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About Her Life
Martha Jane Bergin (born 1926) was something of a prodigy when she graduated from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts at the age of 19. This native of Boston planned to go to medical school but was advised to wait until she was older. To bide her time she took an industrial job at Sylvania (later GTE). Like Stephanie Kwolek , who also planned on becoming a doctor before choosing a career in chemistry, Bergin fell in love with research and dropped her medical school plans. In 1952, while working at Sylvania, she earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Boston University by going to school part-time. At the university she met her future husband, George Thomas, also a chemist.
Thomas’s main research involved phosphors. A phosphor is a substance that glows when light hits it. Some phosphors keep glowing after the light shining on them has been turned off. Glow-in-the-dark toys contain phosphors like this. Other phosphors only shine when light shines on them. "What good is that?" one might ask. Who needs glow-in-the-sunshine toys?
Phosphors like this are useful because they can give off visible light even when the light that shines on them is invisible. This is how fluorescent lights work. Fluorescent lamps, or bulbs, don't actually generate visible light; they produce ultraviolet light, which is invisible. But the inside of the glass tube of the lamp is coated with a phosphor. The ultraviolet light shines on the phosphor, and the phosphor gives off light that we can see.
Early phosphors glowed in an aqua-colored tinge, which made everything, including people, look sickly green. People wanted white light to make things look natural. White light is a mixture of all the visible colors, or wavelengths, of light. The early phosphors were emitting lots of blue and green light, but very little red light. In 1959 Thomas and a coworker developed a new phosphor that produced light in all visible wavelengths to give an even white light. It also increased the brightness of the light.
Thomas went on to develop still better phosphors, and she even designed industrial processes for mass-producing them. She also developed ways to make fluorescent light bulbs last longer.
Chemist and chemical engineer were just two of many roles Thomas took on during her career. In 1983 she moved into management, becoming the director of technical quality control at GTE Sylvania, a title she held until she retired. She also taught chemistry part-time at Boston University and the University of Rhode Island during much of her career. She is the mother of four children.
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