Women that caved the way in STEM

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who worked on NASA’s early space missions and was portrayed by Taraji P Henson in the film Hidden Figures. She died in 2020 at the age of 101.

She was one of the “computers” who solved equations by hand during NASA’s early years and those of its precursor organisation, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

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Rosalind Franklin

British chemist Rosalind Franklin, born in 1920 in Notting Hill, and in 1942 she brought her physics and chemistry expertise to London Coal, where she investigated the properties of carbon.

This was crucial to the war effort, which relied on coal and carbon for strategic equipment like gas masks. This research was the basis of her PhD thesis at Cambridge. In 1950 during her research she discovered that there were two forms of DNA and was offered a three-year scholarship to undertake further investigation at King’s College in London.

Beatrice Shilling

Born in 1909 in Hampshire, aeronautical engineer and daredevil motorcycle racer Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Shilling, is credited by her peers as helping the Allies to win WWII. She purchased her first motorcycle at age fourteen, later obtaining a Bachelor and Master’s degree in mechanical engineering, specialising in the elimination of piston temperatures of high-speed diesel engines. In March 1941, she solved a problem that had jeopardised the life of pilots.

In 1940, during the Battle of France and Battle of Britain, Royal Air Force pilots discovered a serious problem of stalling in fighter planes with Rolls-Royce engines. Tilly led a small team that designed a simple device to solve this problem – a brass thimble with a hole in the middle, which could be fitted easily into the engine’s carburettor. It remained in use as a stop-gap to help prevent engine stall for a number of crucial wartime years.

Inge Lehmann

Inge Lehmann was a Danish seismologist who discovered Earth has a solid inner core. Between 1929 and 1939, she compared various data sets from earthquakes to conclusively prove what was at the Earth’s core.
On 17 June 1929, at around 10:17 local time, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck the South Island of New Zealand. Waves from the quake were recorded on seismometers around the world, notably in Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Baku, Sverdlovsk and Irkutsk.

Lehmann discovered oddities in the wave patterns. She realised that seismic waves arriving between around 104° and 140° from the epicentre had interacted with a solid inner core, disproving the previously accepted belief that the Earth’s core was entirely liquid.

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