Agnes Pockels’ pioneering work was unfairly dismissed by tropes about women’s domestic roles

March 20, 2026

22 min read

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Agnes Pockels’ pioneering work was unfairly dismissed by tropes about women’s domestic roles

Agnes Pockels achievements in surface science have long been overshadowed by a popular and likely untrue story that she became interested in the subject while doing the dishes

By Alexis Pedrick, Sophia Levin, The Lost Women of Science Initiative & Mariel Carr

TU Braunschweig (image); Lily Whear (composite)

This bonus episode of Lost Women of Science’s season on Katharine Burr Blodgett is a co-production with Distillations, a podcast produced by the Science History Institute.

Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katharine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world.

But the way we talk about Pockels’s life and work often falls back on familiar tropes about women’s domestic roles, along with assumptions about how science gets done and what it looked like to do science as a woman in the 19th century.

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 Pockels's story invites us to rethink how we define success for scientists. Is our definition too narrow? And what might we gain if we crack it open a bit wider?

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

TRANSCRIPT

Alexis Pedrick: From the Science History Institute in collaboration with Lost Women of Science, for a special joint episode, I'm Alexis Pedrick, and this is Distillations.

Lost Women of Science just launched their new season, Layers of Brilliance, all about Katharine Burr Blodgett, a scientist whose discoveries in material science quietly shape our everyday world.

Blodgett started working for General Electric in 1918. The science she did there led to multiple US patents and formed the basis of technologies we now use in our screens and electronics. But Blodgett's legacy has long been eclipsed by the famous scientist she worked with, Irving Langmuir. So where do we come in?

Well, Blodgett and Langmuir's experiments used a version of an instrument originally invented by an earlier scientist, a woman named Agnes Pockels, and this episode is all about her.

In 1891, the esteemed international weekly science journal, Nature, did something unusual. They published a letter written by a woman. Her name was Agnes Pockels, and her letter was addressed to a man in England known as Lord Rayleigh. Now Lord Rayleigh or John Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh, was what's known as a hereditary peer.

I've been informed that not everyone reads as much historical romance as I do, and therefore might not be familiar with this term. It just means he inherited his title through his family lineage and was entitled to sit in the House of Lords. Very fancy.

Lord Rayleigh was also a physicist. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904. And all of this is to say that he had the kind of clout that could encourage the journal's editor to publish a letter written by a woman.

Now, Agnes had written to Lord Rayleigh after learning that he was doing experiments on what is now known as surface science. Surface science is the study of the boundary line where two different phases of matter meet––think where solid meets a liquid or liquid meets a gas. These meeting points are often highly reactive, and the outermost layer of molecules act in really unique ways that can be useful to us. Take dish soap, for example. It's an intermediary between water and grease. Why does it work? Because it reduces the surface tension of the water to get at the dirt. Surface science is fundamental to everything from catalytic converters to computer chips to water filtration. It even comes into play with medical implants. So now you're up to date on the science Agnes was working on.

She began her letter to Lord Rayleigh by saying:

Frauke Levin reading Agnes Pockels’ letter: My Lord, will you kindly excuse my venturing to trouble you with a German letter on a scientific subject? Having heard of the fruitful researches carried on by you last year on the hitherto little understood properties of water surfaces. I thought it might interest you to know of my own observations on the subject.

Alexis Pedrick: What observations? And how did Lord Rayleigh respond? Well, to answer that, we should bring in some backup.

Brigitte Van Tiggelen: So I'm Brigitte Van Tiggelen, but you can call me "Brigitte" or "Bridget" or "Bridgetta"...

Alexis Pedrick: Brigitte is our colleague here at the Science History Institute. She's the Director of International Affairs now, but she started as a research fellow, and she specializes in