Women's History Month: Women in Energy

March is Women’s History Month and we thought that we’d take this as an opportunity to highlight some incredible women who have influenced the revolution of energy and electricity!⁣⁣

• Edith Clarke – Clarke became the first woman to earn an electric engineering degree from MIT. As an engineer for General Electric, she invented and patented the Clarke calculator, a device that solved electric power transmission line problems. She was the first woman to deliver a paper at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers’ annual meeting, first woman to teach engineering at the University of Texas and the first female Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.⁣

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• Marie Curie – Curie discovered that Uranium Rays caused the air around a sample to conduct electricity, discovered the existence of two elements, Polonium and Radium, and coined the term ‘radioactivity’. Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two, and the only person to win in two different sciences (physics and chemistry). During World War I she developed mobile X-ray units and Radon gas syringes to sterilize wounds to help injured soldiers. It is estimated her contributions helped more than a million wounded soldiers.⁣

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• Irène Curie-Joliot – Curie-Joliot followed in her mother’s radioactive footsteps. She and her husband, Frédéric Joliot, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. Curie-Joliot’s research into Radium nuclei helped pave the way for the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Han and Lise Meitner.⁣

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• Lise Meitner – Meitner studied radioactive elements with Otto Hahn. After Hahn discovered that Uranium atoms split when bombarded with neutrons, Meitner calculated the energy released from the reaction and named it “nuclear fission.”⁣

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• Chien-Shiung Wu – Known as the “Queen of Nuclear Research.” After the war, she conducted the “Wu experiment” that contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation parity which earned her the first Wolf Prize in 1978. She was the first female president of the American Physical Society and the first female physics professor at Princeton University.⁣

⁣Source: Entergy