🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Kathleen Lonsdale

Science · Chemistry

Kathleen Lonsdale

1903–1971 · Irish-born British

X-ray crystallography

Kathleen Lonsdale was an Irish-born British crystallographer who used X-ray diffraction to prove in 1929 that the benzene ring is flat and hexagonal. In 1945 she and Marjory Stephenson became the first women elected Fellows of the Royal Society. A committed Quaker and pacifist, she was jailed in Holloway during the Second World War, and a rare hexagonal form of diamond, lonsdaleite, is named after her.

How to spot them

  • ▸Proved benzene is flat using hexamethylbenzene crystals
  • ▸One of the first two women Fellows of the Royal Society, 1945
  • ▸Lonsdaleite, hexagonal diamond found in meteorites
  • ▸Quaker pacifist imprisoned in Holloway, 1943
  • ▸Worked with William Henry Bragg at the Royal Institution; professor at University College London

Key discoveries & works

X-ray proof that the benzene ring is flat and hexagonal (1929)

Based on her analysis of hexamethylbenzene crystals, confirming Kekulé's ring as planar

Is Peace Possible? (1957)

Her book setting out a Quaker case for pacifism

International Tables for X-ray Crystallography (1950s–1960s)

Standard reference work she edited

Lonsdaleite (hexagonal diamond) (1967)

Form of carbon found in the Canyon Diablo meteorite, named in her honour

Key ideas

  • Established X-ray crystallography as a tool for settling questions of organic molecular structure
  • Combined science with outspoken pacifism and penal reform

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born Kathleen Yardley in Newbridge, County Kildare, Ireland; the family moved to Essex when she was a child
  • •Went to a boys' school, Ilford County High School, to study science subjects not offered at her girls' school
  • •Studied at Bedford College, London, graduating in 1922 with the highest physics mark then achieved at London University; the benzene work was done at Leeds
  • •Served a month in Holloway Prison in 1943 for refusing to register for civil defence duties or pay the fine
  • •Became UCL's first woman professor (of chemistry) in 1949 and was made a Dame in 1956
  • •First woman president of the International Union of Crystallography and of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
  • •Awarded the Royal Society's Davy Medal in 1957

Drill it — 6 cards

1 / 6new card

Sources

  • Dorothy M. C. Hodgkin, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1975) — Kathleen Lonsdale, 28 January 1903 – 1 April 1971