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Traditional Dress Put your face in a costume from Mary Polly's homelands. Family Time Line. Spouse and Children. Parents and Siblings. David Jones Peck Pickle. Mary Polly Porter. Mary Pickle. Andrew Porter Pickle. John Scott Pickle. Margaret S Pickle.
William Walter Pickle. James Crockett Pickle. View All. Andrew Porter. Mary Martha Gleaves. Elizabeth Porter. She eagerly agreed. During the winter of —11, Miers introduced Porter to Alfred Tutton, who asked her whether she would like to work in his laboratory in London. She accepted enthusiastically. The work was published in the Journal of the Mineralogical Society in with Porter as co-author. The Porter family resumed its travels, first back to the US where Porter catalogued the mineral collection of the National Museum in Washington, now known as the Smithsonian.
Back in the US again, Porter worked on the mineral collection at Bryn Mawr College under Florence Bascom, the most prominent American woman geologist of the period, who was to become her life-long friend. In , Bascom arranged for the German mineralogist and crystallographer, Victor Goldschmidt at the University of Heidelberg, to take on Porter as a research student, despite her lack of formal education. In October that year, however, Porter wrote to Bascom that Goldschmidt had been unable to cope with the outbreak of war and was in a sanitorium suffering from severe depression.
In August , Porter left Germany for Italy. She did not explain how this was accomplished, as Italy was on the Allied side with Britain and France in the first world war.
Both places [Massa and Carrara] are in the war zone. From Italy, Porter travelled back to Oxford, starting research with the new lecturer in crystallography, Thomas Barker. The university now gave BSc degrees to students who had completed two years of research and had their thesis approved by a board of examiners.
In June , Porter received her BSc certificate, though not a formal degree as these were barred to women until At the same time, she was elected to the council of the Mineralogical Society. Like so many of the single women researchers without formal academic positions, money was always a concern for Porter. As a result of her prolific and comprehensive crystal studies, Porter was awarded a DSc degree in Porter has a strong claim to being the starting-point of the lineage of female British x-ray crystallographers.
This goal had originated with Barker. To aid him, he enlisted Porter, together with Reginald Spiller. Barker died in , but Porter and Spiller continued with the work, and volume one was published in The three volumes together contained crystallographic data on a total of crystalline substances. Codd subsequently wrote a paper on the Barker Index as an analytical tool, but nowhere in the article did he mention Porter or her contributions.
Why, then, has her work been forgotten? In a subsequent article Codd wrote about the index, he failed to mention Porter or her contributions. Porter was appointed honorary research fellow of Somerville in Her last work came full circle, back to revising, updating and reorganizing the Corsi Collection.
Porter died at Oxford in , age Michelle Francl, a chemist at Bryn Mawr, proposed in a article on women in crystallography that Porter played the key role in opening British x-ray crystallography to women. Women were not being escorted into a new field by kindly men such as the Braggs, as much as they were seeking out exciting opportunities within a field they already inhabited.
Nevertheless, her life-story is inspiring in the extreme and it is our contention that she was the first of the pioneering women in this field and an inspiration to Hodgkin, future Nobel laureate. Nina Notman tells the story of the interwar industrial chemist whose analytical skill and persistence saw her outmanoeuvre sexism and prove her research aptitude. Katharine Sanderson celebrates the tenacious and brilliant researcher who came tantalizingly close to describing oxygen sensing, a concept that earned the Nobel prize over years later.
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