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  • Thanks to Emerson for supporting this episode of SciShow.

  • To learn more, visit Emerson.com/WeLoveSTEM.

  • [♪ INTRO]

  • After many years of ignoring their stories, the world has finally started to talk about

  • women in sciencewhich is amazing!

  • Everyone should know about all the women in the past and present who have kicked butt

  • doing amazing research.

  • But we really can't talk about women in STEM enoughand we definitely don't

  • talk as often as we should about women who have done cool work in science's

  • more applied sibling, engineering.

  • It's a pretty wide-ranging field, and like with more basic science, it's had women

  • making big advances in it for a long time.

  • And the coolest part?

  • Lots of the stuff they work on and have worked on affects your day-to-day life.

  • We're talking train travel, your Bluetooth headphones, your hybrid cars.

  • So buckle up for five fantastic women in engineering.

  • Hedy Lamarr was a lot more brilliant than people often gave her credit for.

  • She's best known for being a famous 1940s actress, but she also helped come up with

  • the idea that today underlies secure WiFi and Bluetooth technology.

  • This part of Lamarr's story began in the 1930s, when she was unhappily married

  • to an Austrian arms dealer.

  • She often hosted her husband's dinner parties or attended meetings with him.

  • And while she wasn't a fan of playing hostess to literal Nazis at these events, she did

  • end up learning a lot about weapons control systems from just being there.

  • With World War II on the horizon, that was a pretty big deal.

  • See, at this time, radio waves were starting to play an important role in these control systems.

  • And at some point, Lamarr quietly came up with an idea that would make these signals

  • much harder to jam or intercept.

  • It was an early form of what we today call frequency hopping spread spectrum.

  • Rather than sending all of your information over one frequency, you spread it out by sending

  • little packets of info over different frequencies.

  • The information you're sending hops from frequency to frequencyand in order to

  • get the whole message, you have to know when and on which frequencies

  • bits of information will arrive.

  • That makes your data much more secure.

  • It also means that it's harder to jam your signal, because the jammer has to block lots

  • of radio frequencies instead of just one.

  • Now, fast-forward to the 1940s.

  • By this point, Lamarr had left her husband, gone to Hollywood, and become friends with

  • a composer named George Antheil.

  • And finally, she started talking to him about her radio ideas, and how they could be used

  • to help the U.S. military.

  • The two agreed that hopping frequencies could solve the problem of people intercepting or

  • jamming weapons frequenciesbut of course, you needed a way to know which frequency the

  • signal would be on at what time.

  • Together, Lamarr and Antheil came up with the idea of using player piano rolls to synchronize

  • the sender and the receiver.

  • If you're not familiar, these are big paper rolls that you could plug in to a piano that

  • would then play a song.

  • They each had little cut-outs to tell the piano which notes to play when.

  • The idea was that each of the 88 keys on the piano could be used to represent a different frequency.

  • And in 1942, this team got a patent for it.

  • Unfortunately, the U.S. military didn't take it too seriously, and Lamarr didn't

  • receive wide recognition for her work until much later, when plays and movies were being

  • written about it.

  • Today, though, this idea of sending packets of information over a broad range of frequencies

  • is what makes our WiFi secure and helps sync our Bluetooth devices.

  • So thanks, Hedy.

  • Olive Wetzel Dennis graduated from Cornell University in 1920 with a degree in civil

  • engineering, then promptly went and got herself a railroad job.

  • That all might sound relatively normal now, but it wasn't really done at that time.

  • Dennis was only the second woman to graduate from Cornell's civil engineering program,

  • and women didn't really work for railroads.

  • But, hey, that didn't stop her.

  • She got a job working as a draftsman for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and helped build

  • bridges in rural Ohio.

  • Then, not long after, she became a service engineer with the B&O.

  • That meant she rode the line for tens of thousands of kilometers a year, paying attention to

  • details, testing things out, and making all kinds of improvements.

  • Her work led to stain-resistant upholstery, ceiling lights that could be easily dimmed,

  • air conditioning, better meals, window vents that brought in fresh air and kept out dust,

  • and reclining chairs.

  • Of course, when Dennis got kind of famous for her work, newspapers gave her nicknames

  • likethe Lady Engineerand theworld's greatest housekeeper.”

  • Yikes.

  • But! She was awesome at her job.

  • And today, everybody appreciates that train cars are air-conditioned.

  • Dennis was super detail oriented, an advocate for women pursuing their dreams, and proof

  • that engineers don't have to invent a bunch of stuff to have a big impact.

  • Because really, she didn't just change trains.

  • Small improvement by small improvement, she also changed the way we think about transportation

  • and set a new standard for comfortable travel.

  • Annie Easley isn't a household name, and she doesn't have a huge movie about her.

  • But she was another one of NASA's hidden figures.

  • She always knew that she was good at math, but she thought she wanted to go into pharmacy

  • that is, until one day in 1955, when she read about the human computers

  • at NASA's predecessor, NACA.

  • These were people who did the calculations necessary for spaceflight.

  • And right away, she knew that's what she wanted to do.

  • Easley worked as a computer until machines replaced humansand then she just became

  • awesome at programming computers instead.

  • As a programmer, she helped analyze alternative energy, including wind and solar power, and

  • she also worked to understand the storage life of batteries.

  • The code she wrote for analyzing energy-conversion systems actually contributed to the development

  • of the kinds of batteries that we use in hybrid cars today.

  • Easley also helped develop software for Centaur, a high-energy rocket that would become known

  • asAmerica's Workhorse in Space.”

  • The Centaur was designed to use liquid hydrogen as a fuel, which was

  • kind of a big deal at the time.

  • Hydrogen is really light - it's the lightest element - and liquid hydrogen also really burns.

  • This makes it a super efficient rocket fuel, providing a lot of power for not that much weight.

  • But liquid hydrogenand the Centaurgot off to a rocky start.

  • When the rocket was first tested, it was buggy and prone to problemsmostly because liquid

  • hydrogen is so hard to work with.

  • It needs to be stored at less than negative 250 degrees Celsius, expands quickly when

  • heated, and is so cold that it can make metal brittle.

  • So the engineers at Lewis Research Center, including Annie Easley, became responsible

  • fortamingliquid hydrogen by testing it and analyzing data about it.

  • Eventually, Centaur rockets would be used in over 100 uncrewed launches, boosting satellites

  • into orbit and probes into space.

  • The Centaur would be responsible for sending the Cassini mission to Saturn in 1997, as

  • well as probes and fly-bys to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.

  • So like, no big deal or anything.

  • Lynn Conway literally wrote the textbook on microchip design.

  • She helped kickstart the development of the kinds of computers and cell phones we have

  • todayand, on a different note, her work as an activist for transgender rights has

  • also been influential.

  • Working in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Conway invented scalable design

  • rules for VLSI chip design.

  • That stands for Very-Large-Scale-Integration, and it's where millions of transistors get

  • combined into a single chip to increase its processing power.

  • She also pioneered teaching these methods at MIT.

  • Conway's way of thinking was that the chip itself wasn't the invention.

  • Instead, it was the idea of using the best computing technology available to figure out

  • a newer and better way to make the next chip.

  • She deeply understood that the computing industry would constantly reinvent itself.

  • Based on her teaching at MIT, and in collaboration with Carver Mead of Caltech, Conway wrote

  • Introduction to VLSI Systems, which pretty much set in motion chip design as we know it.

  • Also, it led to Moore's law, which suggests that the computing power of chips doubles

  • every two years.

  • Yes, that Moore's law.

  • All of this is amazing, but another remarkable part of Conway's story is that, by this

  • point, she had already had a whole other career in the 60s.

  • Back in those days, she invented dynamic instruction scheduling, which is basically where hardware

  • can rearrange a set of instructions to execute them in the most efficient way possible.

  • It's another fundamental component of computer architecture and modern computing, but up

  • until recently, nobody really knew that Lynn Conway was also responsible for that.

  • That's because she had done the work before coming out as transgender and transitioning.

  • And with the way people viewed gender in the 60s and 70s, it didn't feel safe for her

  • to claim that work.

  • But despite that, she still managed to become one of the leading thinkers in computer engineering.

  • Finally, Treena Livingston Arinzeh studied mechanical engineering as an undergrad, and

  • it was only later that she became interested in applying engineering principles to medicine.

  • But once she did?

  • She became an extremely influential researcher in the field of stem cells.

  • These are sort of blank-slate cells that can differentiate into specialized types of cells.

  • And Arinzeh's primary interest is in using them to repair injuries.

  • You can't just throw a bunch of stem cells in a wound and hope they'll fix things, though.

  • So an important part of Arinzeh's research is the development of tiny, synthetic biostructures

  • that can serve as a kind of scaffolding for stem cells.

  • She's made some great advancements in this field, but her most well-known finding so

  • far was actually published back in 2003.

  • That year, she was able to show that a large bone defect in a dog could be repaired by

  • transplanting stem cells from another dog.

  • And, maybe most importantly, immunosuppressant drugs weren't needed to keep the body of

  • the transplant recipient from rejecting those cells.

  • This finding laid the groundwork for a big idea: that adult stem cells from one person

  • can be implanted into another person without being rejected

  • or causing an adverse immune reaction.

  • This is huge.

  • Without the help of immunosuppressant drugs, most transplants from donors are rejected

  • by the body because the immune system recognizes them as foreign and tries to fight them off.

  • But Arinzeh's work suggests that isn't true for so-called mesenchymal stem cells.

  • These are stem cells that can differentiate into things like bone and cartilage cells,