Katharine Burr Blodgett

Physicist Katharine Burr Blodgett experimented with monolayers, or organic films only a single molecule thick, initiating a new scientific discipline and laboratory techniques that still are used today.

Blodgett was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1898. After the death of her father, who had been a patent attorney at General Electric (GE), her family moved several times throughout her childhood, including to France and then to New York City. At age 15, Blodgett earned a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. During her senior year, she toured GE’s labs and was encouraged by her tour guide, future Nobel laureate and National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Inductee Irving Langmuir, to pursue graduate studies.

Blodgett earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Bryn Mawr in 1917 and her master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1918. During her graduate studies, she contributed to the development of charcoal filtering applications for gas masks that would be used in the two World Wars. Following her graduation, Blodgett became the first woman scientist at GE as she accepted a position as a research assistant to Langmuir.

After six years at GE, Blodgett chose to continue her education at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, where her research focused on the behavior of electrons in mercury vapor. She became the first woman to receive a doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1926.

Following her graduation, Blodgett returned to GE as a research scientist. In 1935, she built on a discovery Langmuir had made years earlier. Langmuir had found that a single water-surface monolayer could be transferred to a solid substrate, and Blodgett’s research led her to discover that this process could be repeated to create multilayer films of any thickness. By creating multilayer anti-reflective coatings on glass, Blodgett successfully produced the world’s first completely transparent glass, or “invisible glass.”

The Langmuir-Blodgett technique was patented in 1938 and essentially has remained unchanged since Blodgett's discovery. The technique eliminated distortion from reflected light in a variety of optical equipment. It has been used in products including eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, windshields, televisions, computer screens, and camera and projector lenses. The Langmuir-Blodgett technique also has found ever-widening uses in scientific research and applications ranging from solar energy conversion to integrated circuit manufacturing.

The impact of Blodgett’s work even made its way into the world of cinema. The 1939 film “Gone With the Wind,” noted for its exceptionally clear cinematography, was the first major movie production to use Blodgett’s invisible glass.

During World War II, Blodgett’s nonreflective lenses were used in submarine periscopes and airplane spy cameras. Her pioneering research also contributed to the creation of poison gas absorbents, a method for defrosting aircraft wings and improvements in smoke screening techniques. Later, she developed a “color gauge” to measure the thickness of coatings and continued to conduct more research on films.

Blodgett retired from GE in 1963. She received many honors and awards for her revolutionary research, including four honorary doctorates, the American Chemical Society’s Garvan Medal in 1951 and the Photographic Society of America’s Progress Medal in 1972.

At the time of Blodgett’s death in 1979, her GE colleague Vincent J. Schaefer said of her legacy, “The methods she developed have become classical tools of the science and technology of surfaces and films. She will be long — and rightly — hailed for the simplicity, elegance, and the definitive way in which she presented them to the world."