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Credit: Alamy<\/p>\n
Few women have had as big an impact on photography as Katharine Burr Blodgett \u2013\u00a0and I\u2019m going to hazard a guess that you\u2019ve never even heard of her. In all fairness, until recently, I hadn\u2019t either, but every photographer on Earth owes Blodgett a debt of gratitude.<\/p>\n
Blodget (1898-1979) was an American physicist and chemist, and her co-invention of non-reflective glass changed photography forever. It\u2019s hard to understate just how much of an impact her invention had, as its principles are still used in camera lenses today.<\/p>\n
In 1938, as an employee at General Electric, Blodgett and fellow researcher Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) refined a way of coating glass with a chemical layer that enabled 99% of light to pass through it. This significantly reduced unwanted glare and reflections, and the principle has been applied to camera lenses ever since.<\/p>\n
The chemical layer that the duo invented came to be known as Langmuir-Blodgett film \u2013\u00a0and it consisted of 44 single-molecule-thick layers of fatty acids derived from soap. While Langmuir invented the layer itself, Blodgett figured out how to control its thickness and apply it to glass.<\/p>\n
Just one year after its invention, Langmuir-Blodgett film was used in cinema for the first time on the production of the all-time classic Gone With the Wind.<\/p>\n
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Dr Irving Langmuir holds a pliotron, a type of vacuum tube he helped to invent in 1912-1913 | Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s the wider use of Blodgett\u2019s invention beyond photography and cinematography that truly highlights how groundbreaking it was. Just a few years later, during World War II, Langmuir-Blodgett film was used to coat submarine periscopes in the fight against the Nazis.<\/p>\n
To this day, the anti-glare coatings on our camera lenses still rely on the findings of Langmuir and Blodgett. While modern non-reflective glass is typically coated in more durable materials, such as magnesium fluoride and silicone compounds, the original layer-by-layer, thin-film technique still underpins non-reflective glass.<\/p>\n
So, on behalf of everyone who\u2019s picked up a camera since 1938, I say thank you to Katherine Blodgett (and Irving Langmuir).<\/p>\n
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