Sic itur ad astra.

In a video produced by the University of Toronto, aimed at recruiting women into the sciences and recorded just a few days before she passed away, Helen Sawyer Hogg gave a lovely and succinct description of that feeling that drives us to pursue science and to share our work.

“Not to know what’s beyond is like spending your life in the cellar, being completely oblivious of all the wonderful things around us.”

Image: U Toronto, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Throughout her career, Helen Sawyer Hogg worked to encourage women to enter the sciences.

Her memorial service included excerpts from letters written by the many astronomers who looked up to her as a role model:

https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1993PASP..105.1369P/0001371.000.html

Here is Helen Sawyer Hogg on the CBC in 1979, explaining eclipses and how to safely observe them with pinholes.

At the end of the segment she recounts her trip to view the 1925 eclipse.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3592900

And in 1970 – ten years before the premier of Carl Sagan’s "Cosmos" – Helen Sawyer Hogg hosted her own 8-episode astronomy show on TV Ontario.

I haven’t found video, but you can listen to about a half-hour of audio from the show here:

https://www.rasc.ca/helen-hogg-tvo

n 1976, Helen Sawyer Hogg wrote "The Stars Belong to Everyone: How to Enjoy Astronomy," a successful popular astronomy book.

You can still buy a copy! (I don't want to link to Amazon, but you can find it there as well.)
https://www.abebooks.com/9780385123020/stars-belong-enjoy-astronomy-Sawyer-0385123027/plp

Somehow, while doing all this, Helen Sawyer found time to be a sci-comm pioneer, reaching out to large audiences through newspaper, books, and TV.

She wrote a column called "With the Stars" for the Toronto Star from 1951-1981, and a column about the history of astronomy, called "Out of Old Books," for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 1946-1965.

The couple moved to Toronto in 1934, where she got a job at Dunlap Observatory. Later, she became a professor at the University of Toronto.

Helen Sawyer Hogg was an NSF astronomy program director, the first woman to serve as president of the Royal Society of Canada physical sciences section, and was also the founding president of the Canadian Astronomical Society:
http://casca.ca/?page_id=53

Helen Sawyer’s husband got a job at an observatory in Victoria, BC. Officially, she worked there as his "volunteer assistant."

It was there that she began her work on variable stars in clusters. The detailed catalogs that she started compiling during this period (and first published in 1939) are still in use today.

https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/~cclement/readhistory.html

Second, astronomer Annie Jump Cannon visited Mount Holyoke the following year, and made a big impression on Sawyer.

After graduating, Sawyer moved to Harvard to work with Cannon and Harlow Shapley on globular clusters. Radcliffe awarded her PhD (1931), because Harvard didn't award science graduate degrees to women.

https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109496538128937972

Helen Sawyer studied chemistry at Mount Holyoke, but two things made her switch to astronomy. First, as part of a class with Dr Anne Sewell, she viewed the total solar eclipse of 1925.

"The almost incredible beauty and grandeur of a total eclipse, tied me to astronomy for life."

Imo, every awestruck kid looking up at the sky during a total eclipse is a new astronomer being born. Here’s mine, back in 2017, at Manhattan Project National Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born #OTD in 1905. She was an authority on variable stars and globular clusters, and a pioneer of communicating science to the public.

Image: University of Toronto, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

@nuthatch @gregeganSF Haha, good point. Careless alt-text on my part.

Hydrogen bonding and stacking interactions between adjacent monomer chains in Kevlar make it about five times stronger than steel, by weight. It's used in everything from body armor to airplanes to race cars.

I'm a big fan of Kwolek's philosophy of taking time to investigate things thoroughly, even (especially) if they don't work right away or give the expected result.

"If things don't work out I don't just throw them out, I struggle over them, to try and see if there's something there."

The fellow who ran the spinneret – the solution is forced through a spinneret to make fibers – insisted it would clog the machine.

But Kwolek convinced him to give it a try. The result was surprisingly strong. Suspecting a mistake, she tested it several times.

Each time, tests on her new fiber indicated that it was roughly ten times stronger than anything else she had made. It was only then that she presented her results to DuPont.

They refined the material, and introduced Kevlar in 1971.

Basically, she had a hunch.

The solution that would lead to Kevlar was unlike most other polymer solutions, milky and thin rather than clear and viscous.

"I think someone who wasn't thinking very much or just wasn't aware or took less interest in it, would have thrown it out."

Kwolek received her BS in Chem from Margaret Morrison Carnegie College of Carnegie Mellon.

After graduating, she went to work for DuPont. She was asked to develop a suitable replacement for steel in radial tires, lightweight but strong, because of an expected gasoline shortage.

This was after several people at DuPont turned down the project.

Her group began their search in 1964, testing thousands of new polymers. "In the course of that work I made a discovery," she recalled.

Here's an explanation and demonstration of Kwolek's "Nylon Rope Trick," which should be a key element in any proposed explanation of Spider-Man's web shooters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFM-iMyvg4c

Chemist Stephanie Kwolek was born #OTD in 1923.

She invented Kevlar, used in high-strength / low-weight applications like body armor and airplane parts. She also invented the Nylon Rope Trick demo!

Images: DuPont/Stephanie Kwolek

Fledgling birb.