30 Facts About Agnes Pockels

Agnes Luise Wilhelmine Pockels was a German chemist whose research was fundamental in establishing the modern discipline known as surface science, which describes the properties of liquid and solid surfaces and interfaces.

Agnes Pockels devised a surface film balance technique to study the behavior of molecules such as soaps and surfactants at air-liquid interfaces.

Agnes Pockels was not a paid, professional scientist and had no institutional affiliation and so is an example of a citizen scientist.

At the time, Venice was under Austrian rule, and Agnes Pockels' father served in the Austrian Army.

Agnes Pockels studied science at home while caring for her parents.

Agnes Pockels later shared academic literature with Agnes Pockels to advance her studies.

Agnes Pockels further developed her apparatus by placing a small disk, such as a button, on the surface of the water in the trough.

Agnes Pockels then used a weighing scale to determine the force necessary to lift the disk from the water.

Agnes Pockels' sliding trough design built on the prior findings of Ludwig Wilhelmy's plate method of measuring surface tension.

Agnes Pockels' design influenced later investigators who improved on the method, leading to the modern Langmuir-Blodgett trough which is in extensive use in colloid and surface science in contemporary times.

Agnes Pockels used her sliding trough to evaluate the effect of small amounts of impurities on water.

Agnes Pockels found that small amounts of impurities could have a large effect on the surface tension of water, compared to pure water.

When placing small amounts of the surfactants in her sliding trough, Agnes Pockels found that the effect on surface tension was small.

Agnes Pockels further found that this threshold point is the same for a variety of surfactant soaps.

Agnes Pockels calculated this area to be 20 square angstroms.

At the encouragement of her brother, Agnes Pockels wrote to Lord Rayleigh to describe her apparatus, her findings, and the fact that she was unable to publish her findings in the scientific journals of the time.

The earlier part of Miss Agnes Pockels' letter covers nearly the same ground as some of my own recent work, and in the main harmonises with it.

Agnes Pockels pointed out that even airborne dust can affect results with her experimental apparatus.

Agnes Pockels recognized that impurities can affect reproducibility of experimental findings.

Agnes Pockels developed a refined method of assessing monolayer films consisting of deposition of the compound on interest as a solution in benzene on the water surface in her sliding trough.

Agnes Pockels described the calming effect that oils can have on bodies of water, an effect first investigated in the published literature by Benjamin Franklin.

Agnes Pockels's research extended to investigations of other surface phenomena including capillarity and contact angles.

Agnes Pockels published 14 scientific papers, mostly in German journals, the last one being published in 1926.

Agnes Pockels was eventually recognized as a pioneer in the emerging field of surface science.

Agnes Pockels never received a formal appointment for her scientific endeavors.

Agnes Pockels spent much of her life caring for her sick parents, which she noted to be "very challenging".

Agnes Pockels's father died in 1906 and her mother died in 1914.

Agnes Pockels died in 1935 in Brunswick, Germany, in the town where she had lived for the duration of her career.

In 1931, together with Henri Devaux, Pockels received the Laura R Leonard Prize from the Colloid Society.

The Agnes Pockels Laboratory was established at the Technical University Braunschweig in 2002.