Layers of Brilliance: The Air She Breathed -- Episode Three

The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis: her forte is experimentation, his is scientific theory. We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall theory of matter. All the while, Katharine builds her life in Schenectady: going to church, making new friends, falling in love. In 1924, she embarks on a new journey to the University of Cambridge, where she studies with some of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You can listen to Layers of Brilliance: The Air She Breathed -- Episode Three online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Layers of Brilliance: The Air She Breathed -- Episode Three is an episode from Lost Women of Science by Lost Women of Science.

This episode is 39:40 long.

This episode was published on Feb 12, 2026.

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