I am interluding my bulletins to the world for a short period whilst I accumulate myself unto the more arcane bits of knowledge to be needed unto for the Smartarses.
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5 comments:
which woman do you feel has made the greatest contribution to science
Dear Tallulah,
Thank you for your unusually coherent question, albeit without the customary capital letter at the start and question mark at the end. Maybe they don't let you have a complete keyboard where you are these days. Or are you working on a Mack?
I think I ought to first pay tribute to all those women who have made it possible for male scientists to invent things. It is so much easier to come up with fire, the wheel, medicine, chemistry, physics, space travel, telecommunications, the transistor, computers, velcro, etc. etc. if one is not encumbered with ironing.
So, an invaluable role there for the laydeez.
But, of course, their contribution has been so much more than that.
Where would our civilisation be, for example, without the apple pie? Without embroidery? Or shopping?
All of them, in their own way, a sort of 'science', and ones that should not go unrecognised by men who are busy inventing stuff.
And of course, there is Mary Anderson, who designed and built the first ever windscreen wiper.
She lived in Alabama in the Southern United States, where it is very very hot, and one winter she went to New York. She'd never seen snow before, and in a blizzard she took a tram and was amazed, because the tram driver kept getting out of his cab to wipe the snow off the windscreen.
She came up with a squeegee that hung on the outside of the windscreen with a spindle attached to one end, which went through a hole in the top corner of the windscreen frame and was attached to a handle on the inside.
The driver could just wind the handle as he went along.
Which of course meant the driver had to underatke a dangerous manoeuvre to make the thing work. But it was a proper invention, and even better when a chap came along and made it into an automatic device, thus ending the dangerous qualities of the Anderson version.
But I suppose you want me to come up with name of one woman.
Alright then, I'll plump for Tish Fearn, British Inventor of the Year 2003. She won the award for her Lite-Lift shavings fork and paddock shovel. Now even stables can be kept clean and tidy, which is a boon to all mankind.
Will that do?
I am unfortunately required to remind my millions of readers of the comments policy on this blog.
Abusive comments about yours truly will not be published, no matter how many thousands of them there may be.
For me the greatest female scientist would still have to be my very good friend Marie Curie. Like me she won two nobel peace prizes and do you know the decanter she gave me still glows a gorgeous green.
Nurse! Nurse! She's escaped again!
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