Famous Jewish women in the field of invention

Electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia interprets the word invention mainly as new technical devices or methods and notes that the majority of inventors are engineers who create technical innovations based on the discoveries of scientists. The word invention is translated into English as invention, and in the same Wikipedia this word is interpreted much more broadly.

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It is not only a new composition, process or device (which means both technical achievements and any achievements related to electronics, computers, informatics, etc.), but also inventions related to culture (art, design, architecture, music, literature , performing arts), sports, scientific methods, language. An example of an invention in painting is the pointillism of Georges Seurat, who created his paintings using small colored dots; in architecture it is Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modernism and free forms; in the sport of Fosbury, who was the first to jump high, crossing the bar with his back.

Helen Frankentaler, an American from a Jewish family, is one of the most famous artists of the 20 century, working in the style of abstract expressionism. She was strongly influenced by the work of Jackson Pollock, but created her own original technique of applying heavily diluted paints on large non-primed canvases located on the floor of the atelier. Such paints were immediately absorbed into the canvas and the effect of the paints flowing on the canvas was created. Her technique was used by Pollock and many American artists.

In literature, one of the first began to write in the modernist style of the stream of consciousness, without even using punctuation marks, the famous Gertrude Stein, who had a great influence on the then young writers whom she called the lost generation, Hemineguay, Fitzgerald, Anderson and others who visited her literary salon in Paris where this Jewish woman had a powerful and sophisticated, according to Anderson, intelligence and an unmistakable literary and artistic taste, was their first critic.

My search for “inventive” Jewish women led to the third century BC to the city of Alexandria, where Mary of the Jews (aka Mary the Jewess, Mary of the Coptic) lived. She is considered the progenitor of alchemy and chemistry. She was the inventor of the benmary, a specially designed water bath that allowed substances to be heated slowly. She was also the creator of the kerokatis, a closed vessel in which the thinnest plates of various metals and a distillation apparatus were exposed to steam. Having knowledge of the different boiling points of various liquids, Maria learned to separate liquid mixtures into individual substances. These were the first steps towards the production of strong alcohol and essences. She is also credited with obtaining hydrochloric acid.

Gerda Ayrton (1854-1923), the first woman in Britain to become a member of the Union of Electrical Engineers and the first woman to give a report to the British Academy of Sciences - the Royal Society of London. She was born in England, the third child of eight children of a Jewish watchmaker, an emigrant from Poland. Gerda was raised by the sister of her mother, a teacher and co-owner of a private school in London. After graduating from school, thanks to wealthy sponsors and supporters of women's education, she studied at a special women's college in Cambridge, after which she did not even receive a diploma, to which women in those days were not entitled.

She was attracted to research work by her husband, Professor William Ayrton, who worked in an electrical laboratory. Gerda was interested in the problems associated with the lighting electric arc for numerous English lighthouses. Reliable arc lighting installations did not exist at that time, the burning of the arc was unstable, the light took on different shades, and a lot of noise was created. Numerous experiments with carbon electrodes, the parameters of the electric current, the gas medium in which the arc is located allowed Gerda to stabilize its combustion and create reliable lamps.

She described the results of her work in the book “The Electric Arc”, published in London in 1902. Gerda also invented a special lantern for the emerging and rapidly developing cinema, which needed a bright light source for projection, and during the First World War a special fan to combat poisonous gases used by the Germans. The British Army purchased 100000 of these ventilators. In total, Gerda received 26 patents for her inventions. In 1902, she was nominated as a candidate for membership in the Royal Society of London, but its charter did not allow a woman to be elected to the academy. For a long time, Gerda's friend was Nobel laureate Maria Curie-Skladovskaya.

Gertrude Elion (1918-1999), an American biochemist scientist, Nobel Prize winner 1988 was born in New York into a family of poor Jewish immigrants from Russia and Lithuania. She graduated from Hunter College and worked for 7 years in various jobs to save money for further studies at New York University. As well as Gerda Ayrton, she did not receive a diploma due to discrimination against women in those days. For the same reason, she couldn’t get a job in her specialty for several years, until finally she was taken at 1942 in the branch of a British pharmaceutical company, where her star-watches began as a researcher. Elion was able to determine the difference in the biochemistry of the behavior of normal and diseased cells and developed drugs that destroy diseased cells and do not affect healthy ones. The medicines she invented are used in the treatment of leukemia, gout, malaria, meningitis, herpes virus and in the transplantation of organs against rejection. In 1991, she became the first woman to enter the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Grace Hopper (1906-1992), a computer science pioneer, was born in New York and graduated from Yale University. With 1943, she served in the reserve units of the US Navy, working on the ancestors of computers of electronic-mechanical computers, for which she created the first programs in history. Since 1949, working in the development team as one of the first UNIVAC computers, she has become the leader in creating the computer language COBOL. Hopper also developed the first compiler, a program for translating the computer language of everything that a programmer created and a computer testing system adopted by the National Bureau of Standards. She introduced the word bug (bug) to computer scientists, an error, a failure in a computer program. After serving for many years in the fleet reserve, she received the title of Commander (Admiral) and was appointed Chief Analyst of the Fleet. Her name is a military frigate.

Heady Lamarr (1913-2000), a movie star of European cinema and Hollywood in the 30-40s of the 20th century, a woman of extraordinary and mysterious beauty, who made only one, but completely unique invention, which turned out to be the key to all devices of modern wireless communication and telecommunication systems ( cell phones, faxes, Internet technologies, etc.) She had 6 husbands and the first of them was a German rich industrialist of Jewish blood Fritz Mundy, who made weapons for the German army. He also carried out research and development of automation and control systems, in which Hadi, who loved technology, took part. She, however, hated the Nazi views of her husband and his fascist friends.

Headie managed to escape to London, putting her husband and the maid who followed her to sleep. During the outbreak of the war, she decided to do something to help defeat fascism. She came up with an idea related to submarine radio-controlled torpedoes that could make them more invulnerable from the point of view of their detection at launch. She called this idea Frequency hopping, that is, the hopping of radio frequency when a rocket is launched. The problem of synchronizing this rebuilding remained. In this she was helped by a familiar composer George Antheil, who at that time was experimenting with avant-garde music performed by 16 mechanical pianos, the work of which he was able to synchronize.

In 1941, their joint patent appeared, which uses the idea of ​​synchronization inherent in the design of the mechanical piano itself (paper rolls to synchronize its 88 keys). Then Heady, with the help of a familiar electrical professor, formalized her idea in the form of an electronic circuit and received a patent from 1942, which was far ahead of its time and was in demand many times only with the advent of modern electronic technologies. Hedy Lamarr starred in 35 films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, with her star on the Walk of Fame. Lamarr's second star is her famous invention. The birthday of Hedy Lamarr on November 9th is named in the United States as Inventor's Day.

Lina Stern (1878-1968), Swiss-Soviet physiologist is included in all the world lists of famous inventors (or, as they say in American sources, inventors). She was born in Latvia to a wealthy family. She was not admitted to Moscow University because of the limit on Jews, and she went to Switzerland, where she brilliantly graduated from the University of Geneva, having published by this time several works on the physiology of respiration, which made her name famous in the scientific world. Soon, she was the first woman to receive a chair in her alma mater and began to study the physiology of the brain and the central nervous system. Her work in this area became pioneering. This is especially true for studies of the physiological barrier between the circulatory system and the central nervous system. This barrier protects the nervous tissue from microorganisms circulating in the blood, toxins, etc., which perceive the brain tissue as foreign.

At the same time, the presence of this barrier makes it difficult to treat many diseases of the central nervous system, since it does not allow a number of drugs to pass through. The methods of treatment developed by Stern on the basis of these studies (special injections directly into the brain) helped save the lives of many children with meningitis, and during the war years, wounded Soviet soldiers who were in shock. In 1925, she dramatically changed her life by leaving for the USSR, where she received the position of director and scientific director of the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, for the development of which she invested all her capital earned in the West. In 1939, Stern became the first woman to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. In 1941 she became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, all of whose members, with the exception of Stern, were sentenced to death in 1948. Stalin struck her off the execution list, it is believed, because he knew about Stern's work to prolong life and counted on her help. She nevertheless spent 3 years in prison, from which she got out when the dictator went to hell.

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