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 – Leonardo, Copernicus, Archimedes – are so famous that there’s 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 “#wall inclusive” selection represents but a fraction of the accomplished women and men – many of them from underrepresented communities – 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 – 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-Rāzī in the 10th; Émilie du Châtelet 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 – the groundbreaking "Note G" that comprises the world's first computer program – concludes with the author's initials misprinted as "A.L.L."
For millennia, humans have been fascinated by static electricity – 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 – the "Voltaic pile" – 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 – named, of course, in honor of Signor Volta.
On the 100th anniversary of his invention – the "centenary of the pile" – 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 didn’t mean nothing was said about her: she was often the object of gossip, and was generally considered not quite proper. Cavendish’s 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 “that my much writing is a disease … the best Philosophers … have been grievously sick” 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 Margaret’s 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.
Huygens’ most famous achievement is the invention of the pendulum clock. Like many seventeenth-century natural philosophers, though, he had multifaceted interests – in addition to clocks, they included telescopes, optics, astronomy, mathematics, and probability. He worked and lived on the beneficence of patrons: first his father and then Louis XIV (through the newly-founded Académie Royale des Sciences), as was common for natural philosophers at the time.
Huygens’ father was friends with Galileo and Descartes, so it’s 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 Saturn’s moon Titan.
When the Académie Royale des Sciences was founded in 1666, Huygens became a member and moved from The Hague, which at the time was part of the Dutch Republic, to Paris, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. Huygens dedicated his next book (1673's Horologium Oscillatorium) to King Louis XIV, creator and royal patron of the Académie. Many natural philosophers and scientists have devoted works to their patrons over the centuries, but Huygens’ support for the French king was especially loaded, since France was then at war with the Dutch Republic.
Huygens’ approach to natural philosophy shifted frequently between the practical and the theoretical. He and his brother ground lenses and improved telescopes – which led to Huygens’ discovery of Titan. Working from the other direction, it was Huygens’ thinking on mechanics and geometry that produced the pendulum clock.
In addition to his brother, Huygens knew and worked with many natural philosophers through both the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He knew Boyle and Newton, and supported Bacon’s ideas on experimental philosophy, to note his connections with only a few of MIT’s other Big Names. Just as science is today, natural philosophy in the seventeenth century was a communal effort.
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 – The Electric Arc – 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 – 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, it’s hard to avoid Euler. His name endures: "Euler’s 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 didn’t 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 d’Alembert, Bernoulli, Lagrange, and Laplace). In fact, he often distributed his work first through that very avenue – a forerunner, of sorts, to today’s 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 Euler’s 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, Euler’s 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) – in English, “A method for finding curved lines enjoying properties of maximum/minimum.” 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 – astonishingly for a woman in the fifth century – 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.
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 – or those who find power in a mob – 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.
