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Isabelle Stone

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Isabelle Stone
An older white woman in academic robes and a mortarboard cap, from 1920 yearbook
Isabelle Stone, from a 1920 yearbook
BornOctober 18, 1868
Chicago, Illinois, US
Died1966
Alma materWellesley College
University of Chicago
Scientific career
InstitutionsBryn Mawr School
Vassar College
Sweet Briar College
Thesis On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films  (1897)

Isabelle Stone (October 18, 1868 – 1966) was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society.[1] She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States.

Early life and education

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Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago.[2] She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890,[1] and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University.[3] Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.[4] Her 1897 thesis, On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films, showed that very thin metal films showed a higher resistivity than the bulk metal.[5]

Career

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Stone taught for a year at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. She was a physics instructor at Vassar College from 1898 to 1906,[6] and head of the physics department at Sweet Briar College from 1915 to 1923.[7] From 1908 to 1914, she and her sister Harriet Stone ran a school for American girls in Rome,[1] and later in life they ran another school for girls in Washington, D.C.[8]

Stone was one of two women (out of a total of 836) to attend the first International Congress of Physics in Paris (the other being Marie Curie).[4] In 1899, she was one of forty physicists (and one of two women, the other being Marcia Keith) at the first meeting of the American Physical Society, held at Columbia University.[9]

Stone's research focused on the electrical resistance and other properties of thin films.[1]

Publications

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Personal life

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Stone lived with her sister Harriet Stone in Washington, D.C. in her later years. Some of her letters are in the papers of George B. Pegram at Columbia University.[6]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie; Joy Dorothy Harvey (2000). The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L-Z. Vol. 2. Taylor & Francis. p. 1241. ISBN 978-0415920407. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  2. ^ Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie (1990). Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press. p. 186. ISBN 978-0262650380. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  3. ^ Conable, Charlotte (1977). Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. p. 86. ISBN 0-8014-1098-3.
  4. ^ a b Richard Staley (2008). Einstein's Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution. University of Chicago Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0226770574. Retrieved 5 April 2014.
  5. ^ John M. Ziman (1969). The Physics of Metals, Volume 1. CUP Archive. p. 176. ISBN 978-0521071062. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  6. ^ a b Behrman, Joanna. "American Women in Physics: Their Higher Education and Sites of Practice, 1870-1940". Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  7. ^ Sweet Briar College (1920). The Briar Patch. p. 11 – via Internet Archive.
  8. ^ Creese, Mary R. S. (2000-01-01). Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Scarecrow Press. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-585-27684-7.
  9. ^ Darrow, K. K. (2009-01-22). "n Equals One". Physics Today. 2 (8): 30–32. doi:10.1063/1.3066592. ISSN 0031-9228.
  10. ^ "Stone, Dr. Isabelle". American Men of Science. New York: The Science Press. 1910. p. 455.
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