women in science

In 1887, Nellie Bly practiced deranged expressions in a mirror for one night, then got herself committed to a New York asylum. She spent ten days documenting rotten food, ice baths, and patients tied together with ropes. Her exposé triggered a grand jury investigation and forced the city to overhaul its asylum system. The doctors who had unanimously declared her insane never explained how a twenty-three-year-old reporter had fooled them all.

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote put carbon dioxide in a glass cylinder, set it in the sun, and discovered it traps heat. She wrote it up. Three years later, a man published similar findings with better equipment and became the father of climate science. Her paper was read aloud by a man because women weren't allowed to present. Then her name vanished from the literature entirely — until 2010, when a geologist found her paper and noticed the experiments had been conducted "by a lady."

Émilie du Châtelet translated Newton's *Principia* into French — still the standard translation nearly three centuries later. She funded her work by applying probability theory to gambling. At forty-two, pregnant and knowing the odds, she raced to finish the manuscript before childbirth. She won the race. She died six days after delivery. The translation outlived her by centuries.

Mary Anning discovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton at twelve, the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur. She taught herself anatomy, geology, and French to read Cuvier. Leading geologists consulted her before publishing. She could not join the Geological Society, attend meetings, or put her name on a paper. She went to the cliffs anyway — every day, in every weather, racing the tides. Her neighbors had a theory: at fifteen months old, she survived a lightning strike that killed three women instantly. Before it, she'd been sickly and listless. After, she was something else entirely.

Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and put them in the sun. The one with CO₂ got hotter and stayed hot longer. She'd just demonstrated the greenhouse effect — the first person ever to do so. Three years later, John Tyndall published similar findings and became the father of climate science. Foote sat in the audience at her own presentation, forbidden to speak, and then disappeared from the record for a hundred and fifty-four years.

In 1942, Hedy Lamarr was Hollywood's most beautiful woman. She was also an inventor. With composer George Antheil, she patented a frequency-hopping system to guide torpedoes without jamming. The Navy sent her to sell war bonds instead. The patent sat in a drawer for twenty years, expired worthless, then became the foundation of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. She earned nothing. At eighty-two, receiving a belated award, she said: "It was about time."

In 1925, Cecilia Payne wrote what would be called the most brilliant astronomy thesis ever written. She proved stars were made of hydrogen and helium. The scientific establishment said she was wrong. So she added a line to her own thesis calling her discovery "almost certainly not real." Four years later, a powerful male astronomer published the same conclusion and credited her in a footnote. Harvard didn't make her a professor for another thirty-one years.