In 1916, when MIT's majestic Cambridge campus opened, the buildings surrounding its Great Court (now called Killian Court) were inscribed with the names of men who'd made notable contributions to science and technology.
A century later, MIT celebrated the centennial of its move from Boston to Cambridge. During the 2016 festivities, we decided to look at the names carved into those buildings with fresh eyes and consider whether things might be done differently if the campus were being built today.
To make one thing clear: every name that was carved into the "original group" of buildings belongs there. Some of the names â Leonardo, Copernicus, Archimedes â are so famous that thereâs nearly nothing new to be said about them. And the less well-known names in Killian Court, too, have earned the immortality that goes with being carved in stone.
Still, from our vantage point in 2016 we were aware of a large number of 20th century individuals whose names would clearly be competitive for inclusion if the stone carving were taking place today. We could also identify many people from earlier centuries whose names really ought to have been considered for inclusion back in 1916.
There are 115 names on the buildings of Killian Court, and we were able to blog about only a small percentage of them. Similarly, the list of names we considered in our â#wall inclusiveâ selection represents but a fraction of the accomplished women and men â many of them from underrepresented communities â who might have been included in such an architectural undertaking today.
During our research we made some happy discoveries. At least one of the names inscribed in Killian Court belonged to a man who had corresponded directly with MIT's founder, William Barton Rogers. But then, one of the individuals in our proposed set of #wall inclusive names had corresponded with Rogers' wife, Emma Savage Rogers. (And fear not: that letter, too, included "regards to Prof Rogers.")
Many of the men whose names are incised into MIT's buildings were born into wealth and privilege (Robert Boyle and James Clerk Maxwell stand out among many others). While inherited wealth diminishes neither their brilliance nor their accomplishments, it does contrast starkly with the opportunities that were available to a man whose parents were born into slavery â but who nonetheless would go on to work closely with Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison, and to author a text that MIT would purchase as soon as it was published.
No one disputes the phenomenal intelligence of a polymath like Benjamin Franklin. But how much more difficult is it to become a celebrated scientist when one is expressly forbidden, during childhood and adolescence, to read worthwhile books, because of a father who feared that exposure to serious ideas could only scar the female mind?
Hypatia in the 4th century; al-RÄzÄ« in the 10th; Ămilie du ChĂątelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi in the 18th; Alice Ball, Rachel Carson, and Ernest Everett Just in the 20th ⊠each of these is a name that should be more widely known, and celebrated. And each represents but a single spot of light in a vast constellation of scientists, searchers, and strivers whose names we are just beginning to learn.
Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace, may be the most widely-recognized name associated with the history of women in STEM. An important programming language developed for the U.S. Department of Defense is named in her honor. So is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration that's held every year on the second Tuesday in October. Ada Lovelace is a Big Name indeed.
Her father was the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Her mother Annabelle was a much more disciplined individual, and Ada received a good education at home. In her nineteenth year Ada became serious about mathematics and science and immersed herself in more advanced studies. Happily, her mentor was Mary Somerville, who was the leading woman scientist of the day (in fact she is the person for whom the word "scientist" was coined). Through Somerville, Ada would meet Charles Babbage, whose proposed "analytical engine" sparked her interest.
An article on Babbage's machine was published in a French journal in 1842. Ada produced an English-language version of the article but did not stop at mere translation. To the 26-page "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" she appended 41 pages of her own "Notes" that included what is now recognized as the first computer program.
Ada's translation-with-notes was her only solo publication, but it's a major landmark in the history of science publishing. When it initially appeared in 1843 in volume three of Scientific Memoirs, Ada's full name was not given. Instead, each of her famous "Notes" was signed with the initials "A.A.L." (for Ada Augusta Lovelace). Fun fact from MIT's Rare Books Program: Ada's most celebrated piece of writing â the groundbreaking "Note G" that comprises the world's first computer program â concludes with the author's initials misprinted as "A.L.L."
For millennia, humans have been fascinated by static electricity â the tendency of a particular substance to attract other, more lightweight materials. Ancient Greeks noticed that if they rubbed a piece of amber, for example, it caused other objects, such as feathers or pieces of lint, to move toward it and stick to its surface. But the phenomenon wasn't understood at all.
In 1600 William Gilbert distinguished between the attractive power of the magnet, and the seemingly identical phenomenon of static electricity. This was a crucially important distinction, but serious study of electricity remained difficult because of the weak and fleeting nature of a static charge.
The development of the friction machine (to produce electrical charges on demand) in the 17th century, and the Leyden jar (to store charges) in the century that followed, were major leaps forward that ushered in periods of increased experimental activity.
But it was Alessandro Volta's invention of the electric battery â the "Voltaic pile" â that enabled experimentation, for the first time, with a steady flow of electricity. This changed electrical research fundamentally, and led almost immediately to major discoveries in chemistry as well as experimental outcomes that would eventually result in the development of electricity as a source of power.
Volta's contribution did not go unnoticed or unappreciated: the battery that powers your flashlight, the much larger battery in your automobile, and the power that's fed into your home through massive transmission lines, all carry specific voltages â named, of course, in honor of Signor Volta.
On the 100th anniversary of his invention â the "centenary of the pile" â a celebration was held in the Italian city of Como, Volta's birthplace, to mark the occasion. Giacomo Puccini, the leading opera composer of the day, left his comfort zone to contribute a march that received its world debut during the festivities. Puccini's piece honoring Volta was fittingly entitled Scossa Elettrica, or "Electric Shock."
Margaret Cavendish made sure that her name was gigantic during her lifetime. Unfortunately, although "Cavendish" does appear among the Big Names in Killian Court, it refers to her distant relative Henry Cavendish, known for his role in identifying hydrogen.
Unlike most female natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish left behind a substantial body of printed works, among them ruminations on natural philosophy and what may be the first utopian science fiction novel. She repeatedly and deliberately placed herself in the public eye, creating a specific image of herself as a learned woman. Arguably, she was able to do this because of her position as Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne: she carried on exactly as she wished and dared anyone to speak against her.
But this didnât mean nothing was said about her: she was often the object of gossip, and was generally considered not quite proper. Cavendishâs writings reveal a keen awareness of how she was perceived by others. Her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, for example, begin with a sly note that while people might say âthat my much writing is a disease ⊠the best Philosophers ⊠have been grievously sickâ with the same illness.
Cavendish even managed to talk her way through the door of the newly-fledged Royal Society of London to view a demonstration. While female natural philosophers and scientists participated tangentially in the Royal Society throughout its history, it was 1945 before any women became Fellows of the Royal Society, which illustrates the audacity required for Cavendish to attend an all-male meeting there in the 1600s.
Throughout her life, Margaret Cavendish was her own biggest supporter. Her husband and his brother played a role in her informal education, but her brother-in-law died early and her husband was more involved in politics than in Margaretâs career. After her death, Cavendish slid into obscurity. Her remarkable nature has only been rediscovered recently, as scholars have begun serious investigation into the role of women in the history of science.
MIT does not own any early publications by Margaret Cavendish. Dozens of editions of her works have been digitized by Early English Books Online and the Brown University Women Writers Project, though, and some of the reprint editions published since the 1990s are on the shelves of MIT's Hayden Library.
Huygensâ father was friends with Galileo and Descartes, so itâs unsurprising that he placed a high priority on giving Christiaan and his brother the best possible education. His father supported him financially for more than half his life so that Huygens could pursue his philosophical interests rather than following the family tradition of diplomacy. During this period, Huygens invented the pendulum clock, studied probability, and made the first recorded observations of Saturnâs moon Titan.
Huygensâ approach to natural philosophy shifted frequently between the practical and the theoretical. He and his brother ground lenses and improved telescopes â which led to Huygensâ discovery of Titan. Working from the other direction, it was Huygensâ thinking on mechanics and geometry that produced the pendulum clock.
As with so many women who've excelled in the sciences, Hertha Ayrton's success did not come easy. One of eight children in a poor family, by age 16 she was working as a governess and sending money home to support her widowed mother and her siblings. But she'd received several years of schooling courtesy of a sympathetic aunt, and was so gifted that when she took the Cambridge University Examination for Women at age twenty she scored honors in English and math.
With financial help from a leading suffragist, she was able to attend Girton College where she completed their course of study in math; from there she went to the Finsbury Technical College in London. Her interests were varied and over the course of her lifetime she would hold 26 patents for everything from an improved movie projector to implements for the British military.
But her greatest success came via her work in resolving the serious challenges posed by electric lighting which, though it was still a developing technology in the 1890s, was becoming hugely important across the globe. Direct-current arc lights were in wide use, but they were beset with problems. Ayrton accomplished what others apparently could not: she analyzed the electric arc from every important angle, and began publishing her work around the age of forty. In 1899 she read a landmark paper at the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The IEE was suitably impressed and that same year, made her its first female member.
She published her most important work â The Electric Arc â in 1902. The 500-page volume was quickly recognized as both the definitive text in its field and a classic in the literature of electrical engineering. Two years later Ayrton became the first woman permitted to read a paper at the Royal Society. And two years after that, the Royal Society awarded her its Hughes Medal â a prize that would go, in subsequent decades, to the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Stephen Hawking. But actual membership in the Royal Society was not to be hers, despite her having been nominated: as a woman she was, in the Society's view, simply ineligible.
Hertha Ayrton actively supported (and in fact founded) suffragist organizations and remained a committed, lifelong feminist. If it's true that we're judged by the friends we keep, a clue to Ayrton's scientific stature may be found in the fact that she and Marie Curie were close personal friends for decades.
Upon her death, Ayrton left a sizeable sum to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, which had opened its doors to her while other scientific bastions remained closed to women.
In mathematics and in physics, itâs hard to avoid Euler. His name endures: "Eulerâs identity" may be the most famous instance of his surname's ubiquity, but there are also Euler numbers in several fields, along with multiple functions, formulas, equations, laws, and theorems that bear his name.
Given his subsequent fame, it may not be surprising to learn that Euler first applied for a professorship at the age of twenty. While he didnât get that job, he did become an adjunct at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences soon afterward. He worked throughout his life on mathematical and physical problems; he taught and wrote. And he maintained correspondence with a wide network of other scientists (including dâAlembert, Bernoulli, Lagrange, and Laplace). In fact, he often distributed his work first through that very avenue â a forerunner, of sorts, to todayâs conference or pre-print systems.
Although he was born and raised in Switzerland, Euler split his adult life between the Academy in St. Petersburg and the Berlin Society of Sciences. Institutions like these provided him both with colleagues and with funding for scientific inquiry, and many of Eulerâs works saw publication under their auspices. Not all, though: he published over five hundred books and articles during his lifetime, but more than two hundred other works were printed only after his death. His influence spread wide across eighteenth-century mathematics and it endures, even in such tiny things as using e for natural logarithms, i for the square root of negative one, or f(x) for a function of x.
Across the board, Eulerâs thinking was rigorous and his writings thorough. His books are peppered with equations and typically contain engraved plates with figures demonstrating various geometric, algebraic, or physical properties. Some of his publications include such marks of fine printing as head- and tail-pieces and other decorative elements.
The title page vignette illustrating this post comes from the Institute Archives and Special Collections' copy of Methodus inveniendi lineas curvas maximi minimive proprietate gaudentes (1744) â in English, âA method for finding curved lines enjoying properties of maximum/minimum.â Latin was still the language of science in this period, as it allowed scholars from across Europe to communicate in a common tongue that lent no one a particular advantage. For someone like Euler, whose letters went to colleagues with a variety of first languages and whose own life spanned several countries, it would have been a natural choice.
The first woman who is known to have taught mathematics and philosophy to men, Hypatia is probably the most famous ancient female scholar. Born in Alexandria, she was daughter to the mathematician Theon. Her father was not her only teacher; she studied under Plutarch the Younger as well.
With her father, Hypatia produced commentaries on Ptolemy, along with a definitive edition of the Elements of Euclid. She devised her own astrolabes and a hydroscope. Hypatia was hailed as a lecturer and â astonishingly for a woman in the fifth century â eventually headed the great Neoplatonist school of Alexandria. But sadly none of Hypatia's own writings have survived. What is known about her has been gleaned from the writings of others, including Synesius of Cyrene.Â
One of Hypatia's most notable students, Synesius went on to become a Bishop in the relatively early days of Christianity. The first printed volume of his works includes Synesius' letters ("Synesiou Epistolai"), some of which are addressed to Hypatia. In an apparent show of respect for his revered mentor, Synesius always addresses her as "The Philosopher Hypatia."
One thing we know for certain about Hypatia is that she came to a terrible end at the hands of a mob. Throughout history, such endings have been all too common among those who challenge the status quo. Nothing, it seems, has so consistently upset those in power â or those who find power in a mob â as much as women who've refused to mask their extraordinary intelligence, or who've demanded basic freedoms that some men reserved only for themselves.
Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, more or less invented the scientific method. For that reason, heâs an appropriate figure for us to celebrate during this first week of classes in MITâs fall semester, in the hundredth year after the Institute moved across the Charles.
It can be difficult to detail Baconâs contributions to science from the vantage of the twenty-first century. He became interested in natural philosophy in his 30s and over the next several decades wrote works intended to transform it into a more systematic, experiment-based pursuit. His political career made sustained periods of investigation difficult, but by 1620 he had one volume of his Instauratio magna â "Great Instaturationâ â ready for publication. Although his plan was for the Instauratio magna to comprise six volumes in all, he died before completing any of the others. What Bacon did complete is now usually referred to by that volume's title, Novum organum scientiarum (âNew instrument of scienceâ).
While Baconâs methods (and many of Baconâs results) do not always reflect the scientific method as we know it today, and though he was certainly not the only person to contribute to the scientific method's development, his Novum organum undoubtedly forms the bedrock of science as a discipline.
Along with his utopian work New Atlantis, Bacon's Novum organum inspired, later in the seventeenth century, the formation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Sir Francis Bacon never knew it, but his partially-completed labor of love kicked off the Scientific Revolution.
MIT owns the 1620 second printing of the Novum organum. Itâs bound together with other greatest hits of his scientific and philosophical output, including New Atlantis. The two were likely sold together in 1638, when the rest of the works in the volume were printed.
In the century since MIT's Killian Court was constructed, many things have changed, both in society and in the sciences. One of the most important developments in science, quantum mechanics, was barely getting started in 1916. By that point Einstein had established the principles of the photoelectric effect and Bohr had figured out why hydrogen produced specific spectral lines, but nobody truly theorized quantum mechanics until the 1920s and 30s. By definition, no one involved in quantum could have had their name carved into the walls of the original Court.
Within the field of quantum mechanics, there are plenty of Big Names to choose from: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, de Broglie, Einstein and Bohr ⊠and Dirac. Diracâs work reconciling quantum mechanics â as established by all these other big names â with Einsteinâs special relativity, along with his re-formulation of quantum into linear algebra terms, moved the discipline forward in a major way. The reconciliation with special relativity also led Dirac to posit the existence of antiparticles such as the positron, a prediction that was experimentally verified in the 1930s.
Paul Adrien Maurice Diracâs personal life followed straightforward lines. He attended and subsequently taught at Cambridge, where he held the professorship once occupied by Isaac Newton; he married the sister of a physicist friend (one wonders if her interests tended toward the sciences as well); and, at the age of 69, moved with his wife to Tallahassee, where he was a professor at Florida State University. His publications serve as textbooks in introductory quantum classes to this day.
In MIT's Institute Archives and Special Collections, Dirac has achieved immortality through the operator, neutrino model, equation, matrix, particles, notation, and more that bear his name. Dozens of MIT theses, dissertations, and technical papers include his name in their titles, documenting his importance to the work of the Institute. But Diracâs own works, such as his paper on the "Quantum Theory of the Electron," published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Series A) in 1928, still reside in the circulating collections.
Certain scientists have had discoveries, theorems and laws named for them, and that's both an honor and an acknowledgement of singular achievement. But there are some truly great figures in the history of science whose work is widely applied, cited, and learned by every student in their discipline with no name attached â precisely because the work is so foundational to the field.
We'll never know how Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius would feel about his work having been divorced from his name despite its importance. He first identified the concept of entropy in an 1865 article in Annalen der Physik that concludes with the first two laws of thermodynamics, formulated in almost exactly the same terms we use today. The first law â "Die Energie der Welt ist constantâ (or in modern English terms, "energy cannot be created or destroyed") â had been conceptualized earlier. The second â "Die Entropie der Welt strebt einem Maximum zuâ ("entropy tends to increase") â was Clausius' own creation.
More laws of thermodynamics followed. However, the numbering Clausius established has never been revised: his first two laws have been supplemented with a third and a âzeroth.â
Clausius lived and worked in what is now Germany. During much of his life, Germany was not a single political unit, and in fact Clausius fought and was injured in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 (of which the Prussian governmentâs ambitions to unify Germany were a major cause). Five years later his wife died, and Clausius spent the following decade recuperating from his injuries and raising their six children.
The MIT Libraries own books by Clausius in French, English, and the original German, as well as numerous offprints and articles, many of them held in special collections.
The word "tragic" is badly overused, but it's difficult to find a satisfactory substitute for it when the topic is Alice Ball's brief life. Born in Seattle, she graduated from the University of Washington in 1914. That same year she and a professor co-authored a paper that was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
One year later she had earned her master's degree in chemistry from what is now the University of Hawaii. In doing so, she became the first woman â and the first African American â to receive an advanced degree from that institution.
Kalawao, on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, had long served as an area where people stricken with Hansen's disease, then commonly called leprosy, were quarantined. For centuries, those suffering with Hansen's lived with no hope of treatment. Newly-minted chemist Alice Ball, undaunted, devised a way to administer a compound that provided relief from some of the disease's worst symptoms.
But an accident, apparently involving chlorine gas, occurred while she was teaching a class, and led to her death. Alice Ball died before learning that her research had resulted in the first effective treatment for Hansen's disease, a treatment that would be in use for decades.
A century after her death, we can only wonder what Alice Ball might have done over the course of a full lifespan, given what she accomplished during the scant 24 years she was alive.
When you hear the name Newton, you think of physics, mathematics ⊠and alchemy? In fact, Newton produced a significant body of alchemical work, and while it may seem incongruous in the 21st century, these areas of study were not diametrically opposed in Newton's day.
Newton spent a significant portion of his life at Cambridge University, first as a student and then as a fellow. But he came up with the seeds of his most revolutionary scientific and mathematical ideas while the university was closed due to plague during the years 1665-1666, providing if nothing else a powerful argument for term breaks and sabbaticals. In subsequent years he worked on developing his ideas more fully while beginning his exploration of alchemy. Although alchemy was not unheard of within the walls of Cambridge and Oxford, it was practiced by people of all classes and walks of life in Europe, intersecting with theological thought, scientific practice, historical inquiry, and, admittedly, a certain amount of Orientalism.
Arguably, alchemy intersected with all of these even in Newtonâs own work. His handwritten translation of the Book of Nicholas Flamel, owned by the MIT Libraries, details the supposed âhieroglyphicalâ symbolism embedded in paintings on the Church of the SS. Innocents in Paris (which was torn down in the eighteenth century). According to Flamel, via Newton, these symbols  â including a winged lion, St. Peter, and even dragons â explain the procedure for creating the Philosopherâs Stone, if you know how to read them.
The dragons hold particular interest: there are two of them, Newton translates, âpainted in a circle, the head biting the tail to shew that they proceeded from one only thing & that that alone was sufficient of its self and in its revolution & circulation it was perfected.â The description recalls an Ouroboros, but the phrasing sets up intriguing echoes with gravity and orbital mechanics. The manuscript dates from the 1690s, just after the publication of Newtonâs Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, suggesting that the subjects werenât strongly partitioned in his mind. Itâs a good reminder that science isnât hermetically sealed off from other disciplines â and that history is always a little stranger than youâd think.
In addition to the Flamel manuscript, the MIT Libraries own several rare works by Newton, including MIT founder William Barton Rogersâ own copy of the Principia.
Ernest Everett Just was a cell biologist. When he graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth in 1907 he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and went on to earn his PhD at the University of Chicago. Just worked as a professor of biology and as a department head, and was recognized as an outstanding researcher and theorist, credited with significant discoveries. In close association with the pioneering embryologist Frank R. Lillie, he spent 19 summers doing research at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. He presented papers at major scientific conferences, published numerous articles, and wrote two books, one of which â The Biology of the Cell Surface â was the definitive text in its field for years. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography notes that, among other achievements, Just was "the first to associate cell surface changes with stages of embryonic development experimentally." His contributions to embryology and cell biology were lasting and important.
But in his fifties, Just left the United States for Europe, with the intention of remaining there permanently. As an African American scientist, he was exhausted by the roadblocks that had been thrown in his way both personally and professionally during his entire lifetime. Grants and research funding that should have been available to a scientist with his record of accomplishment simply were not awarded to him. He was made to feel unwelcome at conferences and scientific gatherings despite the quality of his presentations. And of course his achievements provided no protection whatsoever from the indignities â sometimes petty, often major â that were a part of the daily life of every person of color in America during his lifetime.
Twentieth-century American artists such as Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, and James Baldwin were famously drawn to a continent that offered them some respite from the pervasive and relentless racism of the U.S. So too was Ernest Everett Just, a man of science who sought some measure of peace in a place where â to his immense relief â he was received with the simple respect that was the due of any human being.
His respite was short-lived. After just two years in France, Just was forced to leave when Nazi Germany invaded the country. He died the following year, and his lengthy obituary in the journal Science bemoaned the psychological trauma that had been inflicted on him in his home country. It concluded with this sentence: "That a man of his ability, scientific devotion, and of such strong personal loyalties as he gave and received, should have been warped in the land of his birth must remain a matter for regret."
In the 18th century smallpox was a deadly scourge, and in England, inoculation â the intentional introduction of smallpox into the body of an uninfected person â was a fairly widespread practice. Though often effective at preventing a deadly bout, it was still dangerous and the death rate from inoculation was not insignificant.
Edward Jenner was a young country physician who opened his practice in the 1770s. He noticed that certain individuals appeared to be completely immune to smallpox though they'd been neither inoculated nor previously stricken with the disease. But they all had something in common: a prior bout of cowpox, an illness much milder than smallpox.
Jenner extracted material from the sores on a person with cowpox and used it to inoculate another individual. It worked: the person receiving the inoculation with cowpox was rendered immune to smallpox.
Jenner then determined that the cowpox material he used in vaccination could be dried, and would retain its effectiveness for a few months. The availability of this fairly durable vaccine material made smallpox vaccination possible across Europe and as far afield as Constantinople, Iraq, and India. In North America, Thomas Jefferson's family was vaccinated with material received directly from Jenner.
In 1798 Jenner published An Inquiry Into the Cause and Effects of Variolae Vaccinae, in which he related numerous cases of the cowpox/smallpox immunity phenomenon. The volume, printed at Jenner's own expense and now a much-sought-after rare book, includes illustrations that are elegantly drawn, daintily colored, and flat-out appalling at the same time.
Then as now, vaccination was controversial and Jenner was forced to defend his practice not only in his book but in numerous pamphlets as well. It's a recurrent theme in the history of science and medicine: important discoveries, however valuable, must be defended against waves of resistance driven by ignorance and fear.
But nations across the globe eventually adopted compulsory vaccination, and after decades of international cooperation, the World Health Organization announced in 1980 that smallpox had been eradicated. Today, new disputes rage about various vaccines, and we can only watch as history repeats itself.
One of the most influential science writers of the 20th century, Rachel Carson caused a sea change in the way mainstream American society considered pesticides, our environment, and our place in the ecosystem with her 1962 book Silent Spring. For this alone, Carson has earned a place in our updated canon of people who further MITâs vision of building a better world.
Pennsylvania-born Carson spent most of her life in the Maryland and DC area, but she returned time and again to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (the site of a joint partnership with MIT), which recently put up a statue in her honor. She worked for the US government as an editor, writer, and scientist for more than a decade and a half, while producing beautifully-written articles and books on the significance of the natural world.
Silent Spring was a departure for Carson: her first three books focused on the seas and on oceanic life. Her well-turned prose, combining lushly descriptive and scientific language, is both informative and engaging. Itâs tempting to consider these earlier works false starts before the masterpiece, but each did precisely what Carson wanted it to do. By any metric, though, Silent Spring had the largest impact, and its effects are still felt today.
MITâs copies of The Sea Around Us (1951) feature evocative drawings by Katherine L. (âKayâ) Howe, a colleague and friend of Carsonâs. These drawings â and the overall design of the book â surely helped propel it to its bestseller status.
