This story starts with a Gilded Age true crime: in 1898, a General Electric patent attorney is shot dead in his Schenectady home by a burglar. Weeks later his widow gives birth to a daughter, Katharine Burr Blodgett, who will not enter a classroom until age eight because her mother instead raises her bilingual across France, Germany, and New York. That unstructured, observation-rich childhood produces one of the 20th century's most adaptable scientific minds, and this episode follows her back to the very company her father worked for, where a lab tour led by future Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir turns into a job offer with one condition attached: go get a higher degree first.

She more than complied. After studying charcoal adsorption for World War One gas masks, she became the first woman research scientist at GE's Schenectady laboratory, t ...