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The ground-breaking discoveries of Agnes Pockels laid the foundation for the quantitative measurements of surface films. She was born on February 14, 1862 in Venice, Italy, where her father was stationed as an officer in the Austrian army. In 1871, the family moved to Brunswick, Lower Saxony because her father became ill and retired from the army. She attended the Municipal High School for Girls in Brunswick, where she gained a strong background in physics. She was never able to attend a university because she stayed home to care for her ill parents. Her brother did attend university, however, so she had access to science texts and became essentially self-taught.
Agnes Pockels' home became her laboratory as she began to study the greasy surfaces of water when she was about 18. She measured the surface tension of liquids using small buttons suspended from a wooden beam balance. Within two years, she had invented the slide trough that she used to make measurements on surface films. Her work was published about 10 years later (1891) in Nature only because of Lord Rayleigh's support--he recognized its importance to the scientific community. Some of her methods are still used as standard techniques. In recognition of her contributions, the minimum area occupied by a monolayer film is called the Pockels point.
Along with Henri Devaux, Agnes Pockels won the Laura Leonard Prize for "Quantitative Investigation of the Properties of Surface Layers and Surface Films" in 1931, public recognition of her contributions to surface chemistry. She was also awarded an honorable doctorate in 1932 from the Carolina-Wilhemina University of Brunswick.
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