Katharine Burr Blodgett

This scientist is the reason your glasses, cameras, and screens don’t blind you.

Katharine Burr Blodgett was a physicist, chemist, and inventor.

She was the first woman ever to earn a PhD in physics from Cambridge.

The first woman scientist hired at General Electric.

And the first person in the world to make glass that let 99% of light pass through.

With no glare, no reflection, and no distortion.

But her story started with a murder.

Her father, the head of GE’s patent department, was shot in their home by a burglar.

Just weeks before she was born.

Her mother packed up and moved the family to France, then Germany, then New York, making sure her daughter got the best education available to a girl in 1900.

At 15, Katharine won a scholarship to Bryn Mawr.

By 20, she had a master’s in physics from the University of Chicago, working on gas mask technology during WWI.

She studied under Ernest Rutherford.

Her thesis? Electron behavior in ionized mercury vapor.

Back at GE, she picked up her mentor Irving Langmuir’s research on monomolecular films: coatings just one molecule thick.

Langmuir had figured out how to lay one of these oily films on water.

Blodgett figured out how to lift them off and stack them.

Layer by layer, 44 times over.

The result? A thin-film coating that canceled out light reflections.

She called it nonreflective glass.

The media called it “invisible glass.”

It was a world-changing invention.

It was used in: camera lenses, periscopes, microscopes, projectors, eyeglasses, submarine optics, spy planes in WWII… and in Gone With the Wind (1939), the first major film shot using her technology.

Without her, every lens you look through would reflect light back in your face.

She also invented the color gauge: a tool to measure the thickness of coatings down to a millionth of an inch.

She co-invented instruments for detecting mechanical expansion.

She developed a smokescreen device that could cover entire fields with just two quarts of oil.

She worked on airplane de-icing systems.

She studied electrical discharges in gas (research that laid the foundation for plasma physics).

By the time she retired in 1963, she held 8 U.S. patents.

She published over 30 scientific papers.

She received honorary doctorates from four universities.

And in 1951, she was awarded the Garvan Medal by the American Chemical Society: the highest honor for a woman chemist.

That same year, her hometown honored her with Katharine Blodgett Day.

She acted in local plays.

She wrote funny science poems.

And she played bridge and gardened at her camp on Lake George until the day she died, in 1979.