{"id":3928,"date":"2013-03-12T14:37:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T03:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=3928"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:24:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:24:32","slug":"glimpses-of-a-young-woman-in-laboratories-1959-1963","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2013\/03\/12\/glimpses-of-a-young-woman-in-laboratories-1959-1963\/","title":{"rendered":"Glimpses of a Young Woman Working in Laboratories 1959-1963"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Log<\/a>
Log tables: an essential tool for scientists in the era before cheap calculators and computers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was Robyn Arianrhod\u2019s book, Seduced by Logic, that prompted me to write this series of posts about my mother\u2019s working life and her education in maths and science.\u00a0 Arianrhod\u2019s book is about two female mathematicians, one from the eighteenth century and the other who lived in the nineteenth century.\u00a0 These women made significant contributions to the scientific revolution that swept Europe (read my review here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I had given my father a biography of Newton for the last birthday he had before he died so I was thinking of him while reading the book. I had not expected this book to trigger thoughts about my mother, yet there it was – a discussion of spectroscopy on pages 181-2.<\/p>\n

Through spectroscopy <\/a>scientists can understand more about an object by analysing the light it emits or absorbs.\u00a0 My mother worked as a technical assistant in a spectroscopy laboratory while she was studying maths and physics at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).<\/p>\n

It is over fifty years since my mother worked in spectroscopy.\u00a0 Much has happened since then so understandably her memories of the jobs she held in the early 1960s are hazy albeit punctuated with snippets of clarity.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a>
My mother used this slide rule while studying maths and physics at RMIT from 1959.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My mother\u2019s first job after leaving school was at the Defence Standards Laboratories (DSL) at West Maribyrnong in Melbourne.\u00a0 There she assisted with emission spectroscopy used for metallurgical analysis.\u00a0 Two graphite rods were placed either side of a sample of the material being tested, then the material was bombarded with electric sparks.\u00a0 Glass plates were used to record photographs of the process.<\/p>\n

At DSL my mother recalls her boss, Mr. Baird, setting up the samples to be tested and using a large cylindrical slide rule.\u00a0 Slide rules and log books were essential tools for scientists before the era of calculators and sophisticated computers.<\/p>\n

Mum\u2019s job was to load the glass plate, develop it, read the spectrographs which were on the plates and record the results.\u00a0 She particularly remembers one sample that her team analysed as it was metal from an airplane which had crashed.<\/p>\n

While the vast majority of technical assistants at DSL were male, another woman worked as a technical assistant in the same laboratory as my mother.\u00a0 She was employed as a Technical Assistant Grade 2 (TA2) whereas my mother was a Technical Assistant Grade 1. \u00a0 This indicates that the other woman either had a degree or a Diploma and experience as this was required in order to be classified as a TA2. These were the days when women did not work after they married.\u00a0 The married woman who led work in the mass spectroscopy laboratory at DSL was an exception.\u00a0 She had a PhD in this field.<\/p>\n

After some time working at DSL, my mother gained a position working with atomic absorption spectroscopy at the Chemical Research Laboratories (CRL), a division of CSIRO.<\/p>\n

Before my mother arrived at CRL, Dr Alan Walsh, a scientist working at these laboratories, made a significant breakthrough in spectroscopy.\u00a0 He invented a technique to analyse materials that is known as atomic absorption spectroscopy.\u00a0 Up until then spectroscopy had measured light emissions<\/i> from material, the process that Dr Walsh pioneered examined the absorption<\/i> of light by materials. In his biographical memoir of Dr Walsh<\/a>, Peter Hannaford has listed the fields that have used atomic absorption spectroscopy – medicine, agriculture, mineral exploration, metallurgy, food analysis, biochemistry and environmental monitoring.\u00a0 It has world-wide application and continues to be used today.<\/p>\n

Aside from his scientific research Dr. Walsh is remembered for his character.\u00a0 \u201cHe had an enormous personality and was marvellous to work for\u201d, said my mother. \u201cHe was a brilliant and inspiring leader\u201d.\u00a0 Mum worked directly under Dr Walsh as well as under other scientists in atomic absorption spectroscopy.\u00a0 My mother remembers using a vacuum chamber, dentist drills (not on teeth) and weighing tiny quantities very precisely.\u00a0 She weighed the samples in a climate controlled chamber and used fifteen figure log tables to do the necessary calculations.<\/p>\n

She was responsible for cleaning glassware used in the laboratory and other cleaning tasks.\u00a0 Occasionally she would be sent to the glassblowers\u2019 laboratories to ask them to make a vessel to a specified design.<\/p>\n

~~~~~~~~~~~~~<\/p>\n

For many years Mum kept a memento of her days at DSL.\u00a0 The gray, foot long, plastic boxes which had held the graphite rods used for spectroscopy made an ideal container for her knitting needles.\u00a0 She threw them out in a big clean up last year.\u00a0 I was astonished.\u00a0 I had used these boxes for years but had never read the blue writing on the lid.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no question I always liked science\u201d, commented my mother when recalling how much she enjoyed this work.\u00a0 In 1963 she married my father who she had met while working at DSL. Following convention she stopped working.\u00a0 However, this was not a reluctant resignation.\u00a0 \u201cI resigned when I got married because I wanted to\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n

Her memories reveal another attitude that was prevalent at the time.\u00a0 She was told by one of her bosses that they preferred to employ women as technical assistants because they took direction better.\u00a0 \u201cLooking back, it could have also been that they also had only to be paid half the salary of a male on the same level\u201d Mum reflected.\u00a0 \u201cWe thought that was fair, since a man had to support a family.\u201d<\/p>\n

While my mother did things that would be regarded as unusual for the time, in other respects she followed the expectations of society at the time.\u00a0 This makes me reflect on our attitudes today.\u00a0 Many of us do something that challenges gender stereotypes, even if it is something little (hands up all those women who take out the garbage for kerbside collection or mow the lawns).\u00a0 However, at the same time we adhere to other gender stereotypes in either our actions or our attitudes.\u00a0 Often we are not aware of the dissonance between our stated beliefs and our actions.<\/p>\n

Everyone, including men, has something to contribute towards breaking down the prejudices and stereotypes which are hampering our society.\u00a0 Some people will do this quietly and in obscurity like my mother while others will take a more dramatic approach.\u00a0 Real change will occur through a variety of actions and approaches by a large number of people over a sustained period of time.<\/p>\n

While my mother left work upon marrying and had children, her education and work in science did not end – but I will leave that story for another post.<\/p>\n

This is the second in a series of posts about my mother’s education and work in science and maths. \u00a0In the next post<\/a> in this series I share the story about how my mother came to work as a programmer. Click here <\/a>to read the first post where I share my mother’s memories of her school education in Victorian country high schools of the 1950s.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second in a series of posts about my mother’s education and work in science and maths. In this post I share some of my mother’s memories as a young woman working in science laboratories in Melbourne over fifty years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[43,106,129,167,191,194],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Yvonne Perkins","author_link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/author\/yvonne\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7140,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928\/revisions\/7140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}