Fremantle Rd, Barkingside, Ilford IG6 2JB, United Kingdom
Growing up in England, Kathleen won a scholarship to attend County High School for Girls in Ilford.
College/University
Gallery of Kathleen Lonsdale
Cauldwell St, Bedford MK42 9AH, United Kingdom
At the age of 16, Lonsdale enrolled in Bedford College for Women in London, where in 1922 she received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics. She graduated at the head of her class, receiving the highest marks in ten years, and among her oral examiners was William Henry Bragg, the 1915 Nobel Laureate in Physics.
Gallery of Kathleen Lonsdale
Gower St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
Lonsdale was awarded a Doctor of Sciences degree from University College London in 1936 while at the Royal Institution.
At the age of 16, Lonsdale enrolled in Bedford College for Women in London, where in 1922 she received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics. She graduated at the head of her class, receiving the highest marks in ten years, and among her oral examiners was William Henry Bragg, the 1915 Nobel Laureate in Physics.
Kathleen Dame Lonsdale was an Irish prison reformer and crystallographer. She was an early pioneer of X-ray crystallography, a field primarily concerned with studying the shapes of organic and inorganic molecules.
Background
Lonsdale was born Kathleen Yardley on January 28, 1903, in Newbridge, Ireland, a small town south of Dublin. She was the youngest of ten children born to Jessie Cameron Yardley and Harry Frederick Yardley, who was postmaster for the British garrison stationed there. Her father was a heavy drinker, and in 1908, when Kathleen was five years old, her parents were separated. Her mother moved the family moved to Seven Kings, England, a small town east of London.
Education
Growing up in England, Kathleen won a scholarship to attend County High School for Girls in Ilford. At the age of 16, she enrolled in Bedford College for Women in London, where in 1922 she received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics. She graduated at the head of her class, receiving the highest marks in ten years, and among her oral examiners was William Henry Bragg, the 1915 Nobel Laureate in Physics. He was so impressed with her academic performance that he invited her to work with him and a team of scientists using X-ray technology to explore the crystal structure of organic compounds.
Lonsdale worked with Bragg from 1922 to 1927, first at University College, London, and then at the Royal Institution. During these years she also completed her research for a master's thesis on the structure of succinic acid and related compounds; she published it in 1924, with collaborator William Thomas Astbury, as a theory of space groups that included tables for 230 such groups and mathematical descriptions of crystal symmetries.
She was awarded a Doctor of Sciences degree from University College London in 1936 while at the Royal Institution.
Lonsdale worked at the University of Leeds, studying the structure of hexamethylbenzene, and in 1929 she produced the first proof of its hexagonal, planar shape. Her discovery was made independently of her colleagues' work in London, and it was supported by Bragg even though it contradicted his own theory that the compound had a "puckered" shape.
In 1930, the Lonsdales returned to London, where her husband had found a permanent post at the Testing Station of the Experimental Roads Department in the Ministry of Transport at Harmondsworth. Between 1929 and 1934, Lonsdale gave birth to their three children; she worked at home during this period, developing formulae for the structure factor tables. These formulas were published in 1936 as "Simplified Structure Factor and Electron Density Formulae for the 230 Space-Groups of Mathematical Crystallography. " For the study of ethane derivatives contained in this book, Lonsdale received her doctorate of science.
In 1934, Lonsdale returned to the Royal Institution, where she would work with Bragg until his death in 1942. Upon her return, however, she found that no X-ray equipment was available. Forced to make do with a large electromagnet, Lonsdale undertook experimental work that eventually proved the difference between sigma and pi electronic orbitals, thus establishing the existence of molecular orbitals. She then turned her attentions to the field of thermal vibrations, finding that divergent X-ray beams could be used to measure the distance between carbon atoms.
In 1946 she founded her own crystallography department at University College, London. In 1949, Lonsdale was named professor of chemistry at the college, her first permanent academic post following years of living from one grant to the next. During these years, she wrote a popular textbook, Crystals and X-Rays (1948), and served as editor-in-chief of the first three volumes of the International X-Ray Tables (1952, 1959, and 1962). In 1949, Lonsdale began working with South African scientist Judith Grenville-Wells (later Milledge), eventually collaborating with her on a study of diamonds, as well as on studies of minerals at high temperatures and high pressures, and how solid state reactions work. Milledge later became executor of Lonsdale's literary estate. In the 1960s, Lonsdale became fascinated with body stones (in lectures, she was fond of exhibiting an X ray of a bladder stone from Napoleon III), and she undertook extensive chemical and demographic studies of the subject. She retired from University College in 1968.
Following her husband's retirement from the Ministry of Transport, the Lonsdales moved to Bexhill-on-Sea. On April 1, 1971, she died of cancer in London.
Though she had been brought up in the Baptist denomination as a child, Kathleen Lonsdale became a Quaker in 1935, simultaneously with her husband. Already committed pacifists, both were attracted to Quakerism for this reason. She was a Sponsor of the Peace Pledge Union.
Politics
Lonsdale and her husband were committed pacifists.
Views
Quotations:
"A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety!"
"Any country that wants to make full use of all its potential scientists and technologists … must not expect to get the women quite so simply as it gets the men. It seems to me that marriage and motherhood are at least as socially important as military service. Government regulations are framed to ensure (in the United Kingdom) that a man returning to work from military service is not penalized by his absence. Is it utopian, then, to suggest that any country that really wants a woman to return to a scientific career when her children no longer need her physical presence should make special arrangements to encourage her to do so?"
"It makes me feel both proud and rather humble that it shall be called Lonsdaleite. Certainly the name seems appropriate since the mineral only occurs in very small quantities (perhaps rare would be too flattering) and it is generally rather mixed up! "
Membership
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1945
Connections
On August 27, 1927, Kathleen married Thomas Lonsdale, who was a fellow student of hers. They had three children - Jane, Nancy, and Stephen.