Happy birthday to #physicist Harriet Brooks (1876 - 1933) who discovered atomic recoil, Radon & recognized radioactive elements could undergo chains of transmutations into a series of new elements.👩🏼🔬🎢🐡🧪#histsci
She was Rutherford’s 1st grad student at McGill. After publishing her results 🧵1/n
in 1899 she completed her MSc in 1901 on "Damping of Electrical Oscillations," before embarking on radioactivity research.
Assigned to puzzle of Th "emanation" she discovered some of earliest evidence of transmutation! Co-authored with Rutherford, "The New Gas from Radium" in 1901. It was Radon.🧵
She measured its atomic mass.
Brooks pursued PhD at Bryn Mawr. She won President's European Fellowship to go spend 1902-1903 in Cambridge working with J.J. Thomson who neglected her. She wildly underestimated her skills & was hindered by Thomson's erroneous belief radioactivity was a chemical 🧵4/
process. But, she made 1st measurement of half-life of Radon.
Instead of returning to Bryn Mawr, she went back to McGill to work with Rutherford for a year. She noticed 'volatility' of radioactive substances, & saw 1st evidence of atomic recoil. When the radioactive element emitted an alpha 🧵
particle the daughter nuclei would be propelled in the opposite direction -sometimes with such force that they became embedded in the plate (which hence becomes radioative). She also charted the decays of Th, Ra, & Ac, laying the groundwork for the discovery of nuclear decay series. She published 🧵
results in 1904.
As physics tutor at Barnard College, she met physics prof Bergen Davis, fell in love & became engaged in 1906. The Dean demanded her resignation, insisting she couldn't be both physicist & wife. Brooks protested. She ultimately broke off the engagement, but resigned due to 🧵
stress. She went to work with Marie Curie in Paris, who offered her a job, but Rutherford offered her a fellowship in Manchester. She accepted, but instead, encouraged by Mrs. Rutherford (who harboured traditional ideas about marriage) she married Frank Pitcher. 🧵
