Lost Women of Science

10/05/2026

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, grandmothers, and mother-figures in our lives.

We stand on the shoulders of formidable women, without whom, none of our collective achievements and discoveries would be possible.

15/04/2026

In this Lost Women of Science Conversations episode, and discuss how the trailblazing Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann overcame self-doubt to discover that Earth has a solid inner core, overturning the long-held belief that it was liquid. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

31/03/2026

We’re so excited to share this bonus episode about Agnes Pockels, which is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast from our good friends the .
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Agnes Pockels was a pioneering surface sciencist. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped the heroine of our latest season, Katherine Burr Blodgett, and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts

23/03/2026

How is a legacy preserved, and how is someone forgotten?

Determined to make a final name for himself, Irving Langmuir ventures into science that even he might classify as pathological wishful thinking, while Katharine Burr Blodgett continues her work as the diligent experimenter. But her contributions faded from both the company’s and the public’s memory.
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We go to visit Katharine, to say good-bye – and we look at the wisdom she imparted to the next generation of ​​inquiring minds.

We trace the final chapter of Katharine’s career, her retirement from GE, and her disappearance from public memory.

10/03/2026

In episode five of Layers of Brilliance, Katharine Burr Blodgett’s relatives lead the production team to a collection of papers and artifacts stored in a New England storage unit, revealing an inner struggle she kept carefully out of sight – even as she was making history in the laboratory.

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

At the height of her career, Katharine Burr Blodgett faced challenges that not even her closest colleagues suspected.

01/03/2026

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

Listen to episode four of Layers of Brilliance wherever you get your podcasts.

When Katharine Burr Blodgett discovers non-reflecting glass, The General Electric Company’s public relations machine makes her a star.

15/02/2026

The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis: her forte is experimentation, his is scientific theory.
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We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall theory of matter. All the while, Katharine builds her life in Schenectady: going to church, making new friends, falling in love. In 1924, she embarks on a new journey to the University of Cambridge, where she studies with some of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century.

From Schenectady to the University of Cambridge, Katharine Burr Blodgett’s brilliance impresses the world’s leading physicists.

12/02/2026

It’s , but at , that’s our daily bread and butter! Discover incredible stories of female scientists via our podcast, play, Wikipedia Project, middle school books, and other initiatives all year round.

Pictured from left to right:
Frances Oldham Kelsey (chemist), Margarethe Hilferding (psychoanalyst), Carolyn Parker (physicist), Lilian Bland (aeronautical engineer), Ruby Payne-Scott (astrophysicist), Annie Alexander (paleontologist). Listen to their stories in our podcast.

05/02/2026

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

In 1918 a young Katharine Burr Blodgett joins future Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir at The General Electric Company’s industrial research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. It’s the start of her brilliant career.