11/17/2025
She invented the technology that makes your glasses, cameras, and phone screens work. Her name was deliberately left out of history—until now.
In 1917, Katharine Burr Blodgett walked into the General Electric research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, and became the first woman ever hired there.
She was 18 years old.
The men in the lab didn't know what to make of her. Women weren't supposed to be in physics. They certainly weren't supposed to be brilliant at it.
Katharine was both.
But to understand how an 18-year-old woman ended up in one of America's most prestigious research labs, you need to understand what came before.
Katharine was born in 1898, just weeks after her father was murdered. George Blodgett, a patent attorney, was shot and killed in a home invasion robbery in Schenectady before his daughter was born.
Her mother, Katherine Burr Blodgett, refused to let tragedy define their lives. She was determined that her daughter would have every educational opportunity—even in a world that told women their only career was marriage.
Young Katharine was brilliant. Frighteningly brilliant. She excelled in math and science when girls were told those subjects would damage their delicate brains.
At 15, she graduated from high school. At 17, she finished Bryn Mawr College—one of the few colleges that would even admit women. She graduated with a degree in physics when most physics departments wouldn't allow women through the door.
Then she did something audacious. She applied for a job at General Electric's research laboratory.
The lab director was Irving Langmuir, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on surface chemistry. When he met Katharine, he saw something the rest of the world was trained to miss: genius has no gender.
He hired her on the spot.
She was the first woman ever employed in GE's research lab. The first woman to work alongside the men who were inventing the modern world.
But Langmuir knew she needed more than a job. She needed credentials that would make it impossible for the scientific community to dismiss her.
He told her to go to Cambridge University in England and get a Ph.D. in physics.
In 1926, Katharine Burr Blodgett became the first woman ever to earn a doctorate in physics from Cambridge University.
She was 28 years old. And she was just getting started.
She returned to GE and began working on a problem that had frustrated scientists for decades: reflection.
Every surface that interacts with light—glass, lenses, mirrors—reflects some of that light back. This creates glare. Distortion. Lost clarity.
For telescopes, it meant dimmer images. For cameras, it meant hazy photographs. For eyeglasses, it meant distracting reflections. For cinema projectors, it meant less vibrant films.
Katharine wondered: what if you could eliminate reflection entirely?
Working with Langmuir, she developed a revolutionary technique. She discovered that by depositing ultra-thin molecular layers onto glass—layers so thin they were only a few molecules thick—she could manipulate how light behaved on the surface.
If you layered these films precisely, the reflected light waves would cancel each other out through destructive interference.
The result? Glass that didn't reflect. Glass that appeared almost invisible.
She called it "non-reflective coating."
The world had never seen anything like it.
In 1938, when she perfected the technique, she held up a piece of coated glass and photographers couldn't capture it on film—it was so non-reflective that cameras couldn't see it properly. The images showed what looked like empty space where the glass should be.
She'd made glass invisible.
The applications were immediate and revolutionary. Eyeglasses with her coating eliminated glare, making vision clearer. Microscope lenses could magnify with unprecedented clarity. Telescope lenses could capture fainter stars. Camera lenses produced sharper photographs.
Cinema projection improved dramatically—audiences watching movies in the 1940s and 50s were seeing Katharine's invention, though almost none of them knew her name.
During World War II, her work became critical to the military. She developed improved methods for detecting submarines. She created better de-icing techniques for aircraft wings. She improved smoke screens that saved lives.
By the end of her career, she held eight patents. Her techniques became foundational to modern materials science. The Langmuir-Blodgett film deposition method—named partially for her—is still used today in nanotechnology and advanced materials research.
Your smartphone screen uses her technology. Your anti-glare glasses use her invention. Every precision optical instrument from microscopes to space telescopes builds on her work.
She revolutionized optics. And history almost forgot her name.
Because she was a woman in science, her achievements were consistently attributed to her male colleagues. Langmuir received the Nobel Prize—deservedly, for his own work—but Katharine's contributions were minimized or ignored.
When she was recognized, it was often with surprise. As if brilliance in a woman was an anomaly rather than evidence that women had always been brilliant—just systematically denied the opportunity to prove it.
Katharine never demanded the spotlight. She wasn't interested in fame. She was interested in clarity—in glass, in science, in understanding how the world worked at its most fundamental level.
She worked at GE for 44 years until her retirement in 1963. She never married, dedicating her life to research.
She died in 1979 at age 81. Her obituaries were brief. The world moved on quickly, forgetting the woman who'd made the world clearer.
But every time you put on glasses without glare, you're using her invention.
Every time you take a photograph with a clear lens, that's her legacy.
Every time you watch a movie projected crisply on a screen, you're seeing her work.
Every woman who walks into a physics lab and is told "you don't belong here" is walking through a door Katharine Burr Blodgett already opened.
She was 18 years old when she became the first woman hired at General Electric's research laboratory in a building full of men who didn't think women could do physics.
She invented technology that changed how humanity sees the world.
And for decades, history couldn't see her.
But now we do.
Now we remember that every barrier broken makes the next one easier to break.
That every woman told "you don't belong" who succeeds anyway creates possibility for the next generation.
Katharine Burr Blodgett made glass invisible.
History tried to make her invisible too.
We're bringing her back into focus.
