10 Female Engineers Who Helped Pave the Way

Post 2.666

April 23, 2012

Engineering remains one of the few industries left where men significantly outnumber women, continuously presenting some pretty gnarly challenges for females attempting to enter into it. Thanks to the steel reserve of many pioneers unafraid to penetrate the traditional “boy’s club” of STEM degrees and careers, some precedents have already been set proving that women offer just as much to the engineering world and, of course, the world as a whole. When overwhelmed and intimidated in any situation, try to find inspiration in the following stories of how much hard work and passion can break for future generations and dreamers.

1. Mae Jemison 

   Because of her impressive background in both chemical engineering and medicine, NASA granted Mae Jemison the honor of serving as the science mission specialist aboard Endeavour in 1992, making her the very first African-American woman in space. Following her resignation from NASA, she flexed her entrepreneurial acumen to launch the Jemison Group, whose goals revolve around discovering practical, daily life applications for advanced and simple technology alike. In addition to her scientific triumphs, she also accomplished plenty as a dancer, actress, and educator – even going on to earn nine honorary doctorates from such institutions as Dartmouth and Princeton. Because Jemison worked professionally in both the arts and the sciences, she often served as an advocate for teaching both with equal emphasis, even finding innovative ways to let lessons overlap.

2. Eleanor Baum 

   The first female president of the American Society for Engineering Education and female dean of an engineering school (Pratt Institute School of Engineering) also served as the head of Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and in laudable positions with the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Advisory Board and the National Manpower Commission. She devotes much of her career – which launched after completing her PhD at Polytechnic Institute in 1964 – to opening up even more doors for women and minorities, both traditionally unrepresented in the engineering sector. Prior to entering the academic sector, she spent time as an aerospace engineer with General Instrument Corporation and Sperry Rand.

3. Ruchi Sanghvi 

   Facebook’s first female engineer – one of the first 10 hired in 2005 – opened up to Huffington Post about how much she struggled with being the department’s “odd woman out,” unable to fully connect with her male peers. The Carnegie Mellon graduate responsible for the News Feed, Connect, and Platform broke ground for the millennial ladies hoping to break into the heavily XY internet and social and mobile media sectors. Now the co-founder of Cove (which was recently bought out by Dropbox), she continues making strides. Sanghvi rightfully takes pride in her success as a sexual and racial minority in an industry inundated with white males, believing the hurdles ultimately positive.

4. Nora Stanton Blatch 

   In 1905, Nora Stanton Blatch graduated from Cornell as the very first woman to ever receive a degree in civil engineering; shortly thereafter, the American Society of Civil Engineers accepted her as its first female member, though with junior status. After quitting her first job at the New York City Board of Water Supply, she teamed up with husband Lee De Forest to develop and raise awareness of the wireless radio. Their marriage withered when he insisted she cease working upon the birth of their first child, but the ardent suffragette moved out with her daughter and took up a position with Radley Steel Construction instead. Blatch certainly proves that women are more than capable of balancing motherhood with a demanding engineering career.

5. Lillian Moller Gilbreth

   Brown University awarded this efficiency and management pioneer the world’s first industrial psychology degree; a doctorate, no less, at a time when women still stood as quite a rarity in higher education, not just graduate school. Along with her husband Frank Bunker Gilbreth, the shape of industrial engineering changed permanently thanks to inquiries into time and person management, efficiency, motion study, fatigue, ergonomics and other human factors. For her myriad valuable contributions, the prestigious National Academy of Engineers inducted her as its first female member in 1965.

6. Elizabeth Bragg

   Though she never actually entered the engineering profession, preferring to keep herself tending to her home and family instead, this woman shattered one of the field’s very first glass ceilings. In 1876, University of California at Berkeley awarded her a civil engineering degree, making Elizabeth Bragg the first known woman in the world to ever do so.

6. Elmina T. Wilson

   After Elizabeth Bragg proved it possible for women to earn engineering degrees at the baccalaureate level, Elima T. Wilson went on to do the same for the master’s. She received her diploma in civil engineering from Iowa State University in 1894, and went on to serve as one of the two preeminent women in structural engineering alongside sister Alda. Among the most notable projects she participated in were the very first raised steel water tower west of the Mississippi (in Ames, Iowa) and Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building, which she helped design while working at Purdy and Henderson.

7. Ada Lovelace

   Computer science and engineering exist today because of Ada Lovelace’s work with lifelong inventing partner Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. As an excruciatingly adept mathematician, translator, and scientist, she developed the world’s first computer program. Based mostly on algebra, she and Babbage bounced revisions back and forth until her death at age 36. Because of their combined efforts, however, and entire industry – one obviously more than a mite influential well over a century later – sprang up.

8. Leena Gade

   Audi edged out rival Piaget in the 2011 Le Mans despite two crashes, stunning racing aficionados with a seemingly impossible come-from-behind victory. The team’s amazing win was helmed by race engineer Leena Gade, who wound up becoming the very first woman to ever win the prestigious competition – even though it happened to be the 79th event. She turned her lifelong passion for Formula One into an engineering degree (emphasis on automotive and aerospace), which she then parlayed into a sparkling, groundbreaking career at Jaguar, then Audi.

9. Ellen Swallow Richards

   Her major may have been chemistry – in fact, she was the first American woman at MIT and the first to ever receive a degree in the field – but this fierce feminist stands as a pioneer in environmental engineering and home economics alike. Ellen Swallow Richards’ research while working at the Lawrence Experiment Station directly led to her native Massachusetts establishing America’s first sewage treatment facilities and water quality regulations. The Massachusetts State Board of Health named her a consulting chemist thanks to her contributions to public health.

‘Earliest Christian Artifact’ Just Random Squiggles, Scholars Argue

Post 2.665

By: Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer

Date: 20 April 2012 Time: 04:35 PM ET

Museum reproduction of the ossuary with the alleged “Jonah and the whale” image on the left front panel

A 2,000-year-old box that is being lauded as the earliest Christian artifact ever found has been misconstrued, according to several scholars who were not involved in the box’s discovery. They say the evidence of the box — engraved in Jerusalem mere decades after Jesus’ death — being Christian is extremely frail, and a case of finding meaning in random squiggles.

Hebrew inscription?

Discoverers of the ossuary claim the lines in what would be the fish’s mouth, if this is an image of a fish, spell the Hebrew word “YONAH,” (the Hebrew form of Jonah). The four letters are traced in yellow. However, skeptics argue that the second “letter” is actually two disconnected lines, and that other lines that don’t fit with the interpretation are ignored

Known as the Jonah ossuary (the term for a box made to hold human remains), the artifact is in a sealed tomb dated to before 70 A.D., which is located below an apartment building in Jerusalem. James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and his team recently used a remote-controlled robotic camera to explore the tomb, and discovered an engraving on the ossuary that Tabor says proves it is the earliest known Christian artifact. The robotic exploration of the tomb — and the historic find that resulted from it — are detailed in a new documentary for the Discovery Channel called “The Jesus Discovery.”

“Yonah”

Jonah written in Modern Hebrew (red) and Ancient Herodian script similar to that used in the Dead Sea Scrolls (black). The discoverers of the Jonah ossuary say an inscription in the fish’s mouth is the same as the Herodian word.

Tabor and his team say the ossuary is engraved with a picture of a fish with a stick figure in its mouth. Upon seeing the engraving, they immediately realized the stick figure must be Jonah, the Old Testament prophet whose story of being swallowed by a whale was embraced by early followers of Jesus. If it really is a picture of Jonah and the whale, this would prove the ossuary was Christian. However, when the team published their analysis, outside experts said the depiction was not an upside-down whale swallowing a man at all, but rather a right-side-up funerary monument.

Endless possibilities

Credit: Steve

CarusoWith such loose rules for how to interpret the lines in the image, they could spell out any number of words

In response to that criticism, James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament language and literature at the Princeton Theological Seminary and a member of the ossuary’s discovery team, has retaliated with what he says is new and better proof that the box is Christian: The “stick figure” in the “fish’s mouth” is not just a stick figure, but also Hebrew letters that spell “YONAH,” the Hebrew name of Jonah.

Jonah, Jesus or Yo Yo Ma?

Nun or no?

Credit: Robert

CargillClose-up of a photograph of the supposed letters, and the same image with the contrast increased for clarity. The red arrow points to a space between the lines that make up the supposed ‘nun’, a backwards L-shape Hebrew letter. Because the two lines are disconnected, experts say this is not a “nun,” and thus that the inscription doesn’t spell “Yonah.”

Skeptics are calling the new claim “Rorschach test archaeology.” Steve Caruso, a professional translator who analyzes inscriptions on ancient artifacts for antiquity dealers, said Charlesworth’s interpretation of the inscription is “more of an exercise in reading tea leaves.”

Robert Cargill, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa, concurs. “One must do some rather strenuous mental gymnastics to arrive at the letters for the name of Jonah in this image, including ignoring lines that are clearly present but do not fit the desired inscription, joining together lines that are clearly not conjoined, reshaping letters, and eliminating any semblance of linear alignment,” Cargill says on his blog.

If all those adjustments are permissible when interpreting ancient text, the lines in the inscription can be made to spell out anything from “Jesus” to “Yo Yo Ma,” the scholars note. [Poll: Do You Believe in God?]

Random squiggles

CREDIT: Steve Caruso

View full size image

On top of the fact that several lines must be ignored to read the inscription as YONAH, the second supposed letter in the series, which Charlesworth claims is the Hebrew letter nun (shaped like a backwards L), appears to be two unconnected lines rather than one unbroken line. “This is not a nun; it is two random lines,” wrote Mark Goodacre, associate professor of New Testament at Duke University. On his academic blog, Goodacre explains that it was common for the bases of funerary monuments (which, he believes, this part of the engraving depicts, instead of a fish’s head) to be decorated with geometric designs, which could easily be represented with the lines in the image.

Fish in the margins

Credit: Steve

CarusoIn the museum replica of the ossuary, there are fish decorating the ossuary’s border; if those are in the original, they would seem to be strong evidence in favor of the interpretation that the larger panel image is of a fish, and is Christian. But are they really there? See the next two slides.

The skeptics also point out that the discovery team’s own photos, released before Charlesworth and Tabor began claiming the inscription says “YONAH,” clearly show two unconnected lines rather than a backwards L-shape representing “nun.” Tabor has since released a different picture of the inscription in which the “nun” appears to be unbroken, and has addressed the controversy thus: “The ‘nun’ is not broken. There are some white splotches on the ossuary surface in our close up photos and one of them is at the juncture, which might make it look like the line is broken, but it does intersect.”

Outlined fish

Credit: Steve

CarusoImages on the website of the documentary “Jesus Discovery” originally showed these “fish in the margins” with digital ink over them to make them “clearer.” When criticism mounted, they removed the doctored photo and replaced it with…

The discrepancy between the photos raises further skepticism about the discovery. “Each photograph of the supposed ‘inscription’ seems to paint a different picture, and since the beginning of this debacle a disconcerting number of photographs have been found to be filtered, altered, or mislabeled,” Caruso told Life’s Little Mysteries.

Charlesworth did not reply to requests for comment.

No fish

Credit: Steve

CarusoIn the original photographs of the ossuary, there are only faint marks where the fish are supposed to be, not discernible as fish at all.

A year ago, during Easter season, another claim surfaced about the discovery of an early Christian artifact — that time, lead books containing references to Jesus — and Caruso and others also decisively proved those to be fakes. As Kimberley Bowes, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said at the time, “Modern people’s urge to find material evidence from the first two centuries of Christianity is much stronger than the actual evidence itself. This is because the numbers of Christians from this period was incredibly small — probably less than 7,000 by 100 A.D. — and because they didn’t distinguish themselves materially from their Jewish brethren.”

“It does seem that every Easter there is some ‘big discovery,'” Caruso added. “Mostly it’s film makers or other sensationalists trying to strike while the iron is hot during the season where everyone is rather Jesus-focused. [The discovery of a] very early, relatively undisturbed tomb in and of itself is fascinating; however, a generic first century Jewish tomb doesn’t quite sell.'”