Scientist of the Day - Ellen Swallow Richards

Portrait of Ellen Swallow Richards, undated photograph, MIT Museum (news.mi.edu)

Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards, an American chemist, was born Dec. 3, 1842, in Dunstable, Mass. She attended Vassar College and received a degree in chemistry in 1870, and to further her studies, she applied for admission to MIT. MIT had never admitted a female student, and at a special session of the admission committee, she was granted entrance, with the explicit proviso that her admission was not to be seen as a precedent for admitting further females to the MIT ranks. Swallow (she had not yet married) got a second chemistry degree in 1873 and did the required work for a Masters, but that degree was never granted, since MIT had not yet awarded a Master’s degree to anyone, much less a woman. She taught for some years, unpaid, at a Women's Laboratory at MIT, meeting the needs of secondary school science teachers who had no laboratory experience. Finally, Richards (she was now married to Robert Richards, a Professor of Mining Science at MIT) received a paid appointment as an instructor in chemistry at MIT. She was thus the first woman instructor at MIT, having already been the first woman admitted, and the first to be granted a degree. She was also the first woman in the entire country to receive a degree in chemistry, which she did twice.

Ellen and Robert Richards, photograph, 1904 (Wikimedia commons)

Her big breakthrough came in 1887, when MIT was charged by the state with testing the water supplies in Massachusetts, and Swallow was chosen to head up the water testing laboratory. The resulting report, analyzing some 20,000 samples of water from around the state, was the beginning of environmental testing in the United States, and Richards was its pioneer. As a result, the first water safety standards anywhere were established, as well as the first water testing laboratory.

The Ellen H. Swallow Richards House, a U.S. National Historic Landmark, 32 Eliot St., Jamaica Plain, Boston (Wikimedia commons)

By 1890, Richards had begun to take an interest in applying scientific principles to the home, especially to cooking. She and a colleague set up a kitchen in Boston where they made lunches for school children, and at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the two women installed a similar kitchen to show women visitors at the fair how to prepare nutritious meals from inexpensive foodstuffs. Back at MIT, she founded a national association for teaching the principles of home management. After trying out several terms, including ecology and euthenics, both of which mean "living well," they settled on "home economics" as the name of their new discipline. Again, Richards was the pioneer in establishing this new field of study.

Historic marker at the Ellen H. Swallow Richards House, Jamaica Plain, Boston (thembtadog.blogspot.com)

Richards is sometimes hailed as a founder of ecology, but her ecology – she did use the word – was not what we mean now by ecology, the study of the environment and its interactions. She had in mind something more like “better living through chemistry”, which the Dupont Company, quite independently and much later, would choose as their company slogan.

Portrait of an older Ellen Swallow Richards, undated photograph from a scrapbook of an admirer (findagrave.com)

Ellen Richards taught at MIT until her death in 1911. Her life was not particularly exciting, nor were her achievements spectacular, in a front-page-headline kind of way. The portraits we have are nice, but they do not really grab our attention. There are several photos of Ellen and her husband Robert, one of which we include here. Even her house – now a National Historic Landmark – seems ordinary (third image). But Richards did more to pave the way for higher education in science for women in the United States than perhaps any female scientist except the astronomer Maria Mitchell. She deserves to be much better known.

Ellen Richards died on Mar. 30, 1911, age 68, and was buried in Christ Church Cemetery in Gardiner, Maine, her husband’s birthplace, and where he also rests. Robert Iived to the age of 100.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.