Agnes Pockels

The beautifully simple and elegant tool for studying the response of monolayers on a water surface to compression was invented in 1882 by Fraiilein Agnes Pockels when she was 20 years old from observations made at her kitchen sink. As physical chemistry developed, an appreciation for the... 

Contributions of 20 Century Women to Physics, including Agnes Pockels. http //cwp.library.ucla.edu/... 

Agnes Pockels carried out many experiments which were reported in Nature (1891). This was a remarkable achievement for a woman of the time, working from home. A schematic diagram of a typical experimental set-up is given in Figure 8.12. In the case illnstrated, the snrface... 

Vignette VII presents a historical snapshot of the early experiments of Agnes Pockels that led to the above exciting possibilities. A couple of specific examples along these lines and some additional information follow in Sections 7.10b and 7.10c. 

The name is composed of the first letters of Agnes Pockels (1862-1935, lady amateur scientist from Braunschweig, Lower Saxony), Langmuir, Adam, Wilson, and McBain. 

After Agnes Pockels, an amateur scientist, who did many of the early experiments on surface tension in her kitchen. 

Feb. 14, 1862, Venice, Italy - Nov. 21, 1935, Braunschweig (Brunswick) [i], Germany) Agnes Pockels went... 

The first to perform wave-damping measurements in a kind of Langmuir trough, i.e., under different compression status of the monolayer, was Agnes Pockels (1891). Ironically, she described for the first time an apparatus that was... 

In 1774, Benjamin Franklin found by visual inspection of lake surfaces that 1-100 mg of oil was needed to cover one square meter of water surface with a surface layer. The error in these measurements was too large to determine the area covered by a single molecule. The first quantitative measurement leading to a molecular area of about 20 per fatty acid molecule and a monolayer thickness of 23 A came from a young German amateur named Agnes Pockels. She... 

Ra)tner-Canham, Marelene, and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham. Women in Chemistry Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1998. This book includes brief discussions of Agnes Pockels, Katherine Burr Blodgett, and Maud Lenora Menten. 

Monolayers can be used to retard evaporation (water reservoirs), a related effect is the use of an oil film to dampen waves (surface viscosity), and monolayer interfacial films are often the stabilizing agent in emulsions (lower y and increase i/ ). The first scientific studies of spread monolayers appear to have included those by Benjamin Franklin in 1774 and Agnes Pockels in 1891. Experimental methods for determining the retardation of evaporation by monolayers have been reviewed by Barnes [52]. 

As part of his work on surfaces, Langmuir studied monolayer films on water surfaces, with techniques pioneered by a chemist who started her studies in greasy dishwater Agnes Pockels. 

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