Category: When they worked

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

Eva Firmani

First published on the Technicians Make it Happen website. Below is the full version. Name: Eva Firmani DOB: 7th November … More

Neil Papworth

Neil Papworth sent the first ever text message in 1991 when working as a technician. The message red “Merry Christmas”.

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.

Otto Baumbach in 1928

Otto Baumbach

Otto Baumbach (1882-1966) was a glass blower whose work in Manchester was vital to Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford.

http://www.sites.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/tychoarmill.html

Hans Crol

Hans Crol (?-1591) was a German goldsmith and instrument maker who worked for Tycho Brahe between c.1584 and 1591.

Joanna Chorley, circled, and her fellow codebreakers at Bletchley Park in the photograph taken in 1945 (Photo: Geoff Robinson)

Joanna Chorley

Joanna Chorley (1925-2019) worked at the code cracking centre Bletchley Park during WW2 on the worlds first electronic computer – Colossus.

M. Sterne, Gladys Trim November 1970, Journal of Medical Microbiology 3: 649-654

Gladys Trim

Gladys Trim (1915-?) started work in the Veterinary Department at the Wellcome Laboratories aged 15. Initially she was not doing technical work but helping other
women in the office with the filing. After 42 years she had worked her way up to senior technician with her name included on several publications.

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.

Irene Curie on a mobile x-ray unit, 1916 (unknown source)

Irène Curie

Irène Curie (1897-1956) was the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie. Hers was a glittering scientific career that started when she was an X-ray radiographer in WW1.