This post is off-topic, but I signed up to pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009 in commemoration of Ada Lovelace.
I thought long and hard about which of the many brilliant and inspirational women I should write about. Ada Lovelace is clearly getting plenty of coverage. I expect Amazing Grace Hopper is another popular choice. I almost chose the tragic tale of Hypatia. I ponder her fate when confronted with people who lecture me on faith and morality.
However, my choice is unusual and personal in that it is a woman about whom I really know very little. Dr Elizabeth Alexander trained as a geologist and went on to become one of the world’s first female radio astronomers. Educated at Cambridge at a time when women were not allowed to be full members of the university (that didn’t happen until 1947!), she nevertheless received a first class degree and went on to obtain a PhD. She married and moved to Singapore where she worked as a geologist until escaping to New Zealand just before Singapore fell to the Japanese. It was in New Zealand that she undertook her pioneering work on radar, which was crucial to the war effort. She received little recognition as her work was top secret for obvious reasons. I would have liked to have met her (she died before I was born) but nevertheless she has served as an inspiration to me throughout my life, reminding me that female intelligence persists despite all the hardships and obstacles the world throws in our way and for all the fame and glory heaped upon the – usually male – characters that steal the limelight, we should always remember the quiet dedication of the “invisible” women working behind the scenes.
There is a short article about her in
The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science
and a more detailed paper:
Dr Elizabeth Alexander: First Female Radio Astronomer .
She was also my grandmother.
Great choice! How did you come across her story?
Thank you!
I am named after her, and have always been vaguely aware that she was a scientist, but never knew many details. My aunt is the one who has probably done the most research.
My aunt, Mary Harris has been researching her life and wrote:
Elizabeth Alexander (by Mary Harris)
Her interpretation of the Norfolk Island effect was merely a routine part of her work as Senior Physicist at the Radio Development Lab in Wellington in World War II, while
the main thrust of her work at the time was actually a very large international project, that could perhaps be seen nowadays as an early form of SKA. At the time that RNZAF Flight Officer Hepburn first noted and reported the anomaly from which Elizabeth set up the systematic study of the effect, she was completing the preparatory work at Kaikoura for what was to become the Canterbury Project, and
doing nearly all the NZ end of the political work necessary to set up a joint NZ, British and US Project.
Elizabeth was not even a professional physicist, though she had originally gone to Cambridge to take a degree in the subject. There she met her future husband, Norman Alexander, a graduate from AU who had come to the Cavendish to work for a PhD under Rutherford and Chadwick. Meanwhile Elizabeth, after part I of her degree, had switched to geology which remained her first love. However she
remained an extra-ordinary all-round scientist and maintained her interest in physics through joint work with her husband. In 1936 Norman took up the post of Professor of Physics at Raffles College, Singapore, where Elizabeth began a piece of research that was to change models of geological thinking, whose effects are very much alive today. By way of a bit of fun, the Alexanders had made themselves a 4′ diameter globe, not being able to afford to buy one, which became of so much interest to the Royal Navy at a time when they were setting up a chain of Radio Direction Finding stations in the region, that they requisitioned it and Elizabeth found herself working in RDF at Singapore Naval Base, with the rank of intelligence officer. Although she would not have known it at the time, though she did know the officers involved, there were close contacts between the Base and New Zealand, which was making
radars that the Royal Navy needed urgently. Again, by way of a bit of fun, she and Norman developed a method of RDF plotting, that turned out to be of real use to both NZ and the US as the war developed.
In February 1942, when Singapore fell, Elizabeth found herself a refugee in NZ with three small children, no money and with the semi-official, but inaccurate knowledge that her husband was dead. On the way to NZ, she had delivered very secret word of mouth messages to both the Australian and NZ Navies. Although she had in-laws in the farming community who welcomed her and the children with great kindness, she had to find work so she could support her children, so she networked amongst the radar people she already knew, because so many of them had been at Cambridge and Kings College London when she and Norman were students. Students of radar history will know the names: Pawsey, Pulley, Bowen and of course Fred White at Canterbury.
Soon she was given the job of setting up from scratch the Operational Research Section of the RDL, during which time she taught herself the meteorology she needed, while brushing up her physics. Three years after her arrival as an almost penniless refugee with three traumatised children in tow, she was representing the NZ government in shared radar research on a visit to Darwin.
So far as the Norfolk Island effect goes, Elizabeth just happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time. In her own account, she had taken the best job she could find for the sake of her children, but her real focus was on the welfare of her husband, eventually listed as interned in Changi.
At the time of the Norfolk Island and Kaikoura work, the war was coming to an end and Elizabeth was following it all the way. Her atlas, which I still have, falls open at the double page spread of the Western Pacific. Her contract with RDL ended on the last day of the war and, with her starved and traumatised husband back in NZ again, she wrote up her reports and signed off. She never returned to RDF, radar or
radio astronomy: it was just a job. As soon as she could she went back to Singapore geology, where she had to retrieve her experiments in which all her controls had been looted in the geological lab she had set up in her home on the Raffles College campus. In the 1950s during the International Geophysical Year, when Norman was Prof of Physics in Ibadan, Nigeria and running a research programme for the USA at the time of the first satellite launch, nobody in his department knew anything about Elizabeth’s war work and her expert knowledge of the ionosphere. By then she was a soil scientist anyway. She died in 1958, just before her fiftieth birthday, a month after she had set up the first geology department at Ibadan.
She was the most extraordinary woman and scientist. In interpreting the Norfolk Island effect she certainly knew what she was doing, but it was not a career launcher, just a bit of routine work when just about everything in radar research was about anomalous propagation.