Dame Kathleen Lonsdale deserves to be better known in Ireland, the country of her birth. But then, we Irish tend not to celebrate our scientists, even ones with world-class reputations, writes Mary Mulvihill.
In fairness, Lonsdale left Ireland when she was a child. But we still ignore our home-grown historic scientists, while we readily embrace the achievements of our writers, musicians, artists and dancers. Why this should be so is another story.
Happily, Lonsdale is at last winning some recognition here, and a commemorative plaque will shortly be erected at her former home in Newbridge, Co Kildare, where she was born 100 years on January 28th, 1903, 100 years ago tomorrow.
And why should we be proud of this brilliant woman? Well, Lonsdale's expertise was in skilfully taking x-ray photographs of crystals, and thus revealing their structure. Such work is fundamentally important in science. For instance, it was x-ray photographs taken by another woman, Rosalind Franklin, that revealed DNA's double helix (the 50th anniversary of which is being celebrated this April).
Lonsdale's first breakthrough came in 1929, when she revealed the true nature of benzene, a chemically important compound, whose structure had puzzled scientists for over 60 years. Lonsdale showed that the benzene molecule was a flat, hexagonal ring. Later, among other things, she studied natural and synthetic diamonds, and in recognition of her contribution, a rare form of diamond is named lonsdaleite in her honour.
First woman professor
In 1945, the prestigious Royal Society finally elected its first women fellows, a mere 285 years after it was founded. And who was the first woman chosen? Kathleen Lonsdale. A few years later, she became the first woman professor at University College London.
In 1956 she was made a Dame of the British Empire; and in 1968 she became the first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
A Quaker and pacifist, Lonsdale also campaigned for peace, prison reform, and social responsibility in science, becoming an active member of the Pugwash organisation (which campaigns for nuclear disarmament), and president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Kathleen Lonsdale (née Yardley) was the last of 10 children born to Harry Yardley, Newbridge postmaster and former British army officer, and his Scottish wife, Jessie Cameron. The family was not well off. Four children died in infancy, and Kathleen developed rickets from a poor diet. This left her small in stature, but meant she could later cox for her college rowing eight.
Harry Yardley was a self-taught mathematician, and his daughter later said she inherited her love of maths and science from him. But when her parents separated in 1908, Kathleen moved with her mother to England.
A brilliant student, she excelled at school, and when she graduated in 1922 with a physics degree from Bedford College, a women's college at University College London, she scored the highest marks there in 10 years.
This brought her to the attention of Sir William Bragg, who had won a Nobel prize with his father, Lawrence, for pioneering the use of x-rays to examine crystals. Kathleen joined Sir William's research team at the Royal Institution, along with J.D. Bernal, another brilliant young Irish crystallographer.
Also working there was an engineer, Thomas Lonsdale, and in 1927 he and Kathleen married. They subsequently had three children, yet Lonsdale encouraged Kathleen to continue with her research. So did Bragg, who in 1931 gave Kathleen the then princely sum of £200 to pay for home help, and enable her to return to work - the kind of gesture many working mothers would no doubt appreciate today.
Significantly, though physics is predominantly a man's world, the pioneering field of x-ray crystallography attracted several brilliant young women, notably Dorothy Hodgkin, who later won a Nobel prize for elucidating the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12, and Rosalind Franklin. All were encouraged by Bragg and Bernal, who were noted for promoting women scientists with the kind of positive discrimination that may still be needed in some quarters of science.
Conscientious objector
Kathleen Lonsdale had become a Quaker in 1935, and in 1943 her pacifist principles led to a month in prison, as a conscientious objector, for refusing to register for civil defence duties. It was to be a formative experience, and she later became a prison visitor and an ardent campaigner for penal reform.
She also had Communist sympathies, visiting the USSR and China during the 1950s, and working hard to support colleagues there at a time when such attitudes were frowned on.
There is a telling photograph, taken in 1943 when she attended a rare war-years conference here organised by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. It shows her hard at work, concentrating intensely on her calculations.
She worked hard right to the end, continuing to draft publications even as she was dying of leukaemia in 1971. Now at last this brilliant and pioneering Irish woman, who worked so hard for science and peace, is being honoured in the country of her birth.