23 August is reserved to Sarah Frances Whiting
Today is the birthday of physicist Sarah Frances Whiting, who was born in Wyoming, New York, in 1846. She earned her bachelor's degree at age 17 from Ingham University, one of the first women's colleges in the US. She became a teacher in Brooklyn until 1876, when she was hired as a physics professor at a new university for women, Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
For her first few years at Wellesley she also sat in on physics lab classes at MIT. Whiting used that knowledge to organize the first physics lab classes for women students, and only the second for undergraduates in the US. Whiting kept up on the latest physics developments, attending lectures and spending sabbaticals visiting Lord Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, and other leading scientists of the day.
She was probably the first to take x-ray photographs in the US. In 1898 a 12-inch telescope that Whiting had used during her years in Brooklyn went up for sale; she convinced a Wellesley trustee to buy it and build the Whitin Observatory. Whiting's students included Annie Jump Cannon, who went on to become a pioneer in classifying stars.
"Sarah Whiting died on September 12, 1927 at the age of 81," physicist Frieda A. Stahl wrote in a short biography of Whiting. "Her sister Elizabeth was her sole survivor and legal heir. American women physicists are her professional heirs."
Reference:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1927PA.....35..539C
Bio:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Frances-Whiting
#womeninstem #history #amazingwomen #science
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