Kathleen Lonsdale
Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (née Yardley) (
January 28,
1903 -
April 1,
1971) was an
Irish born
crystallographer, who discovered the planar hexagonal structure of
benzene.
Lonsdale was born at Charlotte House,
Newbridge, County Kildare,
Ireland, the tenth child of Harry Yardley, the town postmaster and Jessie Cameron. Her family moved to
England when she was five. She studied at
Woodford County High School for Girls, then moved to
Ilford County High School for Boys to study mathematics and science because the girls' school did not offer these subjects.
She earned her B.Sc. from
Bedford College for Women in
1922, graduating in physics with an M.Sc. from
University College London 1924. She then joined the research team of Sir
William Bragg. In
1927 she married Thomas Jackson Lonsdale. They had three children – Jane, Nancy, and Stephen.
Lonsdale became a
Quaker in
1935. As such, she was a committed
pacifist and served time in
Holloway prison during the
Second World War because she refused to register for civil defence duties or pay a fine for refusing to register.
Lonsdale obtained a D.Sc. from
University College London in
1936. In addition to discovering the structure of benzene, Lonsdale worked on the synthesis of
diamonds. She was a pioneer in the use of
X-rays to study crystals. Lonsdale became one of the first two female
Fellows of the Royal Society in
1945 (the other was the biochemist
Marjory Stephenson).
In 1949, Lonsdale became a professor of
chemistry and the head of the Department of Crystallography at University College, London. She was the first woman professor at that college, a position she held until
1968 when she was named
Professor Emeritus.
She was given the title
Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956. Lonsdale became the first woman president of the
International Union of Crystallography in
1966. Lonsdale was active in encouraging young people to study science and was the first woman president of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science in
1967. She died in 1971, aged 68.
Lonsdaleite an
allotrope of carbon was named in her honour; it is a rare form of
diamond found in
meteorites.
A sciences building opened in the 1990s on the
University of Limerick campus is named the Kathleen Lonsdale Building in her honour, and there is also a Kathleen Lonsdale Building at UCL.
National University of Ireland, Maynooth presents a special award annually in her honour - The Lonsdale Prize in Chemistry, which is presented to the student who achieves the highest result in final examinations for the Science Single Honours (Chemistry) degree.
*"The Structure of the Benzene Ring in Hexamethylbenzene,"
Proceedings of the Royal Society 123A: 494 (1929).
*"An X-Ray Analysis of the Structure of Hexachlorobenzene, Using the Fourier Method,"
Proceedings of the Royal Society 133A: 536 (1931).
Simplified Structure Factor and Electron Density Formulae for the 230 Space Groups of Mathematical Crystallography, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1936.
*"Diamonds, Natural and Artificial,"
Nature 153: 669 (1944).
*"Divergent Beam X-ray Photography of Crystals,"
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 240A: 219 (1947).
Crystals and X-Rays, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1948.
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Very short biographical note*
Longer biography
