Few ladies have had as large an influence on pictures as Katharine Burr Blodgett – and I’m going to hazard a guess that you simply’ve by no means even heard of her. In all equity, till just lately, I hadn’t both, however each photographer on Earth owes Blodgett a debt of gratitude.
Blodget (1898-1979) was an American physicist and chemist, and her co-invention of non-reflective glass modified pictures eternally. It’s arduous to understate simply how a lot of an influence her invention had, as its ideas are nonetheless utilized in digicam lenses at present.
In 1938, as an worker at General Electric, Blodgett and fellow researcher Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) refined a approach of coating glass with a chemical layer that enabled 99% of sunshine to go via it. This considerably decreased undesirable glare and reflections, and the precept has been utilized to digicam lenses ever since.
The chemical layer that the duo invented got here to be often called Langmuir-Blodgett movie – and it consisted of 44 single-molecule-thick layers of fatty acids derived from cleaning soap. While Langmuir invented the layer itself, Blodgett discovered the best way to management its thickness and apply it to glass.
Just one yr after its invention, Langmuir-Blodgett movie was utilized in cinema for the primary time on the manufacturing of the all-time traditional Gone With the Wind.
But it’s the broader use of Blodgett’s invention past pictures and cinematography that actually highlights how groundbreaking it was. Just a number of years later, throughout World War II, Langmuir-Blodgett movie was used to coat submarine periscopes within the struggle towards the Nazis.
To today, the anti-glare coatings on our digicam lenses nonetheless depend on the findings of Langmuir and Blodgett. While fashionable non-reflective glass is often coated in additional sturdy supplies, comparable to magnesium fluoride and silicone compounds, the unique layer-by-layer, thin-film method nonetheless underpins non-reflective glass.
So, on behalf of everybody who’s picked up a digicam since 1938, I say thanks to Katherine Blodgett (and Irving Langmuir).