Margaret Maltby

Margaret Eliza Maltby (December 10, 1860 – May 3, 1944) was an American physicist notable for her measurement of high electrolytic resistances and the conductivity of very dilute solutions. Maltby was the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from any German university.

She taught for over 30 years at Barnard College where she introduced one of the first courses on the physics of music. Maltby was active in the American Association of University Women where she was instrumental in helping female academics receive fellowships to study and conduct research, at a time when it was uncommon for women to be eligible for such fellowships.

Maltby had a child out of wedlock. Unusually for her time, she was able to continue her career in academia by keeping the birth a secret and later claiming the child publicly through adoption.

Early life

Margaret Maltby was born Minnie Eliza Maltby on her family's farm in Bristolville, Ohio, on December 10, 1860, to Edmund Maltby and Lydia Jane Brockway. She had two older sisters: Betsy (Maltby) Mayhew and Martha Jane Maltby who were 15 and 13, respectively, at the time of her birth. Minnie Maltby was named by her sisters, but she disliked the name and later changed it to Margaret in 1889.

Maltby was interested in science and mathematics at a young age, and her parents encouraged those interests. They taught her how to use basic machinery, and her father especially supported her interest in mathematics. After Edmund Maltby's death, the Maltby family moved to Oberlin, Ohio for educational opportunities.

Education

Maltby attended the preparatory school at Oberlin College before matriculating there in 1878. She graduated from Oberlin in 1882. During college she explored her interest in music. Music became a lifelong interest of hers both personally and in her professional work. In adulthood she listened frequently to classical music on the radio at her home and developed one of the first academic courses about the physics of music during her tenure at Barnard College. Following college Maltby studied at the Art Students League of New York and taught high school in Ohio for four years.

In 1887, Maltby enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and went on to earn a B.S. degree in 1891. She had to enroll as a "special" student because the institution did not accept female students. She met Ellen Swallow Richards in 1887 and joined her "Women's Laboratory" at MIT. Maltby formed a life-long friendship with Richards, and later spoke at her memorial of her "constant thoughtfulness" towards female students as the only female teacher at MIT.

Maltby was the first woman to earn a B.S. degree from MIT, and for this achievement Oberlin College awarded her an honorary A.M. in 1891. While at MIT, Maltby conducted research on acoustics with Charles R. Cross on the minimum number of vibrations necessary to determine a difference in frequency between two sounds. Their research was in response to work by Félix Savart and Friedrich Kohlrausch who had argued that at least two cycles of a sound wave were required. Maltby and Cross's work, published in 1892, showed that less than a cycle was necessary to distinguish a C3 tuning fork from a C4 tuning fork, which are an octave different in pitch.

In 1893 Maltby enrolled at the University of Göttingen, one of the first three women to do so. The other two women, who also entered in that same year, were Grace Chisholm Young and Mary Frances Winston Newson. Maltby was able to attend the university through a European Fellowship from the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. This fellowship, created largely through the efforts of Christine Ladd-Franklin, was intended to pressure foreign universities to open their doors to female students on a regular basis. In 1895 Maltby received her Ph.D., becoming the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Göttingen and the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from any German university. For her doctoral work Maltby studied under Walther Nernst in his physical chemistry laboratory. Nernst was interested in the theory of ionic dissociation and early research into this topic had focused on solutions that were relatively good conductors. In her dissertation Maltby studied solvents that were poor conductors, including alcohol, ether, and water. She applied a Wheatstone bridge in a novel way to measure the conductivity in electrolytically resistant substances.