Jadwiga Szmidt

Jadwiga Szmidt (born September 8, 1889 in Łódź , † April 1940 in Leningrad , today Saint Petersburg ) was a Polish-Russian pioneer of radioactivity and electrical engineering research .

Life

Szmidt was born in 1889 as the daughter of Ryszard Szmidt in Łódź, which was part of Prussia after the second partition of Poland in 1793 . She attended school in Warsaw and studied from 1905 to 1909 at the teachers' seminar of today's Russian State Pedagogical Heart University . There she also attended lectures in optotechnology with Alexander Lwowitsch Gerschun . After graduating, she taught at a school for major daughters in Saint Petersburg. At the same time, Szmidt was part of a group of physicists who met regularly under the guidance of Paul Ehrenfest . This group also included Abram Fjodorowitsch Joffe and Dmitri Sergejewitsch Roschdestvensky .

In 1911 she traveled to Paris to attend a six-month advanced training course at the Sorbonne . Under the influence of the physicist Jan Kazimierz Danysz , she worked in Marie Curie's laboratory in the spring . There she worked with Ellen Gleditsch , May Sybil Leslie and Eva Ramstedt .

After her return to Saint Petersburg, Szmidt worked again as a teacher at the school for higher daughters. At the same time she started her own research under the guidance of Gerschun. From 1913 to 1914 she studied at the University of Manchester and worked in the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford . She researched radioactivity under Rutherford , and on the basis of this research she published two articles in Philosophical Magazine . Her research included the energy relationship between soft and hard gamma radiation, which is emitted from radium decay products. While working in the laboratory, she was seriously poisoned when she opened a container that was believed to contain sulfur dioxide . Other sources report carbon dioxide , but symptoms suggest sulfur dioxide.

Szmidt returned to Saint Petersburg, studied from 1915 to 1916 at the State University of Saint Petersburg . During the First World War she looked after refugees and organized Polish school lessons. Then attended a course given by Joffe at the newly established St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute . From this, the X-ray and Radiological Institute emerged in 1918, which was founded by Joffe and others. Joffe was the head of the institute for many years, which was renamed the Joffe Institute after his death . Jadwiga Szmidt played a key role in the organization of this institute. She organized the students' activities in the radiology laboratories, supervised the experiments and gave classes on radioactivity. At the same time she was interested in X-ray technology and developed filters for the monochromatic X-ray effect.

In 1923 she married her colleague and deputy director of the AA Chernichev Institute and began to work in electrical engineering, her husband's specialty. Together they worked on the forerunners of television technology and acquired a patent for an oscilloscope . From 1924 Szmidt was a department head. Szmidt, who spoke six languages, later translated a number of scientific works. In 1938 Chernichev had to move to Moscow for work. Szmidt stayed in Leningrad, and the couple communicated with each other by mail. Jadwiga Szmidt fell seriously ill and died in Leningrad in April 1940.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Jadwiga Szmidt (1889–1940), a pioneer woman in nuclear and electrotechnical sciences . In: American Journal of Physics . tape 62 , no. 10 , 1994, ISSN  0002-9505 , pp. 947-948 , doi : 10.1119 / 1.17687 ( scitation.org ).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: LZ . Taylor & Francis, 2000, ISBN 978-0-415-92040-7 , pp. 1258 ( books.google.de ).
3. ↑ LebensBilder: Life and Subjectivity in Newer Approaches to Gender Studies . transcript Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8394-0334-1 , pp. 57 ( books.google.de ).