Who is ellen swallow

Swallow Richards later in life with her husband Robert H. The laboratory was closed in after MIT began awarding undergraduate degrees to women on a regular basis and there was no more need for a special track.

In , at the request of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Richards and her assistants performed a survey of the quality of the inland bodies of water of Massachusetts, many of which were already polluted with industrial waste and municipal sewage. The scale of the survey was unprecedented: it led to the first state water-quality standards in the nation and the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant, in Lowell, Massachusetts. From to Richards served as official water analyst for the State Board of Health while continuing as an instructor at MIT—the rank she held at her death.

She and her colleague A. Before Rachel Carson was born, Richards wrote and lectured that a direct link could be drawn between the well-being of humans and the safety and cleanliness of the environment in which they lived.

B orn Ellen Henrietta Swallow to an old Yankee family in , Richards grew up on a farm in Dunstable, Massachusetts, not far from the border of New Hampshire, in an area still unconnected from city centers by rail.

Her mother, Fanny, was a frail woman who seems to have spent more time in bed than out. Both Fanny and her husband Peter had been trained as teachers. But she was sprung from a cloistered girlish existence by a doctor who advised her parents that she must be allowed to run freely in the open air if she was to gain any strength.

The outdoors also nourished a scientific bent. She collected plants and fossils and classified what she found in diaries and letters. She noted the topography and flow of streams. She made maps and naturalist drawings. The Swallows left the farm when Nellie was 16, to move to the larger town of Westford so she could attend school for the first time.

Her father ran a general store. She was always busy: looking after her ailing mother and running the house, helping out at the store and making trips—alone—into Boston to drive a hard bargain with suppliers, and always finding time to read and study. She wondered why any woman would choose to marry, knowing what she knew about the dreariness of such an existence from her friends. Her bright eyes and crooked smile suggested a quick wit, but as an acquaintance once remarked, even her jokes usually made some kind of point.

The year was , and Conway was a member of But she quickly found her way around the rules. She got permission to take more classes than her peers, and to rise earlier than the rest of the dormitory so she could spend more time at the observatory, peering through telescopes. With some pride, she boasted to her parents that she had acquired a reputation for being something of a know-it-all on campus—someone who could be counted on to identify an unfamiliar flower or a new constellation.

On the advice of her mentor, astronomer Maria Mitchell, she was saving up money for a telescope. She was not going to waste her hard-earned dollars on a frivolous thing like a new dress for graduation.

Richards showed signs of being a talented astronomer, but even as a student she was filled with a sense of greater purpose. She wanted desperately to put her knowledge to good use. After two years at Vassar, she began to look for work abroad, out west, and in Boston. What she really wanted was a job as a chemist. But no one would hire a woman. Finally a prospective employer offered to take her on—if she paid them.

Another told her to apply to MIT. MIT faculty was divided on whether or not to let the Vassar girl into their midst. So she laid siege to this establishment with the best tools she had at her disposal: a microscope and a sewing kit.

She quickly impressed the anti-Swallow camp with her scientific acumen. William Ripley Nichols, a professor of chemistry, who initially objected to allowing a woman into the labs, soon made her his right hand, relying on her careful water quality analyses, and giving her the credit when he made his report to the Massachusetts State Board of Health. Another skeptic, Professor Robert Hallowell Richards, was soon arguing with himself over the pros and cons of co-education in his diary, even as he became more and more smitten with her and her prowess in his chosen field, geology.

He proposed to her as soon as she got her degree. Even so, she made him wait two more years, until , for the wedding. She wanted to be certain he would not stand in the way of her career. Yet all the while, she made a point of being as useful and unthreatening as possible in the company of her male colleagues, sewing their buttons and mending their suspenders. After all, so much was riding on her success at MIT: her own scientific career, but also the future careers of her sex.

She intended to be the Trojan horse. A t MIT, Richards began to devote more of her energies to a new discipline that would apply science and chemistry to the urban environment, and in particular to homes.

She observed that science and technology had revolutionized industry in her lifetime, but was rarely applied to the home.

Why is it? Why do not our housekeepers keep pace with our machine shops? She was a good student and she worked for a few years as a teacher and tutor to save money for college. In , she was accepted to Vassar College and graduated with a bachelor's degree two years later. She tried to find work as an apprentist chemist, but could not find a position. One chemist suggested she try to continue her education. So in she applied and was accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT as a "special student" — the first, and at that time only, woman accepted at the university.

Richards was often the lone woman in a group. Here she is with the MIT chemistry staff in the late s or s. She graduated with a second bachelor's degree in That same year, she received her master's degree from Vassar College in Chemistry for a thesis she had written while studying at MIT. Her work with her husband on the chemistry of ore analysis led to her being the first woman elected to be a member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers now the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers.

The next year, with the support of her husband and the Woman's Education Association, Richards opened the Women's Laboratory at MIT, where women were taught basic and industrial chemistry, biology, and mineralogy. Many of her students were school teachers who had little training in laboratories or who wanted to learn how to do chemical experiments.

When women began to be accepted as regular students in the early 's, the Woman's Laboratory was closed down and Richards was offered an appointment as an instructor at the university's new laboratory of sanitary chemistry.