Category: USA

Technicians who worked in the USA

Eva standing in front of Discovery on the mobile launch platform on the way to the launch pad.

Eva Firmani

Tile technicians like Eva work kept astronuts safe as they left and re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

This photograph of the Calutron technicians is one of the most famous photographs from Oak Ridge and Gladys Owens is the technician closest to the camera.

Gladys Owens

Gladys Owens was just 19 years of age when she arrived to work in the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was 1945 and she was to spend 8 months working there as a technician on the Manhattan Project. Gladys would become one of the “Calutron Girls” whose role, though none of them knew it at the time, was key to the building of the first atomic bomb.

Fanny Hesse

Fanny Hesse

Fanny Hesse (1850-1934) was a lab technician and technical illustrator who introduced agar to the study of bacteria revolutionising microbiology.

Blanche Lawrence. Image from the September 1949 edition of the magazine Ebony.

Blanche Lawrence

Blanche J. Lawrence (1921-?) graduated from Tuskegee University before going on to work as a technician and then junior chemist on the Manhattan Project.

Pinky: a technician’s technician

Pinky (1995-1998) only one technician has achieve world domination, only to lose it again. Pinky was Brain’s faithful assistant and a mouse with a lot to teach us.

Vivien Thomas: surgical technician

Vivien Thomas (1910-1985) saved many lives through the, often unacknowledged, surgical innovations he developed as a surgical technician. This after the stock market crash of 1929 took away his life savings, his dreams of becoming a doctor, and his job as a carpenter.

Beaker: a model technician

Beaker (1977- ) quickly became one of the foremost communicators of science of his day. As Dr. Bunsen’s assistant he showed a generation of children the wonders of the modern scientific age.