Isabelle Stone | |
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Born | October 18, 1868 Chicago, Illinois, US |
Died | 1966 |
Alma mater | Wellesley College University of Chicago |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Bryn Mawr School Vassar College Sweet Briar College |
Thesis | On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films (1897) |
Isabelle Stone (October 18, 1868 – 1966) was an American physicist and educator. She was one of the founders of the American Physical Society.[1] She was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States.
Stone was born in 1868 to Harriet H. Leonard Stone and Leander Stone in Chicago.[2] She completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1890,[1] and was among the first women to earn a PhD in physics in the United States, earning hers just two years after Caroline Willard Baldwin earned a Doctor of Science at Cornell University.[3] Stone completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago.[4] Her 1897 thesis, On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films, showed that very thin metal films showed a higher resistivity than the bulk metal.[5]
Stone taught for a year at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. She was a physics instructor at Vassar College from 1898 to 1906,[6] and head of the physics department at Sweet Briar College from 1915 to 1923.[7] From 1908 to 1914, she and her sister Harriet Stone ran a school for American girls in Rome,[1] and later in life they ran another school for girls in Washington, D.C.[8]
Stone was one of two women (out of a total of 836) to attend the first International Congress of Physics in Paris (the other being Marie Curie).[4] In 1899, she was one of forty physicists (and one of two women, the other being Marcia Keith) at the first meeting of the American Physical Society, held at Columbia University.[9]
Stone's research focused on the electrical resistance and other properties of thin films.[1]
Stone lived with her sister Harriet Stone in Washington, D.C. in her later years. Some of her letters are in the papers of George B. Pegram at Columbia University.[6]
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