Continuing Education of Women in Technical Careers and their Employment in Middle Management and Management Positions (1967), and an Ordinance Concerning the Development of Special Courses for Women at East German Technical Colleges (1967).13 Table 12.1: An Overview of Female Employment Rates at Zeiss-Jena in 1977 Number and percentage of women among total employees

15,250

Percentage of women among skilled workers Number and percentage of skilled female employees among all female production workers

43.5% 46.4%

2,545

65.0%

Number and percentage of women among employees with technical degrees

865

21.6%

Number and percentage of women among employees with university degrees

543

17.6%

Number and percentage of women among employees with management positions

233

9.6%

Number of women in upper management

10

Additional measures were implemented during the 1970s in the name of achieving the “unity of economic and social policy,” the political agenda mentioned above. These resulted in the lengthening of maternity leave, the introduction of paid maternity leave, a paid monthly credit for housework, the guarantee of a tax-free marriage credit, and the expansion of childcare facilities.14 The quantitative effects of these measures at Carl Zeiss-Jena are illustrated in Table 12.1. 12 This law guaranteed the right to free education, standardized the structure of the educational system, and served as the basis for the educational training of child caretakers and teachers. As a whole, the system included the Kinderkrippen and Kindergärten, the polytechnical secondary schools (with graduation after ten school years), the extended secondary schools (with graduation after twelve school years), vocational schools, engineering colleges, general colleges, technical universities, and universities. At the end of the 1980s, 90% of all employees in East Germany had completed a vocational training program, and 22% had earned a degree from a college or university (See HERBST et al. 1994, vol. 1, pp. 109–21). 13 Special courses for women, which were often held in the evening, were instituted to facilitate the enrollment of working women and mothers in technical colleges (see Section 12.3). Technical colleges were institutions designed to provide students with the qualifications to work in technical and medical fields (e.g. the College for Ophthalmic Optics in Jena). The prerequisite for entering these training programs, which typically lasted three years, was a diploma from a polytechnical secondary school. 14 State-subsidized institutions for childcare included, in addition to Kinderkrippen and Kindergärten, after-school and before-school childcare centers, school meals, and holiday camps.

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The following sections will demonstrate the gaps that existed between ideal circumstances and reality. My focus will be on specific problems involved with trying to achieve a balance between work life and family life, on the one hand, and with challenging and promoting women on the other. 12.2 Equal Pay for Equal Work This law, which, as mentioned above, had been codified as early as the 1949 constitution, was indeed implemented, at least to the extent that “equal work” was made available to men and women. Salaries for men and women were standardized and regulated not only at Carl Zeiss, but also in all other state-run enterprises. The fact of the matter was that the career trajectories of women unfolded more slowly than those of men, and this was largely so because of the difficulty of balancing the double burden of professional life and family life (see Section 12.4). Women were less motivated than men to advance professionally, and thus their earnings often lagged behind. At most businesses, moreover, female employees worked in positions that required fewer qualifications and were consequently lower-paying.15 The latter reality was especially so in the years immediately after 1945; it was later rectified to some extent by the aforementioned Law on the Integrated Socialist Educational System of 1965, which instituted initiatives to improve the qualifications of the female workforce. As an advisor for women’s affairs at Zeiss, I was able to experience firsthand the placement of women into new wage brackets. By law it was possible to classify certain female production workers as certified skilled employees, even though they might lack the necessary certificate. For this to happen, a woman must have acquired many years of experience on the job and also must have been recognized for her political and social activism.16 The latter demand was excessively high, and I had the pleasure to witness Wolfgang Biermann change the requirement on his own accord. Biermann adopted the sensible opinion that a woman, having held a job for many years and having also played the dual role of mother and wife, could not have been in the position to participate extensively in political and social activity. Women in this situation would not have had the time for the addiMoreover, there was also free access to medical care (for vaccinations, regular checkups, and so on). Large conglomerates and businesses financed and managed childcare facilities and vacation resorts as part of their duties to the union. Incidentally, there was only one labor union in all of East Germany, namely the Free German Trade Union Federation (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund). 15 The same can be said of the situation in former West Germany (until 1989) and in Germany today (see the introduction to Chapter 6). 16 To be regarded as “socially and politically active” (gesellschaftspolitisch aktiv) entailed that the persons in question (women and men alike) had to be more than mere formal members of various social organizations. It was especially the case that they had to have been highly engaged in the so-called Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend), in the labor union, and also in the Society for German-Soviet Friendship.

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tional committee work and other meetings that the requirement demanded. According to Biermann, the act of mastering the dual burden of professional and family life was a great social and political achievement in its own right. He always took it upon himself to promote qualified women and to recognize them as skilled workers personally, and these promotions resulted in a corresponding increase in wages. 12.3 Qualifications and Continuing Education As mentioned above, several laws were ratified in the 1960s for the promotion of women. On account of such laws, the topic of women’s affairs became a central issue for the managers at Zeiss. In January of 1965, Ernst Gallerach, who was then the first deputy to the director of Zeiss-Jena, published a comprehensive article in the national newspaper Neues Deutschland about the measures being taken to promote and qualify female employees.17 A few days later, the general director of the company, who was then Hugo Schrader, addressed himself directly to the female employees in a two-page appeal under the heading “The Republic Needs Women – All Women Need the Republic.”18 Here it was stressed that all women interested in further training would be given two days off per week – with full pay – to achieve their aims. The appeal was made in reaction to the aforementioned law about creating special courses for women.19 Institutions for continuing education were available both within the Zeiss company and externally. These included vocational schools for training apprentices, an adult education center that had been founded in 1919 with funds from the Carl Zeiss Foundation, and colleges and technical schools. A tradition of close collaboration existed between Zeiss-Jena and the neighboring university and technical colleges, especially the Friedrich-Schiller University (so-named since 1934) and the College for Ophthalmic Optics, which had been founded in 1917. After 1945, the engineering college in Ilmenau had been expanded into a technical university, and a new engineering college, specializing in the production of scientific instruments, had been founded in Unterwellenborn. Graduates of these institutions were frequently employed by Zeiss. Associated with the company itself, moreover, were special “training academies” located in various cities in Thuringia and Brandenburg as well as so-called “industrial sector academies,” both of which existed to advance the training of employees. The industrial sector academies 17 Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 113. The article was published on January 19, 1965 and was printed on page 3 of the newspaper. For information about Ernst Gallerach, see SCHREINER 2012, pp. 16–19; and MÜLLER-ENBERGS et al. 2010, vol. 1, pp. 369–70. Gallerach served as the general director of Zeiss-Jena from 1966 to 1971. His predecessor in the position had been Hugo Schrade. 18 See SCHREINER 2012, pp. 16, 19–21. Hugo Schrade had earned a doctoral degree in engineering from the Technical University in Stuttgart and had been an employee at Zeiss since 1929. 19 Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 113. The appeal (Aufruf) is dated January 25, 1965.

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were closely associated with the High Ministerial Academy for Electrical Engineering and Electronics (Akademie des Ministeriums für Elektrotechnik und Elektronik).20 Additional institutions for the continuing education of adult men and women existed in affiliation with Urania (the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge),21 the Chamber of Technology (founded in 1946), as well as with political parties and the union. As their names suggest, the Law on the Integrated Socialist Educational System, which was enacted in 1965, and other ordinances – namely the Law for the Training and Continuing Education of Women in Technical Careers and their Employment in Middle Management and Management Positions and the Ordinance Concerning the Development of Special Courses for Women at East German Technical Colleges – introduced new objectives to the educational system. They also, however, had implications for businesses. Special classes for female employees, for instance, were also created and offered at the educational institutions run by state-owned businesses. Women were likewise given leave to advance their (academic) qualifications at the industrial sector academy of the Carl Zeiss Kombinat. In the years 1967 and 1968, for instance, four courses were offered on the topic of socialist business management, and approximately thirty women participated. In the following years, women also took part in continuing education courses on business administration. These took place in 1968-69 and 1970, and they were taught both at Zeiss-Jena and at the Friedrich-Schiller University.22 Between 1976 and 1980, more than three thousand employees at Zeiss advanced their training enough to earn a so-called “certificate of proficiency” (Facharbeiterbrief).23 The percentage of women who achieved this – 75% – was strikingly high.24 By 1989, as mentioned above, approximately 30,000 people were employed at Zeiss’s headquarters in Jena. Although no quotas for female employment were ever instated, nearly half of the company’s workers were nevertheless women. Among these, 25% held a university or college degree, 3.6% possessed certification from the apprentice system, 67.6% had a training certificate of some sort, and 3.8% worked either part-time or had no higher qualifications.25 Yet despite all of the measures taken to promote the careers of women, it was still highly uncommon for a woman to have an executive position. Between 1946 and 1990, not a single woman was ever represented among the ninety-one employees at the executive level.26 According to an analysis conducted in 1977, there were 2,413 management positions at Zeiss-Jena and, of these, 233 (9.6%) were

20 21 22 23

Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 887. On the founding of Urania, see Chapter 13 of this book. Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 1492, p. 4. The certificate of proficiency (Facharbeiterbrief) was awarded upon examination to employees who had acquired theoretical knowledge and practical skills applicable to their jobs. 24 Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 3739. 25 EIFLER 2010, p. 79. 26 MÜTZE 2009, p. 843.

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held by women.27 Most of these women, moreover, were employed in lower management. In fact, only ten held positions that could be regarded as upper management (see the data in Table 12.1 above). They were in charge of personnel departments, departments of cultural and social affairs, economics and planning divisions, or they were active as in-house counsel. In 1988, as Dieter Remy has noted, the Ministry for Electrical Engineering and Electronics, which was the authority responsible for overseeing Zeiss’s corporate governance, criticized the company’s management for its seeming reluctance to appoint women to high-level positions.28 Despite these circumstances, there were nevertheless a number of female employees at Zeiss whose accomplishments attracted international renown. Some of their contributions should be recounted here. While at Zeiss, the married couple Lieselotte Moenke-Blankenburg and Horst Moenke conducted research on optical determination methods in mineralogy and chemistry and developed – together with a team – the first instrument at Zeiss that made use of a laser.29 Both of them had completed their doctoral degrees at the Mineralogical Institute of the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena. The latter institute was closely associated ZeissJena, and in fact its main building had been funded, at Ernst Abbe’s instigation, by the Carl Zeiss Foundation.30 Lieselotte Blankenburg’s dissertation, which she defended in 1963, bore the title “A Spectrochemical Analysis of Rare Earth Metals in Minerals and Stones with Grid and Prism Spectrographs” [“Spectrochemische Analyse seltener Erden in Mineralien und Gesteinen mit Gitter- und Prismenspektrographen”].31 Her husband had completed his degree six years earlier with a topic likewise concerned with the spectral analysis of stones. The measuring instrument that they developed at Zeiss, which was the first to apply laser technology to spectral analysis, was the Laser-Micro-Spectral Analyzer LMA 1, which combined a microscope, a solid-body laser, and a spectrograph. At that point, a similar device could be found only in the USA.32 They also published their results in English,33 and the instrument was sold worldwide. Although the couple had two children together, Lieselotte Moenke-Blankenburg was nevertheless able to carry out her scientific career. She completed her post-doctoral thesis (Habilitation) at the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg in 1981, where

27 Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 3739. This document is titled “Materials on the Support of Women in Management Positions” (Arbeitsmaterial zur Betreuung von Frauen in Leitungsfunktionen), and it is dated September 13, 1977. 28 REMY 2005, p. 58. 29 MOENKE/MOENKE-BLANKENBURG 1965. The following newspaper article is kept at the Carl Zeiss Archiv (BACZ 18969): “Als erste Frau promoviert – Ein Ehepaar mit dem LASER-Gerät auf du und du,” Thüringer Landeszeitung, April 23, 1965. 30 See Horst Franke’s article “Mineralogie,” in STOLZ/WITTIG 1993, pp. 316–22. 31 I owe this information to Margit Hartleb (University of Jena Archives). 32 See SCHRAMM 2008, pp. 95–103. 33 MOENKE/MOENKE-BLANKENBURG 1966a, 1966b, 1973; MOENKE-BLANKENBURG 1989.

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she was also appointed associate professor of analytic chemistry in September of 1987.34 Ursula Gabler, after having worked for Zeiss, likewise received a professorship. Gabler worked as an economist at Zeiss during the implementation of the “new economic system” in the 1960s and became a professor of business at the University of Jena. After the unification of Germany in 1990, she worked in corporate banking for the Dresdner Bank in Cologne, Leipzig, and Erfurt. In 1994, she became an executive at the Mittelständische Beteiligungsgesellschaft in Thuringia, a holding company for medium-sized businesses.35 An outstanding architect, Gertrud Schille designed and built planetariums for Zeiss around the world, and she has given a firsthand account of her activity in Chapter 5.4 of the present book.36 Trained as an engineer, Edith Hellmuth was for many years the director of Zeiss’s archive in Jena. Today she is an administrator for the History of Technology Society in Jena and the author, together with the economic historian Wolfgang Mühlfriedel, of several books and articles about the history of the Zeiss Corporation.37 In 1969, Sigrid Schlegel completed a degree in foreign trade at the Josef Orlopp College of Foreign Trade (Fachschule für Außenwirtschaft Josef Orlopp),38 and she then worked for the foreign trade department at Zeiss-Jena, where she ultimately became the director of a sales division. Last to be mentioned is Dr. Lieselotte Richter, who directed the human resources department of Zeiss’s research center and thus oversaw the careers of several thousand employees. She reported in a conversation that one of her main objectives was the promotion and qualification of women.39 12.4 Childcare and the Balancing of Professional and Family Life The problem of balancing work life and family life fell squarely on the shoulders of women, for even in East Germany, where much social progress had been made, traditional gender roles prevailed. Even then, the dominant conception among most men – and many women – was that of a woman being a “protectress of the herd” and a mother of children. As early as 1799, the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller had depicted this conception in his “Song of the Bell”:

34 See Who’s Who in Germany (2007). 35 For professional information about Ursula Gabler, see http://www.ebn24.com/?id=32507. 36 I am indebted here to Gertrud Schille for providing me with additional information about certain female employees at Zeiss. Our conversation took place on May 1, 2013. 37 See HELLMUTH/MÜHLFRIEDEL 2000; MÜHLFRIEDEL/WALTER/HELLMUTH 1996, 2004. 38 Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 2048 (thesis by Sigrid Schlegel as an economist of foreign trade). Though based in Berlin, this college also had a subsidiary branch in Jena. 39 Our conversation took place on April 30, 2013.

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The man must without, Into struggling life; With toiling and strife, He must plan and contrive; Must be prudent to thrive; With boldness must dare, Good fortune to share. […] Within doors governs The modest, careful wife, The children’s kind mother; And wise is the rule Of her household school. She teaches the girls, And she warns the boys; She directs all the bands, Of diligent hands, And increases their gain By her orderly reign. […]40 Even at Schiller’s time, this notion of gender roles had been criticized, especially by Caroline Schlegel, an unusually emancipated female representative of the Early Romantic literary movement in Jena. She did not hesitate to ridicule Schiller on account his antiquated conception of women, and she is said to have nearly fallen over in laughter after having read the lines quoted above.41 Nevertheless, such an image of women persists even today in certain areas of Germany and encumbers the equal participation of women in several professions. In East Germany, the desired balance of professional and family life was never fully achieved, for most working women had to endure the burdens inherent to both aspects of life. This was especially true of young women with children, that is, the majority of women between the ages of twenty and forty. Because of government incentives, which had been expanded considerably in the 1970s, the birthrate had been growing steadily. Despite the incentives, however, women still wanted to or had to contribute to their family’s earnings, because overall family incomes were relatively low. As of 1976, Zeiss-Jena managed to find a place in a childcare facility for all of its employees’ children,42 an achievement that was able to be made at the time throughout East Germany as a whole. The daily commute to Kindergarten or Kinderkrippe, however, was often fraught with difficulties. It was at this time that ten thousand new and mostly young employees had been recruited to work in Jena, and they were typically sent to reside in newly-constructed housing complexes outside of the city center. On the one hand, these 40 This translation from Schiller’s “Lied von der Glocke” is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. It is quoted here from UNGAR 1959, pp. 239–40. 41 See HORN 1976, p. 28. 42 Carl Zeiss Archiv, VA 1852 (contains a speech by the general director on women’s affairs; dated January 1, 1977).

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modern apartments were much appreciated, for they were equipped with central heating and considerable comforts (coal heating was typical before then and remained in use for some time). On the other hand, these housing complexes were lacking in suitable infrastructure – shopping centers, cultural institutions, childcare facilities, etc. – for many years. As a result, it could happen that a young woman would have to bring her child or children by crowded bus to facilities in the center of town. Approximately ten kilometers lay between the largest of Jena’s new housing complexes and downtown, and a young mother had to arrive at work punctually at 7:15 in the morning. Hardly any young family could manage to acquire a car of its own, because not enough cars were produced to meet demand (a situation unimaginable today). To buy a car, one would have to apply and then wait more or less ten years for its delivery. The difficulties of daily life, the paucity of convenient childcare facilities, and the general burden of running a household resulted in many working women feeling overstrained and thus preferring part-time jobs. At Zeiss, however, work of this sort was not viewed favorably. Whenever business productivity was evaluated, part-time employment was regularly criticized for bringing down the numbers. And yet neither Zeiss nor the women themselves were interested in giving up employment altogether on account of children. As a single mother who was especially dependent on my employment, I experienced these problems myself, and perhaps you will allow me to relate a personal experience. Although I had great support from my parents, who likewise lived in Jena, it happened from time to time that I could not pick up my daughter from childcare until late in the afternoon – until she was one of few children remaining. After one such occasion, I asked her whether she might also one day like to pursue an interesting career. Then five or so years old, she answered: “No, that would be too damaging for my child.” This was a spontaneous expression of feeling from the mouth of a young girl, expressed without any aggression toward me, and yet I have never forgotten it. Every mother could suffer guilt in this way, and each had to come to terms with it on her own. While beneficial, the generous state incentives provided to mothers and children also have to be evaluated on the basis of personal experience. I fully understand why my daughter, when she later became a mother herself, followed a path so different from mine. In 1976, a newly enacted law guaranteed a paid year of maternity leave, and this facilitated to some extent the situation of young working mothers. Admittedly, the so-called “baby year” could only be used by mothers, not fathers. Because of part-time positions and (paid) maternity leave, these women were of course less available at the workplace. If they sought additional training, there was always the danger that they might fail their exams and thus seem even less qualified professionally. In the end, this situation can only be seen as an expression of insufficient emancipation. No one at the time considered implementing any measures, as some European nations have since enacted,43 to encourage men to partici43 In Sweden and the Netherlands, for instance, fathers may take paternity leave without fearing for their job security.

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pate more fully in raising children. The responsibility for childcare was entrusted almost completely to women. Moreover, because mothers in East Germany were generally very young, grandmothers themselves were often still employed and thus seldom available to help. 12.5 Concluding Remarks Given the societal and political conditions of East Germany, it was almost a matter of course that a highly self-confident generation of women emerged there, women who were challenged and encouraged and who learned to circumvent any opposition to their goals. For the most part, women were treated equally under the law, and men did not possess any gender-specific authority over women, even if women happened to be subordinate to them professionally. In matters of “sexual harassment,” an issue still discussed in the workplaces of today, the aim then was to reach a mutual agreement about how to proceed (this was also so that women would not have to fear for their jobs). Even though the problem of balancing work and family life was difficult to overcome and never fully solved, no woman wanted to undo any of the accomplishments that had been made on the path toward emancipation. Increasingly qualified and engaged participants in all sectors of the economy, women emancipated themselves and provided the overall workforce with a new and modern face. By doing so, they necessarily also changed the way in which men would interact with their female colleagues. If at first only begrudgingly, men gradually came to accept that women could make positive contributions to the completion of the objectives at hand. That said, a number of specific problems still had to be overcome in practice. Although women grew more and more self-confident on account of their employment, the feeling often remained that they were never really regarded as professional equals by their male colleagues. This I learned from my experiences as an advisor for women’s affairs. The feeling was fostered to some degree by the infrequent promotion of women to management positions, even despite the measures taken to facilitate their professional advancement. This seems to be a universal problem. Recent studies confirm that women, on account of their family lives, are still overlooked before men in promotion decisions. They also show that it is typically unmarried or childless women who are hired as executives and whose careers keep up with those of men.44 The ideal goal remained the achievement of complete equality for women in all positions. This was not achieved, and we are still not close to achieving it today. Nevertheless, some promising developments have been taking place recently at the Zeiss Corporation. In 2013, the cover story of first issue of Carl Zeiss im Bild international, its corporate magazine, bears the title “Striking the Right Balance” (in the German edition: “Beruf und Familie – Geht das?”). In his foreword 44 Regarding this disparity in mathematical disciplines, see ABELE/NEUNZERT/TOBIES 2004.

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to the issue, Zeiss’s chief executive, Dr. Michael Kaschke, declares in a subtitle: “Balancing family life and work life is important to us.” He goes on to stress: “The Carl Zeiss Group has a strong brand and innovative products. It makes frequent adjustments and reacts quickly and flexibly to current developments. It also remains steadfastly aware of its social responsibility. We intend to advance the specific culture at Zeiss, about which we can already be proud, even further in the right direction.”45

Figure 12.1: The Title Page of Carl Zeiss im Bild international, 2013, Issue 1 (Source: [Carl Zeiss Archive]).

45 KASCHKE 2013, p. 3.

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Bibliography Carl Zeiss Archiv: VA 113, ND, 19.1.1965, p. 3: Ernst Gallerach, Carl Zeiss Jena: “Genügen ein paar neue Handgriffe?” and the Appeal by Dr. Hugo Schrade, 25.1.1965. VA 1495, A Letter to Inge Lange, president of the women’s commission of the Central Committee of the SED, 21.1.1965. BACZ 18969, Article in Volkswacht, 23.4.1965: “Als erste Frau promoviert.” BACZ 2978, Dissertation of Lieselotte Moenke-Blankenburg, submitted to the Friedrich Schiller University in 1962. VA 965, Annual Report by the Betriebs-Akademie, 1967. VA 2048, Sigrid Schlegel’s thesis paper (Abschlussarbeit), 1969. VA 1492, Report on women’s qualifications, 26.8.1968; Plan to support women in leadership positions at Zeiss-Jena, 1970–75. VA 887, Training Institutions. VA 3739, Paper, 21.12.1976: “Results and Problems with the Training of Female Production Workers”; Paper on the participation and support of women in leadership positions, 13.9.1977; Analysis of women’s share in leadership positions, etc., 30.3.1977; Statement on the Plan for increased labor, 1976–80. VA 1854, Plan for gender policy at Zeiss-Jena in 1977, dated 30.12.1976; Plan of the Zeiss Research Center to promote women, 1977. VA 1852, Speech to the Women’s Forum by Zeiss’s general director, 12.1.1977. GB 1964, General director’s plan for Zeiss’s gender policy in 1981, dated 22.10.1980. [UAJ] Universitätsarchiv Jena, Promotionsakten. ABELE, Andrea; NEUNZERT, Helmut; TOBIES, Renate (2004). Traumjob Mathematik! Berufswege von Frauen und Männern in der Mathematik. Basel: Birkhäuser. EIFLER, Horst (2010). Entwicklung der betrieblichen Aus- und Weiterbildung bei Carl Zeiss Jena 1945–1990. Jena: Eigenverlag. HELLMUTH, Edith; MÜHLFRIEDEL, Wolfgang (2000). “Carl Zeiss Jena – Widerspruchsvoller Weg in die Planwirtschaft.” In: Macht und Milieu. Jena zwischen Kriegsende und Mauerbau. Ed. Rüdiger STUTZ. Rudolstadt and Jena: Hain Verlag, pp. 327–68. HERBST, Andreas; RANKE, Winfried; WINKLER, Jürgen (1994). So funktionierte die DDR. Lexikon der Organisationen und Institutionen (Vol. 1 and 2); Lexikon der Funktionäre (Vol. 3). Reinbek and Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch. HORN, Gisela (1998). Romantische Frauen – Sophie Mereau, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit. Weimar: Hain Verlag. KASCHKE, Michael (2013). “Uns ist die Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf wichtig.” Carl Zeiss im Bild international (CZiB) 1, p. 3. MOENKE, Horst; MOENKE-BLANKENBURG, Lieselotte (1965). Optische Bestimmungsverfahren und Geräte für Mineralogen und Chemiker. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Geest & Portig. MOENKE, Horst; MOENKE-BLANKENBURG, Lieselotte (1966a). “Laser-Mikro-Spektralanalyse.” Jenaer Rundschau 3, pp. 166–71. MOENKE, Horst; MOENKE-BLANKENBURG, Lieselotte (1966b). Einführung in die Laser-MikroEmissionsspektralanalyse (Technisch-physikalische Monographien 21). Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Geest & Portig. MOENKE, Horst; MOENKE-BLANKENBURG, Lieselotte (1973). Laser Micro-Spectrochemical Analysis. New York: Crane, Russak, and Co. MOENKE-BLANKENBURG, Lieselotte (1989). Laser Microanalysis. (Chemical Analysis: A Series of Monographs on Analytical Chemistry and Its Applications 105). Weinheim: John Wiley & Sons.

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MÜHLFRIEDEL, Wolfgang; WALTER, Rolf; HELLMUTH, Edith (1996). Carl Zeiss in Jena 1846– 1905 (Carl Zeiss: Die Geschichte eines Unternehmens 1). Cologne: Böhlau. MÜHLFRIEDEL, Wolfgang; WALTER, Rolf; HELLMUTH, Edith (2004). Carl Zeiss in Jena 1945– 1990 (Carl Zeiss: Die Geschichte eines Unternehmens 3). Cologne: Böhlau. MÜLLER-ENBERGS, Helmut; WIELGOHS, Jan; HOFMANN, Dieter; HERBST, Andreas; KIRSCHEYFEIX, Ingrid; REIMANN, Olaf W., eds. (2010). Wer war wer in der DDR? Vols. 1 and 2. 5th ed. Berlin: Ch. Links. MÜTZE, Klaus (2009). Die Macht der Optik. Industriegeschichte Jenas von 1846-1996: Vom Rüstungskonzern zum Industriekombinat, Vol. 2: 1946–1996. Vermächtnis, Erkenntnis, Experiment und Fortschritt. Jena: Quartus Verlag. REMY, Dietmar (2005). “Kaderauswahl und Karrieredeterminanten beim Kombinat VEB Carl Zeiss Jena in der Ära Biermann (1975–1989).” Historical Social Research 30, pp. 50–72. SCHRAMM, Michael (2008). Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft in DDR und BRD. Die Kategorie Vertrauen in Innovationsprozessen. Cologne: Böhlau. SCHREINER, Katharina (1999). Das Zeiss-Kombinat (1975–1989). Ein fragmentarisches Zeitzeugnis. Jena: Jenaer Forum für Bildung und Wissenschaft e.V. SCHREINER, Katharina; GATTNAR, Klaus-Dieter; SKOLUDEK, Horst (2006). Carl Zeiss Ost und West – Geschichte einer Wiedervereinigung. Jena: Quartus-Verlag. SCHREINER, Katharina, together with the Arbeitskreis Jena and Horst SKOLUDEK (2012). ZEISS Ost – ZEISS West in den Interessenkonflikten der 60er Jahre (Fragmentarische Dokumentation). Nerkewitz: Eigenverlag. TOBIES, Renate (2007). “Mathematik an der Universität Jena – Trends zwischen 1945 und 1989.” In: Studien zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 2. Ed. U. HOßFELD, T. KAISER, and H. MESTRUP. Cologne: Böhlau, pp. 1374–99. UNGAR, Frederick, ed. (1959). Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for Our Time (All-English Edition). New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing.

13 DESIGNING AND BUILDING PLANETARIUMS FOR THE CARL ZEISS CORPORATION: AN ARCHITECT TELLS HER STORY Gertrud Schille The International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) was founded in the United States in 1985.1 Its mission is to document the history of women’s involvement in architecture, interior and industrial design, landscape architecture, urban design and planning, architectural history and criticism, and professional organizations. Although this essay has been written independently of the IAWA, its aims are the same. Here I will survey my career path in the field of industrial design while I was a member of the Carl Zeiss Corporation, a producer of optical instruments based in Jena, Germany. To a great extent, my family history and my professional life have been characterized by my home town of Jena, which is located in the beautiful Saale Valley. In Jena I was influenced by the rich cultural and scientific environment – an environment that has existed there since the fifteenth century – and by the optomechanical industry that has been established there since the nineteenth century. This is an industry known, so to speak, for its particular culture of precision. It was in this milieu that, beginning in the 1970s, I was able to apply the latest methods to the architectural design of planetariums. These projects were undertaken both in Germany and internationally. Here I would like to demonstrate how I was able – as a woman – to execute creative ideas, and I would like to do so by discussing my role in the design and construction of a planetarium in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. In addition, I hope to make a few remarks about the historical roots of my conception of planetariums in general. 13.1 A Biographical Sketch In 1897, the Carl Zeiss firm in Jena founded its astronomical department (AstroAbteilung), a unique division with which I would later be closely associated. One of my grandfathers joined this company in the same year, which was still during the time of Ernst Abbe, and he went on to work there for more than fifty years. All told, eleven members of my family were employed at Zeiss, be it for a short time or throughout their entire careers. My father was trained there as precision engineer, and after his studies he rejoined the company as an economist. My other grandfather, a painter, settled in Jena in 1910 after having studied in Leipzig and Munich; he died in 1918, a victim of the First World War. Around the year 1900, another ancestor of mine was a master builder in Jena. I felt committed to this pro1

See the following website: http://archdesign.vt.edu/programs/international_archive_of_women.

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fessional culture from an early age, and thus I chose to study industrial construction at the College of Architecture and Construction in Weimar (Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen), which is now the Bauhaus-Universität. I began my studies in 1960 and specialized under the supervision of Professor Hans Lahnert. My thesis, it turns out, concerned a project commissioned by the Zeiss company, from which I received a preliminary employment contract before my degree was complete. In 1968, after a probationary period, I began working officially at Zeiss as an architect in the project development department, with a focus on planning investment projects. Because of my background, I was already familiar with the Bauhaus style and its socio-cultural theories, and I used my student years to familiarize myself, in a manner beyond what was typically recommended, with traditional and novel design methods. Among other things, I participated in an elective course on concrete shell construction (Schalenbauweise), a style of architecture involving thin, curved walls of reinforced concrete. It was with this method, for instance, that the cupola of the first projection planetarium in Jena was designed, a structure completed in 1920 to international fanfare for its use of the Zeiss-Dywidag system.2 Above all, I became interested in types of construction that were holistic and biologically oriented. I investigated topics such as biorealism in architecture, which was not yet part of the curriculum in Weimar, by studying the international scholarship that was available at the university library, and I became more and more impressed by the application of the cosmic, dynamic continuum to the design of human living spaces. Examples of such design can be seen, especially, in the work of Richard Neutra, Karl Foerster, Felix Candela, and Frei Paul Otto. Even though, at the time, I never considered that I would ever make use of this specialized knowledge, it would later serve as an important source of my inspiration. Even the so-called “Bauhaus Books” (Bauhaus-Bücher), which I had read as a student, influenced my holistically oriented thinking.3 It was while working as an architect at Zeiss that, in 1976, I was first commissioned to design planetariums, and this would be my main area of activity for the subsequent ten years. I had just taken a year of maternal leave after the birth of our second daughter, Eva, in 1975.4 (Since 1963 I have been married to Ralf Schille, a civil engineer; our first daughter, Uta, had been born in 1964, while I was still a student.) When I returned to Zeiss in 1976, I was asked to fill in for an on-leave architect who had been responsible for designing buildings abroad. At that point he had developed preliminary blueprints for an astronomical observatory in Iraq. Suddenly I had to travel to Bagdad and take part in meetings con2 3 4

See SCHMIDT 2005. A fourteen-volume series, the Bauhaus-Bücher were published between 1925 and 1930 by the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich. They were edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. At the time, maternal leave (“Baby-Jahr”) entailed that I could remain at home for one year with the knowledge that I could return to my job at Zeiss. It was not until an ordinance issued in 1976 that companies were required to pay a full salary throughout a career break of this sort (see Chapter 12).

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cerned with the project. This was, to say the least, highly unordinary. Having been thrown into the deep end, I drew upon the fascination for these types of building that I had fostered during my student years in Weimar. When I took over his work, this marked my first collaboration with Zeiss’s astronomical department. Before that I had accumulated seven years of experience on other construction projects at the same company. These projects included contributions to the socalled “Jentower” in Jena, responsibility for the construction of a new crystal growth facility in Eisenberg (Thuringia),5 managing the renovation and expansion of a plant used for molding plastic parts, and building a corporate cafeteria at Zeiss’s main plant in Jena (“Bau 15”). Moreover, a vacation resort for Zeiss’s employees, on the Usedom Island in the Baltic Sea, was built according to my design and under my architectural supervision.6 13.2 The Planetarium in Tripoli A few weeks after beginning my new job in 1976, I received a commission to design a planetarium for the city of Tripoli. At the time, East Germany enjoyed relatively close political and economic ties to Libya. Until 1972, the GDR had been recognized by only a few states, but after that year the number began to increase steadily. On September 18, 1973, both East and West Germany were accepted as members of the United Nations. This boosted trade opportunities, and Zeiss, like other East German companies, was asked to develop products for the international market and to achieve specific export goals. In those days, purchases of Zeiss’s latest “optical projection planetarium” included the construction of a projection cupola and an outer cupola made of reinforced concrete. This was a torcreted, thin structure with an integrated network of steel bars, the construction of which was based on the aforementioned ZeissDywidag system, which had been developed in the 1920s. This structural design had proved itself for decades, and it remained in use because, unlike other methods, a tenfold tolerance limit could be achieved with it. There was also an international trend in the 1970s for so-called “turn-key” services, that is, the delivery of complete and ready- for-use industrial facilities, including entire buildings. At the time, therefore, a new department was created within Zeiss’s sales management division specifically for managing the exportation of such facilities. I became the 5 6

At Zeiss, the cultivation of crystals was an important area of research for the development of optical instruments. In fact, such research had already been instigated by Ernst Abbe (see Horst Franke’s article “Mineralogie,” in STOLZ/WITTIG 1993, pp. 316–22). The resort consisted of 465 guest rooms, a circular restaurant, and rooms for management and facilities. At the time, nearly every large state-owned company had its own vacation resort, and this is because it was either difficult or impossible for most families to travel to foreign countries. The amenities offered at such vacation homes were variable and dependent on the finances of the company in question. It should be noted that companies had departments for social policy. Along with the trade unions, these departments were responsible to employees for the construction, maintenance, and distribution of vacation accommodations.

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first female employee within the management group concerned with “supplying facilities exports,” to which I was able to contribute my knowledge about the international state of concrete shell construction. The client in Libya had provided no architectural specifications whatsoever, nor any information about the building site itself. It was expected that the Zeiss Corporation would present its own suggestions, given that Jena had been the birthplace of the optical projection planetarium (a type of planetarium in which the constellations and planets are projected onto the inside of a white cupola). Given this blank slate, I was able to realize, for the first time, my holistic vision to the fullest. Having grown up in Jena, I was in the presence of a planetarium on a daily basis, one that had been standing in the former princess’s gardens for half a century. It was a fixture in the cultural life of the city. While planning the construction of the planetarium in Tripoli, I wanted first and foremost to clarify the cultural significance that such buildings can possess. 13.2.1 On the Cultural Role of Planetariums The purpose of planetariums is to convey knowledge about the cosmos, a sort of world view. Here one can observe phenomena that exist outside one’s daily experience. The artistic vision of the architect is required to create a physically and psychologically stimulating atmosphere that serves to enhance the human capacity for experience and also to render the universe open to such experience. In this light, planetariums can be regarded as cultural monuments of the scientific age, and thus they share something in common with temples, cathedrals, and mosques. It was now my task to fulfill these self-imposed architectural demands in a place such as Tripoli, a city on the Mediterranean coast of northern Africa with a rich cultural tradition of its own. Particular adjustments needed to be made to solve the architectonic problems at hand. Moreover, the project was begun under extraordinary time pressure, the deadline for the design being extremely tight. In this regard it was worth remembering a proverb by Seneca: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult” (Epistoles Morales 104.26) 13.2.2 Integrating the Planetarium into its Urban Environment During the concept stage, I attempted to take into account the international state of knowledge regarding planetariums as well as the local experiences accumulated at Zeiss since the construction of the first projection planetarium. Here I would like to add a few historical remarks. For a long time, knowledge of the cosmos had been restricted to an elite few. It was not until the Enlightenment that such information was made available to broader circles, a development for which poets and philosophers are owed a share of credit. Johann Wolfgang

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von Goethe, who had lived in Weimar, which is not far from Jena, and who had composed a good deal of his scientific and poetic works in Jena itself, included the following words in the prelude to his Faust: “Then spare me nothing, on our special day, / either of black-cloth or machinery. / Have sun and moon, and what you will of scenery. / And of the lesser fires be lavish: Give ’em star-light fit to ravish.”7 The philosopher Immanuel Kant had stressed the high ethical value of astronomy to the formation of human personalities and world views. In 1755, he published his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, or Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.8 In his Critique of Practical Reason, he famously claims to be moved by two things above all, “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,” a line that has been treated as a maxim by many later thinkers. Between 1832 and 1844, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, whose work led to the discovery of the planets Mercury and Uranus, held popular lectures in Königsberg on the scientific subject matter of astronomy. These lectures, the first of their kind, were published in 1848.9 Even greater impact was achieved by Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin, who delivered sixty-one lectures on the cosmos at the University of Berlin and sixteen popular lectures in the new hall of the so-called Sing-Akademie in 1827 and 1828.10 In 1888 and likewise in Berlin, Humboldt’s student Wilhelm Förster, an astronomer and later the director of the Berlin Observatory, cofounded the scientific society known as “Urania” with his fellow astronomer Max Wilhelm Meyer. Förster’s great efforts and charisma would have a lasting effect on preeminent figures in the fields of science, industry, and government. Among those influenced by him can be counted Ernst Abbe in Jena, Werner von Siemens in Berlin, and Robert Bosch in Stuttgart. These men were each members of the first executive board of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin, an institute founded in 1887 whose objectives included the standardization of weights and measures in Germany.11 At the Berlin observatory, where Förster also happened to reside, meetings were held by the so-called “Wednesday Society” (Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft). The members of this society, who were representatives of various academic fields, were committed to the following of Förster’s pronouncements: “The primary means of understanding celestial phenomena is to observe them. Such observation elevates our souls above much in life that is restrictive and disjunctive. It strengthens within us our common concern for the earthly world.”12 The influence of Wilhelm Förster was further reflected in landscape designs made by his son Karl Förster, among whose acquaintances can be numbered the architect Richard Neutra. A descendent of Viennese Jews, Neutra worked for some time at the Berlin office of the architect Erich Mendelsohn, with whom he 7 8 9 10 11 12

The translation is quoted from WAYNE 1949, p. 35. For an English translation of this text, see JOHNSTON 2009. See Schumacher 1848. See the preface to HAMEL/TIEMANN 2004. See CAHAN 2004. Quoted from Eva FÖRSTER 1982, p. 46.

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collaborated and consulted on the design of the Einstein Tower in PotsdamBabelsberg, among other projects.13 As mentioned above, I studied Neutra’s books during my student years; his contributions to biorealistic architecture remain well-received to this day. According to his theory of the physio-psychic continuum, upon which humans are located on earth, architects should be required to design living spaces in a responsible manner. His ideas have found expression, for instance, in the work of the Latin American architect Felix Candela and in the biomorphic designs of Frei Otto, a German architect born in Chemnitz. From 1987 to 1990, during my time at the University of Jena, I worked for some time at the archive of the Academy of Science in Berlin, where I was able to study the correspondence between Wilhelm Förster and Ernst Abbe. The topic of their exchanges was not restricted to technical developments in the field of astronomical instruments. Abbe also sent to Förster the newly formulated statute of the Carl Zeiss Foundation with a request for his feedback. In comparison to the foundation’s first set of bylaws, which were instituted in 1889, the new draft was expanded to address social, cultural, and political issues. That said, the following point was already stressed in article 9b of the earlier document: “I also trust, however, that the foundation will readily endorse additional measures for the promotion of the economic and moral welfare of society, for the enhancement of the comforts of life, or for intellectual stimulation […].”14 The statute, which consisted of 122 articles, encouraged the Carl Zeiss Corporation, as well as governmental and educational institutions, to foster an atmosphere of creativity. The conception of the city’s planetarium came about for just such a reason, as did the so-called “Volkshaus” in Jena, which is still used for cultural events today, and what was then the largest public library in Germany, which opened in 1903. Popular lectures were held by the likes of Ernst Haeckel, who taught at the University of Jena from 1862 to 1909 and who was an early proponent of evolutionary theory. In March of 1909, employees at Zeiss founded a society for popular science and astronomy, namely the “Jenaer Urania.”15 Members of this society could make use of Zeiss’s corporate observatory, which had been built in Abbe’s time. The facility has since been expanded with funding provided by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Many developments in Jena had been inspired by happenings in Berlin and Munich, two great centers of science. Ernst Abbe was not the only scientist with ties in Berlin; Haeckel, for instance, visited the Berlin Urania society to discuss his theory of evolution. This society had at its disposal an observatory with a “scientific theater,” upon whose stage the latest scientific discoveries were presented. Here, moreover, were kept seven hundred slides of the night sky, which were used to convey astronomical information. It was from these slides that the thought was conceived to create a planetarium with a projection system. 13 See Hentschel 1997. 14 Quoted from STOLZ/WITTING 1993, p. 169. 15 For information about this society, see the website: http://www.urania-sternwarte.de.

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Additional inspiration for this concept came from Munich, where the famous German Museum of Science and Technology (Deutsches Museum) was opened in 1903. Oskar von Miller, the founder of the museum, planned for it to include an astronomical section with two planetariums, one representing the heliocentric model of the universe and the other the geocentric. When this project was initially announced in 1912, the submitted proposals failed to meet expectations. It came to be that, in the following year, Miller awarded the contract personally to Rudolf Straubel, then one of the executives of the Zeiss Corporation.16 Thus began the history of Jena’s projection planetarium. Although the project was interrupted by the First World War, the engineer and executive Walther Bauersfeld ultimately managed to develop a unique equipment system for it (patent no. 391036, issued on October 17, 1922) as well as a self-supporting cupola for purposes of projection. The latter feature was created in conjunction with the structural engineer Franz Dischinger and the construction company Dyckerhoff and Widmann, which is abbreviated as DYWIDAG. In the summer of 1924, an artificial firmament was presented for the first time in an experimental cupola on the roof of one of Zeiss’s factories, and it aroused a great deal of public attention. Iris Runge, an industrial researcher based in Berlin, came to Jena for a professional conference in September of 1924; she wrote the following enthusiastic account to her mother: [T]he highlight of the lighting engineering conference in Jena was the large planetarium. […] [I]t has been built for the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but it has already been on temporary display to the public in Jena. To see it, people have supposedly been waiting in lines that stretch across the street. Now, however, its shipment to Munich has been delayed, and it has been on extended display exclusively for the lighting engineers. It is amazing!! It consists of a synthetically assembled and rotatable projection device that projects the entire night sky, planets and everything, onto the inside of a white cupola. The cupola is part of a building that resembles an observatory, and the structure is placed on the roof of a Zeiss factory. […] The sun is proportional, but its light is represented dimly, so that the stars in its vicinity are somewhat faded. However, it is possible to see the larger stars just as they appear on a moonlit night. The planets have been enlarged […]. And here one gets a very lively image of their motion in the sky. […] The yearly movement of sun through the zodiac is shown as well […]. In short, it was glorious.17

The planetarium at the German Museum of Science and Technology opened in May of 1925, and this was followed by the construction of other planetariums in Wuppertal-Barmen, Leipzig, and Düsseldorf. Jena consecrated a planetarium of its own on July 17, 1926, and this remains the oldest standing planetarium in the world (the few older planetariums were destroyed in the Second World War). From patents it is clear that the technology was steadily being refined; examples include the German (imperial) patent no. 439557, which was issued to the Carl 16 On the history of the planetarium contract and the execution of the project, see the following website: http://www.deutsches-museum.de/sammlungen/ausgewaehlte-objekte/meisterwerkei/planetarium/. 17 This unpublished letter from Iris Runge to her mother Aimée Runge (née Du Bois-Reymond) is dated October 8, 1924. I am indebted to Renate Tobies, who had access to Iris Runge’s estate, for making this source known to me. [Runge Estate]

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Zeiss Corporation on December 12, 1924, and U.S. patent no. 1,693,969, which was issued on December 12, 1928 to Walther Bauersfeld and Walter Villinger, the director of Zeiss’s department for astronomical instruments and planetariums. During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of additional planetariums were built with the techniques developed by Zeiss, including eight more in Germany, four in the U.S.A., and one in Japan. After 1954, is should be added, Zeiss was divided into East German and West German factions. The headquarters of the former remained in Jena, whereas that of the latter was established in Oberkochen. By now, Zeiss’s planetariums have been constructed on all of the habitable continents.18 13.2.3 My Agenda for the Planetarium in Tripoli In Tripoli I was not faced with any financial restrictions. This was unusual for me, for in East Germany I typically had to work with a limited budget. A great future was imagined for the structure in Tripoli, and this could only be achieved – as the history of architecture has made clear – if the full capacity of building materials could be exploited and if beautiful architectural features could remain visible to the public. Such were my goals, and I hoped to accomplish them for everyone involved in the building process. Up until 1976, the supplementary structures abutting domed planetariums were mostly large-scale buildings of their own, and thus the transitional spaces between the individual structures were often challenging to design. Early on, entryways were often adorned with historical or symbolic features, such as a temple portico with a columned atrium. More recent architects, however, have attempted to cover the traditional projection cupola with other types of concrete shells or plate designs. Such efforts are featured, for instance, on the planetariums in Colombo, Vancouver, and Halle an der Saale. For the planetarium in Tripoli I developed a somewhat novel architectural solution; namely, I combined a traditional domed structure with an exaggerated parabolic shell, the latter being star-shaped and divided into five sections. Admittedly, a roof of this sort was not entirely new. A similar design had been used for a government building in East Berlin (the so-called “Ahornblatt,” or “Maple Leaf”).19 Similar structures had also already existed internationally.20 In comparison with these buildings, however, I tightened the form of the shell, allowing it to shoot steeply into the sky. Thus I was able to ensure that the overall planetarium complex had a dynamic effect and also that it seemed to be made of a single piece. All sections of the building – both the planetarium cupola as well as the exterior 18 See KRAUSSE 2004. 19 The architect of this building was Gerhard Lehmann, who created several important buildings, especially in Berlin. Lehmann designed the “Ahornblatt” in conjunction with the Müther Construction Company in Binz (on the Rügen Island). 20 Analogous buildings included works by Felix Candela, Heinz Isler, and Frei Otto (especially the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart).

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shell of the supplementary building (which contained an entrance hall, a studio theater, a conference center, and a movie theater) – were constructed in the same way, namely out of thin walls of reinforced concrete. While planning the project as a whole, I strove to synthesize the formal language of contemporary architecture with elements from Libya’s historical and cultural traditions. These included a columned arcade surrounding the cupola structure, decorative fiberglass-concrete screens in front of large tinted windows, reflection pools in the exterior space, and a fountain in the entrance hall. Where they meet with open space, all of the surfaces of the building were made particularly narrow, with the only exception being the structure of the main gateway. In this way, as sunset approaches, the eye of the visitor is drawn gradually to the domed space containing the artificial firmament. The grand entrance hall was designed to encourage a meditative attitude, an attitude engendered by first impressions and sustained by the anticipation of encountering the universe beneath the dark dome ahead. Our technological goals were realized by means of the so-called “Spacemaster,” the optical projection planetarium designed in Jena. Within the dome, various sensory impressions are meant to be experienced simultaneously, an effect described fittingly by Neutra: “In our mundane scene, the experience of space and time has an ineffably great deal to do with all of the sensory impressions that force themselves upon us. The organic dynamism within us is invariably related, in the most delicate manner, to our sensory experiences.” He adds: “I have had the pleasure of knowing Albert Einstein and of discussing with him how remarkably differently the observing psychologist and the constructing physiopsychologist – that is, the architect – have to define the concept of space in comparison to how the mathematical physicist must do the same. […] For his part, the professional architect creates a work of simulation that draws upon all of the senses, and does so in a very specific manner.”21

21 NEUTRA 1977, pp. 33–34.

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Figure 13.1: The planetarium in Tripoli – proposal and layout (courtesy of the author).

My proposal also specified that the offices of the planetarium’s management, engineers, and staff would be located in the structure surrounding the cupola. The mechanics of the building and its sanitation facilities were to be located on the basement level. In order to increase the persuasiveness of our proposal for the site, a model of the design had to be made. In fact, we produced two variants, one representing the maximum and the other an intermediate cost. The designer responsible for the great quality of these models was Walter Bubetz, whom I was able to commission after a lengthy search for candidates. Although he was not a specialist in making architectural models, he worked according to my advice and was was more than able to support our undertaking. The models of the planetarium were then pre-

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sented to the members of the Libyan parliament, who decided in our favor: The Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena was awarded the contract for the “turn-key project” and was named general contractor for the construction of the entire planetarium complex. As an architect with a facilitating role, I assumed important coordinating functions in order to enact my creative ideas. First I was able to exert some influence over the decision of where the planetarium should be located within the city of Tripoli. Here I succeeded in having a location chosen that was both near the Mediterranean and also enjoyed a view of the city’s marina. What is more, one of the government’s guest houses was also situated nearby. In order for the project to progress, we had to review offers from various international construction companies and to decide which one should receive the contract. We chose the Swedish construction firm SIAB BYGGEN to be the main builders. The latter company, in turn, subcontracted an East German specialty firm – namely the Spezialbeton company in Binz, led by the engineer Ulrich Müther – to build the concrete shell. For certain finishings, moreover, we issued additional direct contracts to companies in East Germany: For furniture and interior decorating we hired a firm headquartered in Meiningen (Thuringia); for electrical engineering we turned to a company based in Leipzig and Halle; and for communications engineering we contracted another firm from Leipzig. I was personally responsible for directing all architectural affairs and for supervising all of the companies under contract. My duties required me to manage the coordination phase with the contractors and subcontractors, to collaborate with my immediate colleagues in Zeiss’s astronomical department, to be the person of contact for our Libyan clients, and to ensure that all tasks be completed according to schedule. Interpreters were made available to me to assist with my work on site, where I was able, as a woman, to execute my plans and proposals. Especially helpful was the support of colleagues familiar with cultural and local affairs, for example Peter Wendt, a correspondent for the East German news agency in Tripoli. It goes without saying, moreover, that all our activities were overseen by Zeiss’s sales department and by representatives of the East German embassy in Libya. 13.3 The Planetarium in Wolfsburg (West Germany) Wolfsburg, which was founded in 1938 to house the employees of a Volkswagen factory, was to receive a planetarium in honor of its fortieth anniversary as a city.22 I was still entrenched in my work on the planetarium in Tripoli when, in 1978, Hans Gerhard Beck requested architectural designs from me for this “automobile city.” Since 1961, Beck had been Zeiss’s lead developer of astronomical instruments and planetariums. He had also participated in the meetings in Wolfsburg at which the city council had reached the decision to construct a planetarium. The latter was to be financed by Volkswagen and designed and built 22 See the following online story: http://www.zeit.de/1978/28/manager-und-maerkte.

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by the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena. The business arrangement, which was negotiated by East German government officials, was a so-called “tie-in deal” (Koppelgeschäft); in exchange for Zeiss’s expertise, Volkswagen agreed to supply East Germany with automobile engines. To ensure that Zeiss would be contracted both to supply technical equipment and to oversee the construction of the entire planetarium complex, architectural designs were required on short notice. I had only ten days, including nights and weekends, to complete the preliminary blueprints, and my ambition was to highlight some specific features of the region with the methods of modern architecture. In this regard, Hans G. Beck suggested that stainless steel should be used on the exterior of the planetarium to reflect the significance of the steel industry in Lower Saxony. A precedent for such a design existed in Stuttgart, where the West German branch of Zeiss had constructed a planetarium in 1977. The latter structure was supported by a six-part stainless steel skeleton called “the spider.” In contrast to the planetarium in Stuttgart, however, I wanted to preserve the traditional cupola, Jena’s trademark feature. My solution was to design a traditional a double-cupola system with a reflective exterior and to add over them a third open cupola made of a filigree stainless-steel network. As the work of the architectural historian Joachim Krausse has shown, my idea of a free-standing cupola made of a network of bars corresponded to a vision that the Bauhaus architect Adolf Meyer had already realized in the 1920s, when the Zeiss-Dywidag system was being developed.23 About such a cupola, Meyer wrote: An intellectual fluoroscopy of the cupolas designed by Zeiss would reveal the purest imaginable integration of form and structure. […] Regarding the outer surface of the cupola, its 24 structure should yield an image of crystalline clarity and formal unambiguity.

Figure 13.2: The planetarium in Wolfsburg – original proposal (courtesy of the author).

23 See KRAUSSE 2004. 24 MEYER 1925/26, p. 17.

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Despite our tight deadline, we managed to deliver a presentation with a good number of visual aids. After the initial drawings had been completed, and before they were sent to Wolfsburg for review, they had to be presented to Siegfried Hülss, who was then the director of Zeiss’s facilities export division. Further copies were made and ultimately shown to Wolfgang Biermann, the general director of Zeiss in Jena, who wanted to evaluate the plan personally.25 As I was bringing the documents to his office, I came across his office manage, to whom I was able to explain the most important aspects of my design. While I was doing this, Biermann stepped into his waiting room, where he had me explain my ideas yet again. He asked: “Did you have fun doing this?” As I began to answer him honestly – “Well … nights and weekends …” – I realized that the nearly universally feared general director could actually be very polite. He cut me off to offer his own assessment: “You certainly had fun doing this – so much is clear from the design!” As a consequence of Biermann’s approval, I was included among a group of corporate delegates to travel from Jena to Wolfsburg, where I was able to present my own ideas to the client. This was unexpected to me, because travel from East to West Germany was highly restricted at the time. After making our presentation to the mayor of Wolfsburg, to the city director, and to various other government officials, we received a positive decision on the same day. In turn, a model of the planetarium had to be made in short order. This was done by Walter Bubetz, the same designer who created the models for Tripoli. His model was festively displayed on the stage of the Wolfsburg Theater, and it was declared a “work of art” by the city officials. Even though, over the course of the project, the city of Wolfsburg made use of other contractors and ultimately chose a second variant for the final plan, my design nevertheless served as the basis for the new planetarium. The entire undertaking represented an example of East and West German cooperation during a time when the country was still divided. Participants in the project included Carl Zeiss in Jena, Jenoptik in Jena, the Wolfsburg building authorities, the architectural studio Roland Hesse in Wolfsburg, and the architectural firm Kersten-Martinoff-Struhk from Braunschweig. Jenoptik managed the construction of the concrete shell, for which they subcontracted the specialty firm Spezialbeton in Binz. Professor Karl Kordina, from the Materials Testing Institute in Braunschweig, was hired by Wolfsburg to serve as the building inspector; he instituted strict testing criteria and contributed constructively to the project as a whole.

25 On Wolfgang Biermann, see also Chapter 12 of this book.

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Figure 13.3: The planetarium in Wolfsburg – cross section of the revised plan (courtesy of the author).

It was my job to manage all of the services being provided by Jena, so that the project could be completed by the decided deadline. The planetarium – furnished with a blue exterior (representing planet earth), consisting of a two-thirds sphere (a unique feature for a structure of this sort), and containing a cupola auditorium with a Zeiss planetarium projector – was consecrated on December 1, 1983. 13.4 Additional Planetarium Projects Every planetarium construction project has its own special history. By way of conclusion, I should mention the other projects to which I contributed in one way or another, be it conceptually, as the chief architect, or as an on-site consultant. For the large Zeiss planetarium in Berlin, which opened in 1987, I developed the overall concept and worked as a consultant. For the construction of the planetarium in Edmonton, I was employed as an on-site consultant, as I likewise was for the planetarium project in Kuwait City. For planetariums in Sapporo and Algiers, the capital of Algeria, I designed architectural plans and submitted proposals for each. In Algiers, moreover, I worked on-site as a conceptual consultant.

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Figure 13.4: The planetarium in Berlin – project meeting in Berlin with city architects, urban planners, and architects from the Ministry of Culture (courtesy of the author, who is pictured standing on the left).

During this entire time, however, I never forgot a piece of wisdom that had been expressed so eloquently by the poet Theodor Storm: “[O]nly up to a certain stage in life does that electric current flow through our nerves, the current that carries us beyond ourselves and irresistibly sweeps others with it too.”26 I owe my thanks to everyone who encouraged and trusted me throughout my career in the largely male-dominated fields of architecture and construction, but I am no less grateful to those who were exacting and demanding. None of my achievements would have been possible, of course, without the sympathetic support of my family.

26 Quoted from the novella “Journey to a Hallig” (Eine Halligfahrt), in JACKSON/NAUCK 1999, p. 90.

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Bibliography [Runge Estate] Private Estate of Mrs. Anna Maria Elstner (née Runge), Ulm, letters by Iris Runge. BACH, Klaus, HELMKE, Johann-Gerhard, eds. (1990). Radiolaria, Shells in Nature and Technics. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Karl Krämer CAHAN, David (2004). An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1871–1918. New York: Cambridge University Press. FÖRSTER, Eva et al., eds. (1982). Ein Garten der Erinnerung. Berlin: Union-Verlag. HAMEL, Jürgen; TIEMANN, Klaus-Harro, eds. (2004). Alexander von Humboldt, Die Kosmos-Vorträge 1827/28 in der Berliner Singakademie. Frankfurt am Main: Insel. HENTSCHEL, Klaus (1997). The Einstein Tower: An Intertexture of Dynamic Construction, Relativity Theory, and Astronomy. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. JACKSON, Denis; NAUCK, Anja, trans. (1999). Hans and Heinz Kirch: With Immense and Journey to a Hallig. By Theodor Storm. London: Angel Classics. JOHNSTON, Ian C., trans. (2009). Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens: Or, an Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles. By Immanuel Kant. Arlington: Richer Resources. KRAUSSE, Joachim (2004). “Architektur aus dem Geist der Projektion: Das Zeiss-Planetarium.” In Wissen in Bewegung. 80 Jahre Zeiss-Planetarium in Jena. Ed. H.-Ch. von Herrmann. Jena: Ernst-Abbe-Stiftung, pp. 49–85. MEYER, Adolf (1925/26). “Das Zeiss-Planetarium in Jena. Der Bau.” Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 1, p. 17. NEUTRA, Richard (1977). Bauen und die Sinneswelt. Dresden: Verlag Die Kunst. SCHMIDT, Hartwig (2005). “Von der Steinkuppel zur Zeiss-Dywidag-Schalenbauweise.” Betonund Stahlbau 100, pp. 79 – 92. SCHILLE, Gertrud (1982). “Raumflugplanetarium in Tripolis.” Architektur der DDR 3, pp. 146–53. — (1981). “Planetaria – Turn-Key Project of the Jena Optical Work.” Jena Review 6, pp. 236– 38. — (1984). “Planetarium – A New Attraction in Wolfsburg.” Jena Review 3, pp. 154–56. — (1985). “Planetarium in Wolfsburg.” Architektur der DDR 1, pp. 37–40. SCHUMACHER, H., ed. (1848). Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel: Populäre Vorlesungen über wissenschaftliche Gegenstände. Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke. STOLZ, Rüdiger; WITTIG, Joachim, eds. (1993). Carl Zeiß und Ernst Abbe: Leben, Wirken und Bedeutung (Wissenschaftshistorische Abhandlung). Jena: Universitätsverlag. WAYNE, Philip, trans. (1949). Faust: Part One. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. London: Penguin.

INDEX OF NAMES Abbe (née Snell), Elise 1844–1914: 183 Abbe, Ernst 1840–1905, German physicist, mathematician, entrepreneur: 179, 181– 183, 187, 190, 196, 200, 207, 212, 221, 229, 231, 233, 234, 244 Afanasyeva (-Ehrenfest), Tatyana, 1876– 1964, Russ. mathematician: 17, 204 Alden, Elizabeth (Betty) (married Little) 1927–2003, American physicist, anthropologist: 57 Allen, Russ †1945, American Scientific Management Consultant: 83 Ambronn, Hermann 1856–1927, German botanist, physicist: 189, 190 Ancker (-Johnson), Betsy *1927, American physicist: 18, 57 Antoniadou, Eleni, Greek physician: 63, 64, 68 Arden, Elizabeth (née Florence Nightingale Graham) 1878–1981, American cosmetics enterpriser: 152 Argelander (-Rose), Annelies 1896–1980, German-American psychologist: 186 Arndt, Kurt 1873–1946, German academic physical chemist: 125 Arsenjeva (married Heil), Agnesa N. 1901– 1991, Russ.-Dutch physicist: 17 Auerbach, Felix 1856–1933, German physicist: 190 Ayrton (née Marks), Hertha 1854–1923, English eng., math.: 2, 16, 17, 73, 75 Ayrton, William Edward 1847–1908, English physicist, engineer: 16 Badt, Dora (Dodo Liebmann), 1906–ca. 1976, German-American physicist: 32 Bagley, Sarah George 1805–1883/1895, American telegraph operator: 73 Bauersfeld, Walther 1879–1959, German engineer: 235, 236 Baum, Hedwig (Vicki) 1888–1960, Austrian -American novelist, screenwriter: 130 Beck, Hans 1876–1942, German mathematician: 103, 104, 113, 114

Beck, Hans Gerhard *1930, German astronomer: 239, 240 Becker, Richard 1887–1955, German physicist: 91, 92 Beckmann, Ernst 1853–1923, German chemist: 96–98 Bendig, Maximiliana *1898, German chemist: 38 Benedict, Elizabeth 1887–1927, German physics Ph.D. 1915, Breslau: xi, 46 Berg, Otto 1873–1939, German physical chemist: 16, 91 Beria, Lavrentii P. 1899–1953, Soviet politician, chief of NKVD: 168 Bessel, Friedrich Wilhem 1784–1846, German astronomer, math.: 233, 244 Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Konstantin N. 1829– 1897, Russian historian: 202 Bethe, Hans 1906–2005, German-American physicist, Nobel Prize 1967: 161 Betz, Albert 1885–1968, German physicist: 29 Biermann, Wolfgang 1927–2001, German engineer, manager: 213, 218, 228, 241 Blau, Fritz 1865–1929, Austrian chemist, physicist: 92 Blumentritt (married Haack), Marianne 1903–1983, German, physics Ph.D.: 188, 193, 194 Bochvar, Andrei A. 1902–1984, Soviet metallurgist: 170, 171 Boggs, Lucinda Pearl 1873–1931, American Ph.D. student in Germany: 185, 199 Boltzmann, Ludwig 1844–1906, Austrian physicist: 204 Bonner, Francis T., American chemist: 161 Bontschits (married Katerinitsch), Jovanka 1887–1966, Serbian architect: 4 Born, Max 1882–1970, German physicist, Nobel Prize 1954: 88, 208 Borodin, Alexander 1833–1887, Russian chemist, composer: 202 Bosch, Robert 1861–1942, German engineer, industrialist: 124, 233

246

Index of Names

Braun, Helene (Hel) 1914–1986, German mathematician: 8, 21 Bretschneider, Martha *1887, German industrial chemist: 124, 125, 142 Brieskorn, Egbert V. 1936–2013, German mathematician: 104, 112 Bubetz, Walter *1943, German designer: 238, 241 Bülow, Margarete 1902–1981, German chemist: 35, 37 Chisholm (married Young), Grace 1868– 1944, British mathematician: 10 Clarke, Edith 1883–1959, American engineer, math.: 2, 6, 9, 11, 75, 109 Cohn, Henriette (Henny), 1900–1950, German-American physicist: 32, 100 Compton, Arthur H. 1892–1962, American physicist, Nobel Prize 1927: 162 Condon, Edward 1902–1974, American nuclear physicist: 160 Conwell, Esther M. 1922–2013, American physicist: 18 Courant, Richard 1888–1972, German-American math.: 88, 103, 105–107, 110, 113 Culhane (married Lathbury), Kathleen 1900 –1993, British industrial biochemist, artist: 134, 135 Curie (née Sklodowska), Marie 1867–1934, Polish-French physicist, chemist, Nobel Prize 1903 (physics), 1911 (chem.): 15, 120, 121, 128, 142–144, 159, 171 Curtius, Theodor 1857–1928, German chemist: 124 Damaschun (married Hansen), Irmgard *10.5.1907, German, physics Ph.D.: 188, 189, 192 Danziger, Evelijn Esther 1934–1942: 196 Danziger, Hans 1892–1943, German-Jewish teacher: 196 Danziger, Harry Mordechai 1936–1942: 196 Dashkova, Catherine 1743–1810, Director of Russ. Academy of Sciences: 201, 211 Debye, Peter 1884–1966, Dutch-American physicist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1936: 194, 208 Delbrück, Berthold 1842–1922, German linguist: 185 Dennis, Olive Wetzel 1885–1957, American engineer: 74

Dischinger, Franz Anton 1887–1953, German construction engineer: 235 Döpel, Robert 1895–1982, German physicist: 174 Drude, Paul 1863–1906, German physicist: 204 Drury, Betty, American executive secretary: 107 Du Bois-Reymond, Allard 1860–1922, engineer, patent attorney: 40 Du Bois-Reymond, Emile Heinrich 1818– 1896, German physiologist: 40 Duisberg, Carl 1861–1935, German industrial chemist, corporate director: 122 Egorov, Nikolai G. 1849–1919, Russian physicist: 204 Ehrenfest, Paul 1880–1933, Austrian physicist: 17, 204 Einstein, Albert 1879–1955, physicist, Nobel Prize 1921: 159, 160, 167, 176– 178, 208, 234, 237, 244 Eitel, Wilhelm 1891–1979, German chemist: 37 Epatova-Dronskaya, Ninel, Soviet scientist: 171, 172 Erdmann, Benno 1851–1921, German philosopher: 95 Ershova, Zinaida V. 1904–1995, Soviet chemist: 171, 173, 174, 177, 178 Eucken, Rudolf 1846–1926, German philosopher, Nobel Prize for literature 1908: 184, 185 Evans, Ralph Liggett *1895, American chemist: 152, 153, 156 Evans, Marjorie Louise Woodard 1921– 2012, American physical chemist: 162 Factor, Max 1872–1938, Polish-American cosmetic enterpriser: 151 Fajans, Kasimir 1887–1975, Polish-American physical chemist: 54, 55 Faulstich, Marga 1915–1998, German chemist: xi, 180, 196–200 Feldhaus, Franz Maria 1874–1957, German author, historian of technology: 84 Fermi, Enrico 1901–1954, Italian physicist, Nobel Prize 1938: 168 Fibinger, Mathilde 1830–1873, Danish feminist, novelist, telegraphist: 73 Fleischmann, Lionel 1873–1962, American engineer: 87, 105, 106

Index of Names Flügge-Lotz (née Lotz), Irmgard 1903–1974, German-American math., aerodynamicist: 13, 23, 28, 34–37 Flyorov, Georgy N. 1913–1990, Soviet physicist: 175 Ford, Henry 1863–1947, American industrialist: 77, 78, 85 Forest, Lee de 1873–1961, American inventor: 74 Förster, Karl 1874–1970, German garden architect: 233 Förster, Wilhelm 1832–1921, German astronomer: 233, 234 Fountoukli, Florentia 1869–1915, Greek pedagogue: 63, 71 Franck, James 1882–1964, German-Ameri– can physicist, Nobel Prize 1925: 191, 196 Franklin, Rosalind E. 1920–1958, British biophysicist: v Fränz, Ilse, German physicist: 35, 37 Frederick, Christine Isobel McGaffey 1883– 1970, American home economist: 83, 85 Freundlich, Herbert 1880–1941, Germanborn chemist: 36 Friederich, Ernst 1883–1951, German chemist: 92, 93 Friedheim, Carl 1858–1909, German chemist: 30 Friedländer, Erna 1894–ca.1943 [Holocaust victim], German chemist: 126 Fröhlich, Alfred, engineer: 103 Fröhlich, Cäcilie (Froehlich, Cecilie) 1900– 1992, German-American math.: ix, xi, 6, 9, 12, 40, 88, 91, 102–114 Frölich, Anna-Charlotte *1907, German chemist: 34, 35, 37 Frotscher, Walter *13.9.1907, German mathematician: 195 Fry, Thornton Carl 1892–1991, American mathematician: 11, 12, 22 Fuchs, Klaus 1911–1988, German physicist: 166, 167 Gabler, Ursula *1943, German economist: 222 Gabriel, Siegmund 1851–1924, German chemist: 96, 98 Gallerach, Ernst *1930, German manager: 219, 227

247

Ganswindt, Gerlind 1895–1991, German engineer: 94 Ganswindt, Isolde (see Hausser). Geffcken, Walter 1904–1995, German chemist: 197, 198 Gershun, Aleksandr L. 1868–1915, Russian physicist: 203 Gibson, George E. 1884–1959, Scottishborn American chemist: 167 Gilbreth, Frank Bunker 1868–1924, American pioneer of scientific management: 2, 16, 77–83, 85, 86 Gilbreth, Lillian (Lillie) Evelyn Moller 1878 –1972, American psychologist, engineer: ix, xi, 2, 16, 74, 77–86 Ginzel, Ingeborg 1904–1966, German-American mathematican, aerodynamicist: 6, 13, 34, 35, 37, 43 Godefroy, C. W., vice president of the National Hairdressers Association, U.S.A.: 152 Goeppert (married Mayer), Maria 1906– 1972, German-American physicist, Nobel Prize 1963: 161, 177 Goerz, Carl Paul 1854–1923, German entrepreneur: 204 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1749–1832, German poet, natural scientist: 233, 244 Goldowski, Nathalie Michel *1908, Russian-born American physicist: 162 Goldschmidt, Frieda *1899, German-born chemist: 33 Goldschmidt, Karl 1857–1926, German industrial chemist, corporate director: 125, 132, 142 Gorbunov, Nikolai P. 1892–1937, secretary of Lenin: 205 Graevenitz, Luise von *1877, German geneticist: 185 Grebenshchikov, Ilya V. 1887–1953, Soviet physical chemist: 204 Gropius, Walter 1883–1969, German architect: 230 Grunsky, Helmut 1904–1986, German mathematician: 36 Guckel, Margarete, *1896, physics Ph.D. 1924, Breslau: 55, 56 Gumbel, Emil Julius 1891–1966, German math., statistician, publicist: 208, 212 Gumilev, Nikolay S. 1886–1921, Russian poet: 165

248

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Gysae, Brigitte *31.12.1905, German physicist: 35, 37, 91, 92 Haack, Wolfgang 1902–1994, German mathematician: 194 Haber, Fritz 1868–1934, German chem., Nobel Prize 1918: 9, 10, 37, 121, 124, 143 Haeckel, Ernst 1834–1919, German biologist: 234, 255, 257 Hahn, Otto 1879–1968, German chemist, Nobel Prize 1945: v, 173 Halbertsma, Nicholaes Adolf 1889–1966, Dutch physicist, engineer: 51, 52, 54 Hamlin, Marston Lovell 1887–1968, American chemist: 150, 153, 156, 157 Hanle, Wilhelm 1901–1993, German physicist: 192, 196, 258 Hansen, Gerhard 1899–1992, German physicist: 192 Harwood, Margaret 1885–1979, American astronomer: 14 Hausdorff, Felix 1868–1942, German mathematician: 104, 107, 112, 113 Haußner, Robert 1863–1948, German mathematician: 190 Hausser (née Ganswindt), Isolde 1889–1951, German physicist: 5, 7, 8, 16, 28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 41, 88, 94–97 Hausser, Wilhelm 1887–1933, German physicist: 16, 95 Hecker, Oskar 1864–1938, German geophysicist: 189 Heckter (married Straßmann), Maria 1898– 1956, German chemist: 36–38 Heil, Oskar 1908–1994, German physicist: 17 Heilmann, Johanna 1899–1961, German chemist: 33 Heineman, Dannie N. 1872–1962, American engineer, entrepreneur: 107, 112 Heineman, Hettie (née Meyer): 107 Heinze, Walter 1899–1987, German physicist: 76 Heitzmann, Martha *30.1.1916, German physicist: 32 Hellmuth, Edith *1939, German engineer: 215, 222, 227, 228 Helmholtz, Hermann von 1821–1894, German physicist: 201 Herbeck, Margot 1909–2003, German physicist: 35–37, 91

Herforth, Lieselott 1916–2010, German physicist, politician: 5, 24 Herschkowitsch (married Danziger), Elsbeth 1904–1942, physics Ph.D. 1931, Jena: 188, 189, 195, 196, 199 Herschkowitsch (née Leviasch), Annette: 196 Herschkowitsch, Mordko 1932, UkrainianGerman physical chemist: 195, 196 Hertz, Gustav 1887–1975, German physicst, Nobel Prize 1925: 174 Herzfeld, Alexander 1854–1928, German sugar chemist: 121 Hess, Hildegard *1920, German chemist, director of testing laboratory: 138, 142 Hess, Ludwig 1882–1956, German industrial chemist: 138 Hesse Roland, German architect: 241 Hettner, Gerhard 1892–1968, German physicist: 191, 193 Heumann, Miss, German chemist: 35, 37 Heyden (married Jorges), Maria *4.5.1912, German physicist: 37 Heyne, Hans 1900–1973, German eng.: 105 Hippel, Arthur Robert von 1898–2003, German-American physicist: 196 Hirschberg (married Pollok), Elsa *1876, German chemist: 33 Holzapfel, Luise 1900–1963, German chemist: 33 Honecker, Erich 1912–1994, German politician: 214 Honigmann (married Hubmann), Lisa Dr., glass researcher: 94 Hoover, Herbert Clark 1874–1964, president of the U.S.A.: 81, 82 Hopper (née Brewster Murray), Grace 1906– 1992, Amer. computer pioneer: 12, 21 Hoshi, Hajime 1873–1951, chemist, industrialist: 5 Houtermans, Fritz 1903–1966, German physicist: 164 Hövermann, Henny *21.12.1884, German chemist: 125 Hubmann, Werner Dr., researcher at OSRAM: 94 Hülss, Siegfried, German manager: 241 Humboldt, Alexander von 1769–1859, German natural scientist: 233, 244 Hund, Friedrich 1896–1997, German physicist: 194

Index of Names Hüniger, Magdalene *26.7.1896, German chemist: xi, 88, 90, 94, 98, 99, 102 Immerwahr (married Haber), Clara 1870– 1915 [suicide], German physical chemist: 121 Ioffe, Abram F. 1880–1960, Russian physicist: 164, 204–206, 211, 212 Isler, Heinz 1926–2009, Swiss eng.: 236 Jacobsohn, Marie *1890, Swiss-German technical chemist: 125 Jacoby, Richard 1877–1941, German chemist: 89–91, 96, 99 Jagla, Elly 1899–1981, German chemist: 35, 37 Jessen, Ilse *26.4.1898, German physicist: 91 Joliot, Frédérick 1900–1958, French physicist, Nobel Prize 1935: 171 Joliot-Curie, Irène 1897–1956, French physicist, chemist, Nobel Prize 1935: 128, 171 Joos, Georg 1894–1959, German physicist: 189–194, 200 Kachalov, Nikolai 1883–1961, Russian engineer: 204 Kalapothaki, Maria 1859–1941, Greek physician: 62, 68, 69 Kallisperi, Sevasti 1858–1953, Greek philologist: 62 Kant, Immanuel 1724–1804, German philosopher: 233, 244 Kapitsa, Pyotr, L. 1894–1984, Soviet physicist, Nobel Prize 1978: 166, 167 Karle (b. Karfunkle), Jerome 1918–2013, American physical chemist, Nobel Prize 1985: 162 Karle (née Lugoski), Isabella Helen *1921, American physical chemist: 162 Katsch, Anne Marie (Annemarie) *20.9. 1897, German physicist: 88, 100, 101 Katsch, Gerhardt 1887–1961, internist: 100 Katsch, Hermann *1853, paitner: 100, 101 Katsigra, Anna *1877, Greek physician: 63, 64, 66, 68, 69 Kern, Charlotte *14.10. 1894, German phy– sicist: 187, 189, 190 Khariton, Iulii B. 1904–1996, Soviet physicist: 164, 166, 169

249

Khlopin, Vitalii G. 1890–1950, Soviet chemist: 169, 170 Kistiakovsky, George B. 1900–1982, Ukrainian-American physicist: 160 Kistiakovsky, Vera *1928, American physical chemist: 160 Klein, Felix 1849–1925, German mathematician: 10, 23, 194 Knoevenagel, Claudia *1909, German chemist, physician: 35, 37 Knopf, Otto 1856–1945, German astronomer: 182 Knott, Carl 1892–1987, German engineer, manager: 17 Kochina (née Polubarinova), Pelageya Y. 1899–1999, Russian math.: 202, 212 Kohn, Hedwig 1887–1964, German-American physicist: ix, xi, 5, 10, 19, 25, 26, 45–58, 167, 258 Kolesnitshenko, Iwan S. 1907–1984, Ukrainian-Soviet General: 210 Konenkov, Sergey T. 1874–1971, Russian sculptor: 167 Konenkova (née Ivanovna Vorontsova) 1884 –1980, Margarita, presumably Russian spy: 167 Kononovich, Lev Petrovich, Dora Leipunskaya’s husband: 166 Kossel, Walther 1888–1956, German physicist: 57 Kösters, Wilhelm 1876–1950, German phy– sicist: 206–209 Kovalevskaya (née Korvin-Krukovskaya), Sofia 1850–1891, Russian mathematican: 2, 22, 160, 202 Kozlay, Hazel L. 1898–1987, American Hairdresser, book editor: 152 Kraft (married Andresen), Christel, German chemist: 38 Krausse, Joachim *1943, art historian: 236, 240, 244 Krüger, Deodata 1900–1945, German chemist: 35–37, 41 Krüger, Gerda von *1907, German chemist: 35, 37 Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav 1870–1950, German diplomatist, chairman of the Friedrich Krupp AG: v, 8, 12, 35, 42 Krupskaya, Nadezhda 1869–1939, Russian politician: 202

250

Index of Names

Kurchatov, Boris V. 1905–1972, Soviet physical chemist: 170 Kurchatov, Igor V. 1903–1960, Soviet physicist: 164–170 Kurlbaum, Ferdinand 1857–1927, German physicist: 45 Ladenburg, Rudolf 1882–1952, GermanAmerican physicist: 45 Lange, Fritz 1899–1987, German physicist: 164 Laski, Gerda 1893–1928, Austrian physicist: 28, 91 Laue, Max von 1879–1960, German physicist, Nobel Prize 1914: 40 Lax, Ellen 1885–1977, German physicist: 7, 31, 88, 91, 93, 94, 99, 100, 102 Le Blanc, Max 1865–1943, German chemist: 7 Lebedev, Aleksandr A. 1893–1969, Russian physicist: 206 Lehmann, Gerhard *1933, German architect: 236 Leipunskaya (née Shpanina), Sofya N. 1885–1961: 163 Leipunskaya, Dora I. 1912–1978, Russian physicist: x, xi, 19, 159–178 Leipunsky, Alexander I. 1903–1972, Rus– sian physicist: 163, 164, 176 Leipunsky, Ilya I. 1872–1936, Russian fore– man: 163 Leipunsky, Ilya I. 1872–1936: 163 Leipunsky, Ovsey I. 1909–1990, Russian physicist: 163, 164 Lellek, Rudolf 1886–1962, German engi– neer: 84 Lenin, Vladimir I. 1870–1924, Bolshevist leader: 202, 205 Lermontova, Julia W. 1847–1919, Russian chemist: 2 Leslie (married Burr), May Sybil 1887– 1937, British chemist: 127 Lifshitz, Evgeny 1915–1985, Soviet phy– sicist: 210 Little, Elizabeth (Betty) Alden 1927–2003, 1948 B.A. in physics, U.S.A.: 57 Loewe, Siegmund 1885–1962, German born physicist, factory owner: 32, 87, 101 Lorentz, Hendrik A. 1853–1928, Dutch phy– sicist: 204 Lotz, Irmgard, see Flügge-Lotz

Lüders, Marie-Elisabeth 1878–1966, Ger– man economist, social worker, politi– cian: 123, 143 Lummer Otto, 1860–1925, German physicist: 45–48, 50–52, 54, 55, 58, 167, 168, 177, 257 Lunacharsky, Anatoly V. 1875–1933, Rus– sian politician: 205 Lüppo-Cramer (married Siedentopf), Ingrid 1907–1999: 182 Lüppo-Cramer, Henricus 1871–1943, German photo-chemist: 182 Luther, Robert 1868–1945, Russo-German academic physical chemist: 130 Lutterbeck, H., German engineer: 76 Maltby, Margaret E. 1860–1944, American physical chemist: 2 Mariü (married Einstein), Mileva 1875– 1947, math., physicist: 159, 177 Martens, Friedrich Franz 1873–1919, phy– sicist: 95 Masling, Antonia (Toni) *19.10.1886, Ger– man physical organic chemist: 125 Materne, Elisabeth *1895, German chemist: 92 Matschoß, Conrad 1871–1942, German en– gineer: 84 Mayer, Joseph E. 1904–1983, American chemist: 161 Mead, Margaret 1901–1978, American cul– ture anthropologist: 15 Meitner, Elise (Lise) 1878–1968, Austrian physicist: v, 15, 24, 28, 43, 91, 159, 160, 173, 177 Mendeleev, Dmitri I. 1834–1907, Russian chemist: 202, 211 Mendelsohn, Erich 1887–1953, German ar– chitect: 233 Meyer, Adolf 1881–1929, German architect: 240, 244 Meyer, Alfred R. 1888–1968, German phy– sicist: xi, 48–52, 54 Meyer (née Priem), Annemarie *1910, Ger– man chemist: 33 Meyer, Kurt Hans 1883–1952, Russian-Ger– man organic chemist: 131 Meyer, Martha: 103 Meyer, Max Wilhelm 1853–1910, German astronomer: 233 Meyer, Richard Joseph, 1865–1939, German chemist: 30, 89, 90, 96, 98

Index of Names Michelson, Albert A. 1852–1931, American physicist, Nobel Prize 1907: 191 Miething, Hildegard 1889–1972, German physicist: 31, 49, 50, 88, 91, 93, 97 Miller, Oskar von 1855–1934, German en– gineer: 235 Mises, Richard von 1883–1953, AustrianAmerican math.: 195, 208 Mittasch, Alwin 1869–1953, German phy– sical chemist: 130 Moenke (née Blankenburg), Lieselotte *1934, German chem.: 6, 17, 221, 227 Moenke, Horst *1930, German industrial researcher: 17, 221, 227 Morse (married Mann), Rowena 1872–1958, American philos., theologist: 185, 199 Morse, Samuel F. B. 1791–1872, American inventor: 185 Moufang, Ruth 1905–1977, German math.: 6, 8, 12, 23 Mühlfriedel, Wolfgang *1930, German his– torian: 215, 222, 227, 228 Müller, Ilse *19.11.1887, German chemist: xi, 8, 76, 88–90, 94–97, 99 Müther, Ulrich 1934–2007, German constr. engineer: 236, 239 Nafpliotou, Irini, Greek physician: 62 Nemenov, Mikhail I. 1880–1950, Russian radiologist: 205 Nernst, Walther 1864–1941, German che– mist, Nobel Prize 1920: 97, 99, 101 Neuberg, Irene S. 1908–1994, GermanAmerican chemist: 33 Neumann, Edel-Agathe *19.1.1906, †in Sweden, German-born physicist: 32, 88, 101, 102 Neumann, Elsa 1872–1902, German phy– sicist: 30, 43, 89 Neuroth, Norbert, German physicist: 199 Neutra, Richard 1892–1970, Austrian archi– tect: 230, 233 Noddack, Walter 1893–1960, German phy– sical chemist: 16, 23, 91, 129, 144 Noddack-Tacke, Ida, see Tacke Noether, Emmy 1882–1935, German mathe– matician: 208 Nordon (married Hammer), Gerda *1908, German born chemist: 33 Obukhov, P. M. 1820–1869, Russian metal– lurgist: 203

251

Oppenheimer, Gertrude 1893–1948, Ger– man-American biochemist: 35, 37 Oppenheimer, Robert J. 1904–1967, Ameri– can physicist: 160, 176 Orlopp, Josef 1888–1960, German politi– cian: 222 Otto, Frei Paul *31.5.1925, German archi– tect: 230 Panagiotatou, Alexandra 1876–1903, Greek physician: xi, 63, 65, 66 Panagiotatou, Angeliki 1874–1954, Greek physician: ix, xi, 26, 59, 65–67, 69– 71 Panagiotidou, Polymnia, Greek pharmacist: xi, 63, 64 Panke, Hans, researcher at GE: 99 Panofsky, Wolfgang K. H. 1919–2007, Ger– man-American physicist: 161, 177 Parren, Kallirhoe 1859–1940, Greek jour– nalist: 62–64, 66, 68, 70, 71 Paschen, Friedrich 1865–1947, German physicist: 206 Pawlek, Franz 1903–1994, Austrian physical chemist: 101 Perepelkin, Yakov 1874–1935, a founder of Russian military optics: 203 Petersen, Waldemar 1880–1946, German engineer, manager: 105 Philipps, Melba 1907–2004, American phy– sicist: 160, 173 Pieck, Marianne 1892–1932, German che– mist: 33 Pirani, Marcello 1880–1868, German physi– cist: 49, 53, 55, 56, 90–94, 97, 99 Planck, Max 1858–1947, German physicist, Nobel Prize 1918: 45, 52, 92, 95, 97, 99, 167, 185, 208 Plohn (née ?), Clara, German chemist, jour– nalist: 121, 125 Plohn, Robert, German pharmacist: 121 Polak, Lev S. 1908–2002, Soviet chem.: 175 Prandtl, Ludwig 1875–1953, German physi– cist, aerod.: 29, 35 Pringsheim, Ernst 1859–1917, German phy– sicist: 45 Pringsheim, Peter 1881–1963, German phy– sicist: 101, 208 Proksch, Ruth 1914–1998, German mathe– matician: 6, 13 Pulfrich, Carl 1858–1927, German physicist: 191, 199

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Rapoport, Iakov L. 1898–1996, Soviet poli– tician: 169, 205, 212 Rathenau, Emil 1838–1915, German-Jewish design engineer, entrepreneur: 105 Raunert, Margarete 1895–1994, German physical chemist: 7, 129, 142 Rees, Mina 1902–1997, American mathe– matician: 6, 12, 15, 21, 23 Reich, Max 1874–1941, German physicist: 91 Reitmayer, Franz, German glass researcher: 199 Rhode, Irma *1900, chemist: 35, 37 Richter, Gustav 1911–1999, German phy– sicist: 174 Richter, Lieselotte, dept. head at Zeiss: 222 Riehl, Nikolaus, 1901–1990, German phy– sicist: 173 Rischowski, Irene, German engineer: 74 Ritchie, Miller A. F. 1909–2000, president Pacific University: 107, 112, 113 Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad 1845–1923, German physicist, Nobel Prize 1901: 205 Roka, Thiresia *1869, Greek philologist: xi, 63, 64 Romanova, Maria F. 1892–1959, Russian physicist: x, xii, 19, 180, 201–211 Rona, Elizabeth 1890–1981, HungarianAmerican chemist, physicist: 162 Roosevelt, Eleanor 1884–1962, US First Lady, politician: 111 Rosenheim, Arthur 1865–1942, German chemist: 30, 89, 96 Rozhdestvensky, Dmitry S. 1876–1940, Russian physicist: 204–207 Rubens, Heinrich 1865–1922, German phy– sicist: 45, 95, 96, 191 Rubinstein, Helena 1870–1965, PolishAmerican cosmetics enterpriser: 151 Rüchardt, Eduard 1888–1962, German phy– sicist: 191 Rüdenberg, Reinhold 1883–1961, GermanAmerican electrical eng., inventor: 91 Rukop, Hans 1883–1958, German physicist: 94, 95, 208 Runge (née Du Bois–Reymond), Aimée 1862–1941, Iris Runge’s mother: 235 Runge, Carl 1856–1927, German mathe– matician: 12, 90, 200 Runge, Iris Anna 1888–1966, German in– dustrial math., physicist: xv, 6, 12, 18,

24, 40, 50, 76, 88–94, 102, 200, 208, 212, 235, 244 Runge, Wilhelm 1895–1987, German electr. engineer: 88 Rutherford, Ernest 1871–1937, New Zealand -born British nuclear physicist: 17, 166 Sakharov, Andrei D. 1921–1989, Soviet physicist, Nobel Peace Prize 1975: 165 Salbach, Hildegard *1896, German physi– cist: 31, 92 Schaefer, Clemens 1878–1968, German physicist: 47, 48, 56, 58, 100 Schille, Ralf *1939, German civil eng.: 230 Schiller (married Gräfin Schenk von Stauf– fenberg), Melitta 1905–1945, German test pilot, aeronautics researcher: 8, 13, 21 Schiller, Friedrich 1759–1805, German poet, philosopher, historian: 222, 223 Schlegel, Caroline 1763–1809, German woman writer: 223, 227 Schlegel, Sigrid *1936, German dept. head in foreign commerce: 222, 227 Schleiden, Matthias Jakob 1804–1881, Ger– man botanist: 190 Schluckebier, Marie-Luise *1903, German mathematician: 13 Schott, Erich 1891–1989, German entre– preneur: 199 Schott, Otto 1851–1935, German chemist, entrepreneur: 179, 198, 199 Schrade, Hugo 1900–1974, German engi– neer, manager: 219, 227 Schrammen (married Hansen, and divorced), Annelise J. P. *22.7.1901, German, Ph.D. in physics: 187, 189–192 Schrödinger, Erwin 1887–1961, Austrian physicist, Nobel Prize 1933: 101 Schur, Issai 1875–1941, German mathema– tician: 101 Schwarz, Hermann Amandus 1843–1921, German mathematician: 95 Seaborg, Glenn 1912–1999, American che– mist, Nobel Prize 1951: 167 Semenov, Nikolai N. 1896–1986, Soviet phys. chemist, Nobel Prize 1956: 164 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus ca. 1–65, Roman philosopher: 232 Senftleben, Hermann 1890–1975, physics Ph.D. 1915, Breslau: xi, 46

Index of Names Shalnikov, Alexander I. 1905–1986, Soviet physicist: 164–166 Shannon (née Moore), Mary Elizabeth (Bet– ty) 1916–2001, Amer. math.: 12 Shannon, Claude Elwood 1916–2001, Ame– rican math.: 11 Shegog, Thomas Alexander 1869–1929, Irish-born American chemist: 150 Shevchenko, Viktor B. 1902–1981, Soviet engineer: 170 Shostakovich, Dmitri D. 1906–1975, Rus– sian composer: 165 Siedentopf, Heinrich 1906–1963, German astronomer: 182 Siemens, Werner von 1816–1892, German electrical engineer, industrialist: 233 Siemsen, Anna 1882–1951, German pedag., politician: 186 Simson, Clara von 1897–1983, German physicist: 40, 42, 91 Sittig, Lieselotte *1899, German chemist: 92, 93 Smakula, Olexander 1900–1983, Ukrainian physicist: 193 Snell, Anna 1839–1915, German feminist: 183 Snell, Karl 1806–1886, mathematician, phy– sicist: 183 Sochocky, Sabin Arnold von 1883–1928, Ukrainian-American physicist, physi– cian: 147, 149 Sohm (née Ireland), May, *2.5.82, British mother of Monica S.: 192 Sohm, Monica *5.7.1914 German physicist: 188, 192, 193 Sohm, Paul 1883–1939, German manager: 192 Sommerfeld, Arnold 1868–1951, German physicist: 191, 193, 208 Stalin, Joseph (Iosif V.) 1878–1953, Soviet politician: 19, 22, 159, 164, 166, 168, 169, 173, 175, 177, 201, 205, 212 Stanton Blatch (second marriage to Barney), Nora 1883–1971, Amer. civil eng.: 74 Starke (-Werner), Dorothea 1902–1943, German math.: 5, 14, 182, 188, 189, 195 Steenbeck, Max 1904–1981, German phy– sicist: 88 Stein, Emmy 1879–1954, German geneticist: 185

253

Stein, Gertrud *1905, German-born chemist: 35, 37 Steinheil (married Franz), Elsbeth 1893– 1955, German engineer: 74 Steinheil, Hedwig *1892, German phys.: 74 Stephanopoli, Ioanna, Greek philologist: xi, 61, 63, 64 Storm, Theodor 1817–1888, German author: 243, 244 Straßmann, Friedrich (Fritz) 1902–1980, German chemist: 37 Straubel, Rudolf 1864–1943, German math., physicist, manager: 189, 235 Strindberg, Johan August 1849–1912, Swedish writer: 160 Stuart, Herbert A. 1899–1974, Swiss-Ger– man academic physicist: 137 Stücklen, Hildegard 1891–1963, German born physicist: 192 Study, Eduard 1862–1930, German math.: 104 Szilárd, Leó 1898–1964, Hungarian-born American physicist: 162 Tacke (married Noddack), Ida 1896–1978, German physical chemist: 16, 23, 91, 129, 144 Taylor, Frederick W. 1856–1915, American mechanical engineer: 80 Teller, Edward 1908–2003, Hungarian-born American physicist: 161 Ter Meer (married Knott), Ilse 1899–1996, German engineer: 14, 16, 17 Thieme, Herbert, German Scientist: 174 Toeplitz, Otto 1881–1940, German mathe– matician: 13, 104, 114 Tolkmitt, Gerda Johanna Dorothea *8.7. 1911, German physicist: 188, 192 Tolksdorf, Sybille *1900, German-American chemist: 35, 37 Tuschen, Elisabeth *5.10.1919, German chemist: 33 Ulbricht, Walter 1893–1973, German politi– cian: 214 Unrein (née Abbe), Margarete (Grete) 1872– 1945, German feminist: 184 Urey, Harold C. 1893–1981, American phy– sical chemist, Nobel Prize 1937: 161 Vaerting, Mathilde 1884–1977, German pe– dagogue, sociologist: 186

254

Index of Names

Vannikov, Boris L. 1897–1962, Soviet poli– tician, People’s Commissar of Muni– tions: 168, 169 Vasiliadou, Anthi, Greek physician: xi, 63– 65, 69 Vavilov, Sergei I. 1891–1951, Soviet phy– sicist: 207 Vernadsky, Vladimir I. 1863–1945, Russian geologist: 204 Villinger, Walter A. 1872–1938, German astronomer, engineer: 236 Vogt (née Mugnier), Cécile 1875–1962, French neurologist: v, 28 Vogt, Heinrich 1890–1968, German astro– nomer: 182 Vogt, Oskar 1870–1959, German physician, neurologist: v Völker, Johanna *4.7.1904, German physi– cist: 188 Volmer, Max 1885–1965, German physico– chemist: 174 Wachenheim (married Mueller), Lili *1893, German industrial chemist: 124, 125 Wächter, Ilse Eleonore (Lore) *1.11.1913, German physicist: 188, 193 Wall, Florence E. 1893–1988, American in– dustrial chem., cosmetologist: xi, 116, 136, 145, 146, 148–158, 215 Warrentrup (married Schwiemann), Hilde– gard *1905, German chemist: 7, 88, 94 Weber, Johanna *1910, German aerodyna– mics engineer: 35, 37 Wehage, Dora *16.2.1890, German mathe– matician: 12, 13 Wehnelt, Arthur 1871–1944, German phy– sicist: 92, 101 Werner, Helmut 1905–1973, German astro– nomer: 182, 195 Westphal, Wilhelm H. 1882–1978, German physicist: 207, 212 Wetthauer, August 1887–1964, German physicist: 208, 210, 211 Weyde, Edith 1901–1989, German photo– chemist: 130–135, 138, 139, 141, 143 Wien, Max 1866–1938, German physicist: 189–194 Wien, Wilhelm (Willy) 1864–1928, German physicist, Nobel Prize 1911: 52, 191

Wiener, Otto 1862–1927, German physicist: 204 Wilcke (married Pietsch), Gertrud 1902– 1986, German chemist: 33 Will, Karl Wilhelm 1854–1919, German chemist: 41 Willis, George S., American physician: 145–147 Winkelmann, Max 1879–1946, German ma– thematician: 189, 190, 194, 195 Winston (married Newson), Mary F. 1869– 1959, American mathematician: 9 Wirth, Günther, German scientist: 174 Witte (married Lellek), Irene M. 1894–1976, German management expert: ix, 2, 23, 77–85 Witte, Emil †1918, German journalist: 83 Wolff (née Jolowicz), Marguerite 1883– 1964, German-British legal expert: 28 Wolff, Hanns-Heinz, German physicist: 102 Wolffhardt, Emma 1899–1997, German chem.: xi, 118, 131, 137, 138, 141, 142 Wrangell (married Andronikow), Margare– t(h)e von 1876/77–1932, Baltic German agricultural chem.: 5, 9, 10, 21, 22, 186 Wreschner, Marie 1887–1941, German che– mist: 31 Wuesthoff (originally Herzfeld, née Hoff– mann), Freda 1896–1956, German phy– sicist, patent lawyer: 40, 42, 43 Wuesthoff, Franz 1896–1992, German che– mist: 40 Wußing, Hans 1927–2011, German historian of mathematics: 257 Wyneken (née Dammermann), Luise: 192 Wyneken, Gustav 1875–1964, German edu– cational reformer: 192 Wyneken, Ilse Irene 1903–2000, German Ph.D. in physics: 188, 192 Zamfirescu, Elisa Leonida 1887–1973, Ro– manian engineer: 74 Zaveniagin, Avraamii P. 1901–1956, Soviet politician: 168–170, 173 Zeiß, Carl 1816–1888, German instrument manufacturer: 179, 181, 244 Zeldovich, Yakov B. 1914–1987, Soviet physicist: 164

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Olaf Breidbach is the director of the Ernst Haeckel Haus, an institute devoted to the history of medicine, science, and engineering at the University of Jena (Germany). His studies of biology, philosophy, and paleontology resulted in two doctoral degrees, one on Hegel’s natural philosophy and the other on insect neurobiology. After receiving his degrees, he initiated a research group for the study of neural development at the University of Bonn. In 1994, he transferred to the department of mathematics at the University of Bochum, and since 1996 he has been a professor of the history of science at the University of Jena. He is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and his most recent three books are Radikale Historisierung (Frankfurt, 2011), Anschauung denken (Munich, 2011), and Neuronale Ästhetik (Munich, 2013). Peter Bussemer received a Diplom in physics from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany) in 1965. After one year at the Technical University of Ilmenau (Germany), he completed his doctoral degree (1971) and his Habilitation (1982) at the University of Jena. From 1971 to 1974, he trained engineers at a technical college in Gera. From 1975 to 1994, he was an assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Jena. His research has concentrated on the fields of optics and solid state theory. He has given lectures in all fields of theoretical physics. In 1982 and 1983, he spent six months at the Institute of Spectroscopy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Since 1999, he has been a professor of physics and computer science at the University of Cooperative Education (Berufsakademie) in Gera. As a visiting professor at the Moscow State University and the Technical University of Prague, he offered lectures on quantum computing. His interest in the history of science and its popularization led to an exhibition and a colloquium about Otto Lummer in Gera in 2010. In 2012, he organized an exhibition on the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Weida, East Thuringia, which resulted in a book edited by the PTB in Braunschweig. Polyxeni Giannakopoulou has a degree from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ioannina, Greece, and she works as a high school teacher at the 1st Model High School of Athens. She also earned an M.A. from the interdepartmental program in History and the Philosophy of Science and Technology administered by the University of Athens and the National Technical University of Athens. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis on the history of science at the same interdepartmental program. The title of her dissertation is Transmission of Scientific ideas in Greece, 1850–1900, and her main research fields are the popularization and transmission of science in the public sphere, science and the

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press, and women in science. She has published articles in Greek anthologies and also the article “Women and Science: Popularizing Natural Sciences in 19th Century Greek Periodicals” (Almagest 1 [2010]). She is a member of the Association of Greek Women Scientists and a member of the research groups “Women in Science, Women in the Periphery” and “Science and the Press” affiliated with the International Research Group STEP (Science and Technology in the European Periphery). Jeffrey Allan Johnson, a professor of history at Villanova University (U.S.A), received a B.A. in history from Rice University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University; his dissertation appeared as The Kaiser’s Chemists: Science and Modernization in Imperial Germany (1990). Besides a two-part article, “German Women in Chemistry, 1895–1945” (NTM, 1998), and other studies of the social, political, and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany, he is the co-author (with Werner Abelshauser, W. von Hippel, and R. G. Stokes) of a history of BASF (C. H. Beck 2002; Cambridge University Press 2004), the co-editor (with Roy M. MacLeod) of Frontline and Factory: Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914–1924 (2006), and the guest editor of Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars (special issue, Ambix 58/2, July 2011). He is the president of the Commission on the History of Modern Chemistry, International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, Division of History of Science and Technology (IUHPS/DHST). His latest article is “The Case of the Missing German Quantum Chemists: On Molecular Models, Mobilization, and the Paradoxes of Modernizing Chemistry in Nazi Germany,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 43/4 (Sept. 2013): 391–452. Herbert Mehrtens completed his Diplom in mathematics and his doctorate in the history of mathematics (history of lattice theory) at the University of Hamburg. He earned his postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) from the Technical University of Berlin with his book Moderne – Sprache – Mathematik, which deals with the foundation of the discipline. He conducted research as a visiting scientist at the University of Utrecht and the University of Aarhus, and he held a visiting professorship at the Institute d’histoire et de sociopolitique des sciences, Université de Montréal (Canada). He was also a Kenneth O. May Lecturer at the University of Toronto, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv and at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. In 1992, he received a professorship in the history of science and technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. His main research fields have been the social history of mathematics, especially during the time of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, the history of applied mathematics, mathematics and war, questions of the development of scientific management, as well as several gender-related historical fields. In 1997, he held a fellowship at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology in Cambridge, Mass. (U.S.A.), and in 2002 and 2003 he was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Notes on Contributors

257

Maria Rentetzi is an associate professor of history and the sociology of science and technology at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. She received her B.Sc. in physics at the University of Thessaloniki, an M.A. in history and the philosophy of science and technology and a second M.A. in philosophy from Virginia Tech, where she also completed her Ph.D. in science and technology studies. She is the president of the Commission in Women and Gender in Science, Technology, and Medicine, International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, Division of History of Science and Technology (IUHPS/ DHST). In 2004, Rentetzi was awarded the Gutenberg e-prize by the American Historical Association. She is the author of Trafficking Materials and Gender Experimental Practices (Columbia University Press, 2007), the co-editor of a Centaurus special issue on Gender and Networking in the Physical Sciences (2009) and of a second special issue of Centaurus on Gender and Histories of Knowledge (2013). She is currently completing her second monograph, Radium Economies in the Early Twentieth Century (Yale University Press). Gertrud Schille, an architect, studied at the “Bauhaus” University in Weimar, and in 1968 she obtained a position at the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena (Germany). As of 1976, she was responsible for the project planning, construction, consultation, and arrangements for the installation of ZEISS planetariums in (East and West) Germany and other countries, including Algeria, Japan, China, Canada, Kuwait, and Libya. In 1987, she accepted a staff position at the Institute for the History of Science (Ernst-Haeckel-Haus) at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. After the fall of the Berlin wall, she opened her own architectural firm. In 1994, she became a full member of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning (Deutsche Akademie für Städtebau und Landesplanung). Katharina Schreiner, an accredited translator and interpreter of the Russian language, held multiple staff positions at the Carl Zeiss Corporation in Jena (Germany) from 1960 to 1990. There she worked as an interpreter, as a special adviser for gender equality, as the press representative for the company’s chief executive, and, beginning in 1980, as the latter executive’s personal assistant. From 1991 to 1995, she worked for the organization “Handwerker am europäischen Haus,” for which she arranged cultural exchanges between German and Russian business representatives. Now retired, she conducts research in the field of industrial history, and she has written books on the activity of the Carl Zeiss Corporation in East and West Germany. Renate A. Tobies, a historian of mathematics and science at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany), studied mathematics, chemistry, physics, and pe– dagogy, and completed her doctoral degree and Habilitation at the University of Leipzig while working at the Karl Sudhoff Institute with Hans Wußing. She was the managing editor of the International Journal of History of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine (Birkhäuser, Basel) for twenty years. After Wußing’s

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retirement, she became a visiting professor at the University of Kaiserslautern and taught the history of science and technology at the University of Stuttgart. In addition, she has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Braunschweig, Jena, Saarbrücken, and Linz. She is a Corresponding Member of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences (Paris) und a Foreign Member of the Agder Academy of Sciences and Letters (Kristiansand, Norway). Her main research fields are the history of mathematics and its applications, and women in mathematics, science, and technology. Annette B. Vogt is a historian of mathematics and science at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the History of Science in Berlin (Germany). After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Leipzig, she received a Diplom in mathematics and a Ph.D. in the history of mathematics from the same university. After working at the Institute for Science Studies and the History of Science at the Academy of Science in Berlin (East), she has been a research scholar at the MPI for the History of Science since 1994. She also teaches the history of science and mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2009 until 2013, she was an assessor for the Council of the DHST/IUHPST (Division for History of Science and Technology of the IUHPST), and as of 2013 she has been its secretary general. She is a Corresponding Member of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences (Paris). Her main research fields are the history of mathematics, women in science, and the history of Jewish scientists. Brenda P. Winnewisser, a physicist, received a B.A. in physics from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from Duke University. She came to Germany on an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 1965, which she used at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and the University of Kiel. She married the physical chemist Manfred Winnewisser and stayed in Germany. From 1967 to 1974, she was a guest scientist at the University of Kiel, and from 1974 to 2000 she held a similar position at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen. She also held a research position in physics at the Ohio State University for a semester in 1968, taught as a visiting professor at Mississippi State University in 1970–71, and held a DFG research fellowship at the Physical Chemistry Institute in Giessen from 1987 to 1991. Since 2000, she has been an adjunct professor of physics at the Ohio State University. Her research has explored the molecular dynamics of small molecules in the gas phase through rotationally resolved millimeter wave and infrared spectra. Her interest in the history of science resulted in oral history interviews for the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics (with Wilhelm Hanle and Gerhard Herzberg), and she recently edited the English edition of a German biography of the physicist Hertha Sponer. She is currently completing a book on the physicist Hedwig Kohn, which is scheduled to appear in 2015.

W I S S E N S C H A F T S K U LT U R U M

1900

Herausgegeben von Olaf Breidbach. Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Mitchell G. Ash, Peter Bowler, Horst Bredekamp, Rüdiger vom Bruch, Gian Franco Frigo, Michael T. Ghiselin, Zdeněk Neubauer und Federico Vercellone.

Franz Steiner Verlag

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ISSN 1613–673x

Matthias Jacob Schleiden Schriften und Vorlesungen zur Anthropologie Hg. von Olaf Breidbach, Uwe Hoßfeld, Ilse Jahn und Andrea Schmidt 2004. X, 148 S. mit 7 Abb., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08542-7 Uwe Hoßfeld Geschichte der biologischen Anthropologie in Deutschland Von den Anfängen bis in die Nachkriegszeit 2005. 504 S. mit 31 Abb., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08563-2 Dirk Preuß / Uwe Hoßfeld / Olaf Breidbach (Hg.) Anthropologie nach Haeckel 2006. 256 S. mit 50 Abb., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08902-9 Ernst Haeckel Gott-Natur (Theophysis) Kommentierter Nachdruck. Hg. von Olaf Breidbach und Uwe Hoßfeld 2008. 107 S., kt.

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ISBN 978-3-515-09163-3 Karl Möbius Ästhetik der Tierwelt Mit zeitgenössischen Rezensionen und einem Vorwort von Christoph Kockerbeck 2008. LX, V, 128 S. mit 195 Abb. und 3 Taf., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-09281-4 Michal Simunek / Uwe Hoßfeld / Olaf Breidbach / Miklos Mueller (Hg.) Mendelism in Bohemia and Moravia, 1900–1930 Collection of Selected Papers 2010. 277 S. mit 29 Abb., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-09602-7 Ivan I. Schmalhausen Die Evolutionsfaktoren Eine Theorie der stabilisierenden Auslese. Hg. von Uwe Hoßfeld, Lennart Olsson, Georgy S. Levit und Olaf Breidbach 2010. LIX, 437 S. mit 44 Abb., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-09624-9

This book presents new research on women scientists who enjoyed careers at industrial corporations during the first seven decades of the twentieth century. What positions were they able to achieve? What was the relationship between academic and industrial research? How open were certain industrial sectors – the electrical, chemical, cosmetic, nuclear, and optical sectors in particular – to hiring female researchers? Were women working in certain industries better able to acquire patents than those in others? What role did patronage play at the time?

How did political turmoil affect women’s careers? How did career opportunities differ from one country to another? This book focuses on women who were active in Germany, Russia, and the United States, but the situation in Greece, France, and Great Britain is also addressed. Each of the chapters is based on new sources, including materials from corporate archives. On the basis of these findings and their own work, the editors have formulated a series of general theses concerning the conditions of women working in industrial research.

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