Agnes Pockels (1862–1935): From housewife to honorary doctorate #

She was a self-taught scientist who learned from her brother’s books and investigated the surface tension of liquids while washing the dishes. The British scientist Lord Rayleigh helped Agnes Pockels make her breakthrough. She was eventually allowed to conduct research at the Technical University of Braunschweig.

Agnes Luise Pockels was born in Venice on 14 February 1862, the daughter of Alwine and Theodor Pockels, an Austrian career officer. Her brother Fritz was born three years later in Vicenza. The malaria that was rife in the region at the time also affected the Pockels family, eventually leading to her father’s early retirement.

In 1871, the family moved to Braunschweig, where Pockels attended the municipal secondary school for girls. The young woman gave up the chance to study at university in order to care for her ailing parents. Nevertheless, using the physics textbooks belonging to her brother, who later became a professor of physics, she taught herself science and made significant observations about the surface tension of liquids—while doing the washing-up, as it were. In 1882, to investigate this phenomenon, she invented the trough with a sliding barrier, still in use today. The American researcher Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) later developed it into the Langmuir–Pockels film balance. Langmuir received the Nobel Prize in 1932—some of his findings were based on Pockels’ experiments.

Pockels made an important contribution to understanding interfacial phenomena. As a scientific outsider, she feared that German journals would reject her work, so in 1891 she approached the English physicist and future Nobel laureate John William Strutt (1842–1919), known as Lord Rayleigh. A lively correspondence ensued, and Pockels’ work was eventually published in the journal „Nature“ with Rayleigh’s recommendation. This also made Pockels known in Braunschweig. From then on, she was allowed to work at the physics institute of the Technical University of Braunschweig and was also invited to give scientific lectures. On 27 January 1932, Pockels became the first and, to this day, the only woman to receive an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Braunschweig for her pioneering research into surface chemistry—an extraordinary honour for a self-taught scientist.

Agnes Pockels died in Braunschweig on 21 November 1935, aged 73. Since 1993, the Technical University of Braunschweig, as the institution is now known, has awarded the Agnes Pockels Medal to people who have made a particular contribution to promoting women in research and teaching.

Literature

• Working Group Other History (editor): Women of Braunschweig. Yesterday and Today. Six Walks, Braunschweig, 2002, p. 111

• G. Beiswanger, Chemie in unserer Zeit 1991, 25, p. 97

• G. Beiswanger: Pockels, Agnes Luise Wilhelmine. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 20, p. 55, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2001

• German Chemical Society (GDCh): Women chemists – they have existed and still do, brochure 2003, p. 8