First Woman To Graduate BSc
Born 24 July 1874, Glasgow, Scotland.
Died 19 June 1939.
Ruth Pirret (1874-1939) was the first woman to graduate BSc from the University, in 1898. Although her work was principally in chemistry, she can be considered to be included amongst the early women working in engineering due to her important contribution to the understanding of corrosion in marine boilers.
Ruth was born in Kelvinside, Glasgow’s prosperous West End, while her father was minister at the United Free Church in Garnethill. The penultimate child in a large family, there must nevertheless have been sufficient resources to ensure most of them got excellent educations, since two of her older sisters set up their own nursery school and her younger sister, Mary, became a medical doctor, in addition to Ruth’s own university education.
Ruth was among the first women to matriculate at the University in 1892. She won eight prizes as a student, including Advanced Practical Physiology, and took honours courses in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physiology (this in the men’s advanced classes). She graduated BSc in Pure Science on 12 April 1898.
Ruth’s degree initially took her into teaching, then one of the few paid careers open to female graduates. In 1900-01 she was science mistress at Greenock High School and she is then thought to have taught in various other schools, possibly in Kilmacolm, Newcastle and Arbroath, before returning to the University of Glasgow in 1909 to undertake postgraduate research with Frederick Soddy. She was the second woman (after Anne Louise McIlroy in 1908) to officially register as a research student at the University. Ruth and Soddy's work was developing the disintegration theory of radioactivity and was published in two co-authored papers (in 1910 and 1911) on “The ratio between uranium and radium in minerals", which led to Soddy becoming an FRS and getting a professorship at the University of Aberdeen in 1914.
During the First World War Ruth became a Vice-Warden of Ashburne House Hall, a residence for female students in Manchester. Just before the end of the war she left that position and returned to Glasgow.
It is not clear at what point she moved from radioactivity work to corrosion but in 1920 she was co-author of the Fifth Report to the Corrosion Research Committee, with Dr. GD Bengough and R. May. In the same year she was elected a full member of the Institute of Metals. The work may have been done at the National Physical Laboratory initially but, as she continued to collaborate with Bengough until at least 1928, she was later working for him at the Royal School of Mines’ Metallurgical Laboratories in Imperial College, London. In 1924 their work was published in book form as “Causes of rapid corrosion of condenser tubes”. In 1928 she was thanked for her work which contributed to some of the experimental results published by Bengough in “The Theory of Metallic Corrosion the Light of Quantitative Measurements”, but that seems to be the last definitive mention of her work on this topic. Also in the same year she gained a patent for “A new or improved device for protecting the flames of spirit stoves and the like”, which suggests she had a taste for picnicking!
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she lived in Kensington with her sister Mary. Ruth Pirret died in June 1939.
University Link: GU Degree: BSc, 1898;
Discover more school teachers on the University of Glasgow Story website
Chemist
Born 2 September 1877.
Died 22 September 1956.
Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) was a chemist who lectured at the University of Glasgow before the First World War, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921.
Born in Eastbourne on 2 September 1877, he was the youngest son of Benjamin and Hannah Soddy. He was educated at private schools and then attended Eastbourne College (1892-94), University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (1894-1895) and the University of Oxford, where he gained Postmastership at Merton College and graduated with first class honours in 1898.
Soddy worked as a research assistant at Oxford until 1900, when he then spent two years at McGill University in Canada, lecturing in Chemistry and working with Sir Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity, and then with Sir William Ramsay at University College, London. He moved to Glasgow in 1904 as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity, and it was during his ten years at the University that he completed his most important research into the chemistry of radioactive elements.
Working with collaborators including the laboratory assistant Alexander Fleck (who later rose to become Chairman of ICI), Soddy developed the "Displacement Law" - that, "when an alpha or beta ray is emitted, the element moves to a different place in the periodic table." In 1913 he formulated the concept of "radio elements chemically non-separable" which, at the suggestion of Dr Margaret Todd, a fellow guest at a dinner party in his father-in-law's house at 11 University Gardens, he named "isotopes".
Soddy left the University in 1914 to the Chair of Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen, and in 1919 became Dr Lee’s Professor of Physical and Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, a post that he held until his retirement in 1936.
During his career he achieved a number of honours. In 1910 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and as mentioned above in 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of isotopes. He was the first English-born Chemist to receive this honour. In 1923 he was awarded the Cannizzaro Prize in Rome, and in 1936 he was awarded an Honorary LLD by the University of Aberdeen, and was also made a Foreign Member of the Swedish, Italian and Russian Academies of Science.
Soddy died in Brighton on 22 September 1956, aged 79. By his will, he established the Frederick Soddy Trust to provide grants to "groups studying the whole life of a community."
University Link: Honorary Graduate, Lecturer
GU Degree: LLD, 1934;
Discover more chemists on the University of Glasgow Story website
Oxford DNB