Pursuing science has never been easy. While there are those difficulties that come with adopting a life in science, there are those that are imposed on scientists due to society’s constructs. And more often than not, women have been at the receiving end of such social stigma. Harriet Brooks might be Canada’s first female nuclear scientist, but even her story clearly illustrates this.
Born in Exeter, Ontario in 1876 to a family that was respectable, but not wealthy, Brooks was one of nine children. She was one of two children in the family who went on to attend a university, and graduated from McGill University in 1898 with an honours B.A. in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (Science).
Rutherford’s influence
Physicist Ernest Rutherford had moved to McGill from England that same year and Brooks was the first graduate student in his research team. Having gone on to obtain her M.A. degree, Brooks’ work with Rutherford turned towards the exciting new field of radium * .
Rutherford firmly believed in Brooks’ abilities and even wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her once. In it, Rutherford not only mentioned that “next to Mme Curie she is the most prominent woman physicist in the department of radioactivity”, but also stated that Brooks “is an original and careful worker with good experimental powers”. With Rutherford’s backing, Brooks found herself working with eminent physicists such as J.J. Thomson in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and Marie Curie, when she was in Paris.
Brooks’ contributions
In a letter to Nature, an international journal of science, on July 21, 1904, Brooks spoke about a peculiar type of volatility in radium exhibited immediately by its active deposit when removed from the emanation. Later results in 1909 clarified that this effect was due to a recoil, which has proved to be of much importance as a method of separation of elements.
Brooks made a discovery that was pivotal in determining that elements undergo transmutation during radioactive decay. More importantly, she identified the multiple decays of elements that take place in a sequence – what we now call a decay series.
Fights her fight
Amidst all these advances and research, Brooks was also fighting her own fight. While teaching Physics at Barnard College in New York in 1905, she got engaged to a Physics professor at Columbia University. When Laura Gill, Barnard’s Dean, stood by the view of the college’s trustees that one could not be both a married woman and a successful academic, Brooks bellowed a strong response. She categorically stated that “it is a duty I owe to my profession and my sex”, adding that marriage shouldn’t come in the way of practising her profession. Even though Dean Gill didn’t budge from the trustees’ view, the problem came to a close as Brooks’ engagement was broken off.
And then, suddenly, without warning, Brooks stopped her research in physics and dropped her plans for a teaching career. No discernible reason has been found since for this decision of hers. She married in 1907 and had three children, two of whom died while still in their teens. Brooks herself died relatively young in 1933, possibly a result of illness due to her years of exposure to radiation. It would be nearly fifty years and a couple of generations later that the importance of Brooks’ contributions were recognised.
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*The glaring omission of radium
You’ll get a grasp of how new Brooks’ chosen field was from the fact that the word ‘radium,’ coined only in 1898 following its discovery, had missed out a place in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Even though the relevant section (R-Reactive) of the OED came out only in 1903, the makers of the dictionary had exercised caution, as they believed that radium’s properties were still being investigated and in order to avoid a grave blunder in its definition.
The fact that radium’s properties were confirmed before the R-Reactive section of OED appeared, and that it became well-known and rose to prominence, made it one of the most famous omissions of the first edition of OED.
‘Radium’ had to wait till the 1933 Supplement for its inclusion in the OED.
