Episode 5 – The Self You Have to Live With

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Katie Hafner: In 1929, when she was 31 years old, Katharine Blodgett started an amateur acting career with the Schenectady Civic Players.

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Her first role for the Players was in a play called Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg. The entire one-act play consists of one long, tense encounter between two women whose inner thoughts are personified on stage. 

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One of the women, Margaret, has been invited to tea by an unlikable socialite, and she is trying to be polite to her annoying hostess, whom she really can't stand. Katharine plays Margaret’s inner voice, “Maggie.” Maggie is like a splinter in Margaret’s brain, nudging and prodding her.

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Voiceover:  Don't seem anxious.  Flatter her. Change the subject.  

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Katie Hafner: Maggie, the inner voice grows ever more insistent.

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Voiceover: She's taunting you. For God's sake, strike back!

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Katie Hafner: That role turned out to be far more meaningful than we realized when we found out about it – even a premonition of sorts.

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Today on Layers of Brilliance …The Katharine Blodgett nobody knew.

We tend to live our lives as if they were, in some way, already written. Not in a mystical sense, just in a human one. We carry stories about ourselves near the surface of our consciousness, and then, often without realizing it, we start to act those stories out.

Your younger self can often foreshadow your older one — and an older self can, in turn, shed light on what you were always becoming. In that sense, we become our own self-fulfilling prophecies.

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It was late last spring, a few months into our reporting journey for this season, when  I’m deep into Katharine’s family tree, and I come across a great-niece, Deborah Alkema, who lives in Massachusetts. I find a number and decide to call. To my surprise, she answers the phone! 

About 20 minutes into our conversation, Deborah Alkema mentions a storage unit.

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Storage unit?

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Yes, a family storage unit in New Hampshire, where I happen to be spending the summer. 

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Deborah tells me she’s been meaning to go sort through it and thinks she will drive up there sometime in the next few months. I say, how about sometime in the next few weeks? Visions of laboratory notebooks -- stacks of them -- are dancing in my head.  Sure, says Deborah. She’s a very nice person. And I offer to meet her there.

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Deborah Alkema: Yeah. Entry's right there. Mm-hmm.

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Katie Hafner: Oh, I see. 

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Deborah Alkema: So you just wanna pull over there somewhere.

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GPS voice: Your destination is on the left. 

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Deborah Alkema: Entry's right there.

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Katie Hafner:   We're in Belmont, New Hampshire, about 30 minutes north of Concord, the capital of that Live-Free-or-Die state. And as we're pulling into the parking lot, Deborah tells me what she remembers about her great-aunt Katharine.

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Deborah Alkema: She used to come visit us regularly and she would bring us like scientific toys and stuff.

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And my sister credits her with bringing the, um, electric doorbell kit that got my sister interested in electricity, and she's an electrician.

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 I was like in my upper teens when she died, I think. 

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 Katie Hafner: Northland Secure Storage. 

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Deborah Alkema: Yep. 

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Katie Hafner: How long have you had this unit? 

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Deborah Alkema: Um, since Mom died. I'm really bad on years. 

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I need to get in my storage unit around there. 

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Storage employee: What unit are you in?

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Deborah Alkema: This one here. 

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Katie Hafner: Oh, wow.

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There in that tiny space are cardboard boxes, and plastic storage containers. A good two or three dozen of them. All stacked up. 

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Deborah Alkema: Yeah, we have a lot of family papers.

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Katie Hafner:  We start rummaging around. looking at labels on the boxes..

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Miscellaneous items…

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Then…

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Um, holy smokes.

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Something has caught my eye. Lying at the top of one of the boxes we've just opened is a very very old thick brown leather-bound book, frayed at the edges, with Katharine B. Blodgett handwritten on the cover, and the number 968 at the top, in black ink.

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Katie Hafner: This is her lab notebook. Her lab notebook from 19 October 1st, 1918. So basically her very. First, notations. 

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Deborah Alkema: So she would've been 20. Mm-hmm. 

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Katie Hafner: She would've been 20. There isn't much in it. No. It only goes to page 10.

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Deborah Alkema: Hmm. 

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Katie Hafner: This is it? After a hundred years, Katherine Blodgett’s laboratory notebooks ended up in a New Hampshire storage unit? Okay. I resist – just barely – the urge to text everyone on the production team.

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If there's this one notebook, the others must be somewhere in the pile of crumbling cardboard boxes and old plastic containers. 

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Katie Hafner: Let me get this, let me see, let me put this down.

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I tell Deborah how grateful I am to her and her siblings for not throwing Katharine’s papers away, and she gets it.

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So one thing that we say that we said in our first season was, please, if you have a grandmother who you think might have done something interesting with her life…

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Deborah Alkema: Save the stuff.

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Katie Hafner: Or Great Aunt… Don't throw it away. Right? Right. Or if there's an attic that needs to be cleaned out, go through it.

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Deborah Alkema: Go through it. 

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 Katie Hafner: speaking of which, once we decide there's no way we can go through all of this in the one afternoon we've set aside, Deborah entrusts me with a lot of it.  I get everything into my car and then into my house. And there it all is. Piles and piles of Katharine Blodgett's... accumulated life.

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The boxes open into piles, and the piles spread. First, my dining table disappears. Then the chairs. Then the dining room floor around it. Every scrap from the boxes demands attention.

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The work is slow, physical, exhausting.

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 Peggy Schott flies in from Baltimore to help sort through all the science papers. Our associate producer, Hannah, drives up from Boston. Eva, who's an intern at Lost Women of Science, comes for a few days, too. And we make a small, makeshift community focused on Katharine’s life.

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But once everything is out of the boxes, it turns out there are no other lab notebooks. 

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Just that one from 1918, notebook number 968, which Katharine may have tucked under her arm one day, or slipped into her bag, and just scooted on home with it. The one notebook she kept.

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And so that one notebook feels different now.

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Less like an accident. More like a beginning she wanted to remember.

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 The absence of the notebooks becomes not merely disappointing but meaningful. The long stretch of missing pages begins to feel like part of the story itself.

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Because Katharine Blodgett’s work was never really hers to keep.

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All laboratory notebooks kept by scientists at GE belonged to the company. George Wise, the historian we’ve heard from in other episodes who has written extensively about GE, pointed this out.

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George Wise:  They were preserved though, as legal evidence.

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Katie Hafner: Legal evidence to support GE’s patents. 

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George Wise: They're useful in trials in court. Every entry is supposed to be witnessed by somebody.

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Katie Hafner: But beyond their legal use, the company didn’t seem to consider them valuable.

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George Wise: There was no desire to let anyone see it other than the patent attorneys and the usefulness in court.

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At no point that I know of was there, the idea that these would be preserved for the benefit of the public or for the benefit of other scientists, even though it would've been a useful thing to do.

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Katie Hafner: The lab notebooks we have been able to look at –like those of Irving Langmuir or Vincent Schaefer– must have been saved by someone, and later donated for preservation. Someone who understood that, someday, people like us would find value in them. 

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But the mountain of material that was Katharine’s and that’s now covering every surface of my dining room requires our forensic attention. Because you just never know. 

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It’s overwhelming, though. 

This isn’t an archive. It’s a weather system. Paper drifting across decades. Ink and newsprint and handwriting – handwriting as it went through the years, from clear and neat to all but indecipherable.

Some of it is dazzling weather, like the stacks of postcards from her mother through the years – one for nearly every day – bright and affectionate.

Also the Bryn Mawr reunion programs. And Zonta Club flyers, the professional women’s group she belonged to, and rosters and agendas and mailing lists. Small communities, saying: You belong here. 

Pure Sunlight.

And some of it feels darker. Much darker.

The newspaper clippings about her father’s murder—dozens of them, each one replaying the same tragedy in a slightly different key. Though she never talked of this, she obviously needed to find and keep as much about it as she could.

All those murder clippings made for a long, low-pressure system. Something that never quite lifted.

And there are bundles of letters from the 1800s– many of them her parents’ love letters – tied with string gone stiff and brittle.

All mixed in with tax returns, neat and impersonal. Stock certificates. Cool and grey. 

And then, sudden flurries of achievement. Her lecture notes from Cambridge. Dozens of newspaper clippings about Katharine. 

There's a thick scrapbook, heavy with photographs and headlines, capturing Katharine at award ceremonies, standing stiffly beside men in dark suits, being recognized—finally—by a world that didn’t always know what to do with her.

There’s the Bible study notebook from 1917. Two small “line-a-day” diaries —the one from 1942 to 1946 is dense with neat, clear handwriting so small I needed a magnifying glass, and the other from the 1970s, when her handwriting had thinned into a blackened scrawl.

And letters from different people, handwritten and typed, brief and long, some sent as telegrams. A lot of the correspondence is from someone named Alice Penrose, who signed off as Granny – though she wasn’t Katharine’s grandmother, a mystery that would take on its own strange weight.

Katharine’s meticulous record-keeping of her garden, from the pH of the soil to the buds that sprouted over the seasons. Each rose numbered and studied like a lab specimen. Her slips of scribbled recipes in her ongoing pursuit of the perfect popover. On one sheet of paper, she had written out a recipe for enough applesauce to feed a small platoon. My dining room has been overtaken by decades passing in overlapping currents. Long seasons of being.

Late one night while I was on my own, I stood scanning the dining table, and I noticed something. 

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It was a series of envelopes always from the same person, but the stationery changed from year to year. Washington University, St. Louis. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore.

Different cities. The same name. I'd flipped through these envelopes earlier, but hadn't thought much of them or dug into them yet. But that night, the return address on one of them caught my eye: McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts...This wasn’t a colleague or cousin, or friend or romantic interest writing to Katharine. It was her psychiatrist.

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In 1931, Katharine was an inpatient at McLean, a renowned psychiatric hospital in the Boston suburb of Belmont. And while there, she was under the care of a psychiatrist named John Whitehorn. 

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The breakdown, we now know, came in late February 1931, a little more than 12 years after she started working at GE. It was while she was visiting her brother, George, and her sister-in-law, Isabel, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was overwhelmed by voices that only she could hear, and I’m guessing it was her brother and sister-in-law who took her to McLean, an elite psychiatric hospital in nearby Belmont. McLean was a leading institution in what it called the “moral treatment” of mental illness, offering more humane treatments than its counterparts did. Katharine was receiving the best care possible during a time when little was known about the treatment of mental illness, at what was widely considered the best place for those whose minds had turned against them.

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She stayed there for about two months, then returned to her life. To her work. To the lab.

Suddenly, everything on my dining table looked different. The story I thought I knew of Katharine’s adult life had just shifted. Here was a brilliant scientist, a brilliant mind - to make a parallel with the deeply troubled genius mathematician John Nash - coping with an extraordinary inner life.

More after the break.

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Katie Hafner: Although Katharine wasn’t hospitalized again after the 1931 stay at McLean – at least as far as we know – the voices didn’t go away. They came back. For years, on and off, they hovered and hounded.

At the family’s request, and to protect Katharine’s privacy, we aren’t going into great detail about the voices Katharine heard.

Some of them were troubling, others benign. She’d be at the lab, say, making calculations, and what she referred to as her split self, would pipe up out of nowhere, and clear as a bell, she’d hear, “Good job!” 

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We asked Nick Rosenlicht, a psychiatrist in Berkeley, California, with decades of experience, to comment on that.

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He said he was struck by how engaged she was with the voices, carrying on actual dialogues.

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Nick Rosenlicht: She feels like they're almost, you know, it's almost like these are imaginary friends or frenemies of hers.

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Katie Hafner: Sometimes she referred to them as “backstage voices.” Whatever they were, why the voices materialized when they did, in 1931, maybe even before then, we don’t know. 

But the point is, they would appear unbidden. And increasingly unwanted.

One thing: the murder of her father and the fact that it was unsolved was something Katharine had trouble shaking. Why else would she keep so many clippings, several of them duplicates... 

In fact, we found one large envelope addressed to the psychiatrist, John Whitehorn, and in it, she had enclosed a flashy magazine called “True Confessions” from 1924, 29 years after the murder, containing an article written by the detective who investigated her father’s murder. Typical of a tabloid magazine, the murder was retold, sparing no details or drama. The detective wrote about his hunt for the “villain” in a who-dunnit narrative. 

And according to one account, at some point, Katharine attended a couple of seances led by a prominent Schenectady spiritualist in the hopes of calling up the ghost of her late father.

Katharine and John Whitehorn’s letters back and forth continued for years. We see the correspondence mostly from his side, and it’s clear that he admired Katharine’s scientific achievements deeply and was in awe of both her and Irving Langmuir. 

He frequently commented on Katharine’s publications and occasionally suggested alternative explanations to Langmuir’s findings in papers, meticulously writing out equations and chemical models.

He even did some experiments of his own, measuring heart rate changes of subjects during sleep for research on stress, which he was eager to share with Katharine.

After a while, Katharine’s illness just didn’t come up.

Until it did. In 1940, almost a decade after Katharine was hospitalized, after years of conjuring miracles in the laboratory by virtue of her patience, her energy, her … unfailing curiosity….two years after her breakthrough with non-reflecting glass, she sent Dr. Whitehorn two letters asking for help – and after the second one, he wrote back.

His letter was brief. 

He likened the voices to an imaginary man under a bed, “so fascinatingly feared by the neglected female.” 

Who knows what he meant by that, but he did make a suggestion. He suggested she rely on her “increasing boredom and disgust” with the voices in order  to surmount them or, at least, no longer be quite so plagued by them –to drain them of what he suggested was her fascination with them.

He said he knew of no medicine or surgical measures for getting rid of the voices. He recommended that Katharine stay busy engaging with real people. And if that failed, he wrote, a long course of psychiatric interviews might be in order.

In other words, he was at a loss.

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Nick Rosenlicht:  I mean, he's really kind of cavalier about it. 

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Katie Hafner: Nick Rosenlicht again.

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Nick Rosenlicht: Like you know, cut this stuff out. You're an adult. You don't need to imagine these things, and you know, you know they're not real.

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He refers to these unfair voices as if they're things she kind of has control over.

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Katie Hafner: Bear in mind, there was no known treatment at the time for conditions such as Katharine’s.

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And as much as she might have wished, she didn’t have control over the voices. 

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What all of this crystallized for me and the rest of the production team, was that the decade when Katharine Blodgett was doing the most extraordinary science of her life was also a decade when her mind was not at peace.

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There’s a particular kind of courage in that – the courage of showing up, day after day, when your own mind is not  always on your side.

Katharine wasn’t just doing difficult science. She was doing it while standing slightly off to the side of the world. Imagine trying to think – really think, focus, on careful, exacting work – while being interrupted by a second, unwanted conversation happening in your head. 

Now add to that another kind of solitude. Katharine Blodgett was often the only woman in the room, surrounded by men who respected her, but could not for even a minute comprehend her place in their world. 

In the mountain of papers from the storage locker was a notebook that didn’t look like much. It was a spiral-bound book of ruled pages made by a company called Tumbler.

But when I opened it, I realized this Tumbler Notebook had nothing to do with Katharine’s work in the lab.

It was a diary of sorts… And most of the entries started with, “Dear Granny.”

She was this….Granny, as I mentioned earlier, wasn’t Katharine’s grandmother. She was Alice Penrose, someone Katharine had a complicated, prickly relationship with. Alice was the Director of Home Economics at the Ballard School, a YWCA vocational institution in New York City. It appears that the two women knew each other through Katharine’s mother. 

Katharine and Alice were in frequent touch. Alice even wrote to Katharine while she was at McLean. So Alice Penrose saw the most fragile part of her young friend. 

Katharine had given a lecture to Alice’s students about electricity. Alice had borrowed money from Katharine and was paying it back in fits and starts. Alice was much older than Katharine. Strangely, she signs many of her letters, “Your Granny.” Some of their letters to each other are downright hostile, but the entries to Granny in the Tumbler Notebook are all love and affection. 

And here’s the even stranger part: Katharine wrote these entries in 1939. 

Three years after Alice Penrose had died.

So this isn’t a correspondence. It’s a one-way conversation. And everywhere in  that notebook, in that one-way conversation, is Katherine talking, to quote Granny, “about her split self”.

Natalia Sanchez Loayza:  You're muted, Katie.

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Katie Hafner: I know. The dog's barking. Hold on. 

Our producer Natalia and I are getting on a Zoom with a guest. 

Sorry about that.  Let's start with having you tell us your name and what you do.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck: So I'm Elizabeth Lunbeck and I am Professor of the History of Science in residence at Harvard University and chair of the Department of the History of Science.

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Katie Hafner: Liz studies the history of psychiatry, and we turned to her for help navigating what we’ve discovered about Katharine.

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In the Tumbler Notebook, Katharine calls what she has a “split personality,” the only time we see her putting a name to it.

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Liz sees something else.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  Is this just a way of describing her inner life? I’m not sure it’s a split personality. She refers to it as that, but maybe she is just very attuned to different strands of her own experience… 

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Katie Hafner: Liz points out something about the Tumbler notebook that I hadn’t fully registered until she says it:

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  What strikes me is the effort she put into trying to, contain, manage, and deal with whatever it was that was, tormenting her. Like the scientist she was, she took a very scientific approach to herself.

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She was very careful in her descriptions of her inner state. She referred several times to experiments on herself.

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Katie Hafner:  In her entries to Granny, Katharine asked the same question repeatedly, examining the variables.

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What happens when she leans into the “split self”—and what happens when she tries to shut it out?  What makes it better? What makes it worse?

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Elizabeth Lunbeck: We talk about the self all the time now. She's an early adopter of a, of the kind of tracked self. She is tracking the vagaries, the vicissitudes of herself in a very concrete and detailed way.

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Katie Hafner: Mostly, says Liz....

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  She is a scientist of herself. She's a scientist in the lab. She's a scientist in her garden. She is first and foremost a scientist.

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Katie Hafner: And there was one aspect of Katharine’s tracked self…that Liz kept circling back to – the part that lit up for her—

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Elizabeth Lunbeck: It is striking how, sort of, freighted ambition is for her. Something that really stands out to me here is her describing how she deals with the ambitious part of herself. This separate self. Tells her, you're doing a great job. You're really good.

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Katie Hafner:  In Katharine’s telling, the ambitious part of herself doesn’t feel fully like hers. It’s backstage. 

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In one entry to Granny in the Tumbler notebook, Liz picked up on a particular phrase, an idea that appears repeatedly:

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  I need terribly to feel proud of myself.

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Katie Hafner:  But she can’t quite hold that pride directly.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  The easiest way to accomplish it is to think of you, Granny, being proud of me.

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Katie Hafner: It’s pride she borrows and can’t quite own. And that borrowed pride becomes a kind of scaffolding – something she could stand on long enough to keep going.

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As Liz Lunbeck sees it, Katharine was wrestling with her ambition. What she presented to the world - assistant to the great Irving Langmuir – and her ambitious self were in conflict. 

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  I think she's kind of maybe plagued or tormented is too strong. What she shows to the world is her you know, she's a nice little old lady and, you know, working her garden.

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But inside, she wants to be recognized. She wants to do more, she wants more approval.

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Katie Hafner:  And then she was also busy doing something else, which…

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Elizabeth Lunbeck: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think she was, she was very busy, occupied, preoccupied with something else, which was that she was trying to figure out her own self.

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Katie Hafner: So when Vincent Schaefer said he never saw her depressed?

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Of course he didn’t. Because whatever this struggle was, Katharine kept it carefully -- almost perfectly -- hidden.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck:  It's not surprising that her colleague, Vincent Schaefer, would not have seen any of what we have been able to see after the fact because she kept it so carefully apart from her professional life.

Katie Hafner: What we see in this notebook is a portrait of effort.

A woman trying – day after day – to manage her own mind. Trying to be, as she put it in the language of her time, “a normal human being.”

Trying to keep her ambition alive without being punished for it – by her world, or by herself.

And then, every morning, she goes back to the lab – and lowers a sheet of glass through the surface of the water. Again. And again.

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Discovering Katharine’s mental health struggles clarified as much as it clouded. A few things started to make sense. Or at least I decided to impose a kind of explanation. To the world, it appeared that she had no need to call attention to herself. As those around her saw it, she was content to stay in the lab, for the most part, carrying out experiments. 

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But I can imagine that the spotlight GE shone on her, with all those stories that got written about her discovery, might have amplified her feelings about ambition. Because it’s clear from her diary that she struggled with her ambition and her desire to be able to feel proud of all she was accomplishing, she returns again and again to this.

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Among the hundreds of fascinating – okay, fascinating to us – scraps of paper we found, constituting the poetry of a daily life – we found something else that was intriguing.

The Katharine who investigated, probed, and tried to comprehend – even take control of – a mental illness that often got the better of her throughout the years – that Katharine – turned to  the literature of self-improvement.

It was a typed excerpt from a book titled… The Self You Have to Live With. The author was a pastor and theologian who taught classes in thought control. The book seems classic self-help with a generous serving of Christian teachings. It was published in 1938, the year Katharine discovered non-reflecting glass, the year she filled the pages of the Tumbler notebook.

Her chosen excerpt: “A self is something you are continually creating…a source of misery or a source of power – that depends upon the interests you cultivate, the thoughts you permit. Life’s greatest achievement is the continual remaking of yourself so that …. at last …. you know how to live.”

Katie Hafner: This has been Lost Women of Science. The producers of this episode were Natalia Sanchez Loayza and Sophia Levin, with me as senior producer. Hannah Sammut was our associate producer. Elah Feder was our consulting editor. Ana Tuiran did our sound design and engineering, and Hansdale Hsu mastered the episode.

Elizabeth Younan is our composer and Lisk Feng designed the art. 

Thanks to senior managing producer Deborah Unger, program manager Eowyn Burtner, my co-executive producer Amy Scharf, and marketing director Lily Whear. 

We got help along the way from Eva McCullough, Nadia Knoblauch, Theresa Cullen, Carolyn Klebanoff, and Issa Block Kwong. 

A super special thanks to Peggy Schott, Nick Rosenlicht and Liz Lunbeck.

And we're grateful to Deborah, Jonathan, and Marijke Alkema for helping us tell the story of their great Aunt Katharine. We're distributed by PRX and our publishing partner is Scientific American. Our funding comes in part from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation, and our generous individual donors

Please visit us at lost women of science.org, and don't forget to click on that all-important donate button. I'm Katie Hafner. See you next week.