ÉLISE DEROCHE 1886 1919 The Aéro Club de France Paris certifies that Madame de Laroche has been licensed as an airplane pilot March 8 1910 The President The history of motorized aviation is still young in those days Only seven years earlier Orville and Wilbur Wright succeeded in performing the first seconds long flights Madame de Laroche is born Élise Deroche around 1885 to a family living in modest circumstances She later tries her luck as an actress calls herself Baroness Raymonde de Laroche and meets aircraft constructor Charles Voisin who suggests that she learn to fly The courageous young woman welcomes the challenge At the first opportunity that presents itself she takes off in his single seater without permission The year is 1909 Her flight instructor is less than enthusiastic but be that as it may her flight marks the first ever solo of a woman in the history of aviation Deroche feels that flying is the best possible thing for women Flying does not rely so much on strength as on physical and mental coordination Right after receiving her pilot s license Mme Deroche crashes in Reims and is rescued with severe injuries but just two years later the Frenchwoman is flying again Perhaps I ll tempt fate once too often But I have dedicated my life to aviation and always fly without a trace of fear she says On July 18 1919 she dies in a crash landing after a test flight with an experimental plane THE AVIATOR About female aviators In 1935 the American Amelia Earhart is the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California Two years later she embarks on the first equatorial flight around the globe Earhart has completed three quarters of the distance when she disappears somewhere in the South Sea In a comment preceding this flight she reportedly said Women like men should try to do the impossible And when they fail their failure should be a challenge to others One should assume that a remarkable female scientist inspires nothing but admiration yet even during Marie Curie s lifetime the press writes that she is a strange woman But let s start from the beginning Marie Curie is born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867 Women are not admitted to universities there so in 1891 she moves to Paris to study at the Sorbonne Even there the gender ratio shows the great challenge that a universi ty education poses to women in those days only 23 of more than 1 800 students are women The educational migrant besides finding her future husband the physicist Pierre Curie discovers polonium and radium Later she ll be the first woman to teach at the university albeit only after her husband has died in a road accident and the chair in the physics department he previously held is bestowed on her Three years earlier she had been the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics together with her husband Pierre Curie and her doc toral thesis supervisor Henri Becquerel In 1911 she receives the most distinguished scientific recogni tion once more this time in chemistry and without having to share it Curie s daughter Irène by the way will subsequently follow in her footsteps and in 1935 receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry as well Her mother is no longer alive at that time on July 4 1934 Marie Curie aged 67 dies of the consequences of decades long handling of radioactive materials Albert Einstein says about her Marie Curie is of all celebrated beings the only one whom fame has not corrupted THE SCIENTIST About recognition That Marie Curie in 1903 is awarded the Nobel Prize on an equal footing with her husband and her fellow scientist Becquerel was not to be taken for granted Even decades later women who were instrumental in achieving breakthroughs in scientific research projects are ignored like Jocelyn Burnell In 1967 aged only 24 she discovers the first radio pulsar but the Nobel Prize goes to her thesis supervisor Anthony Hewish Rosalind Franklin is another example The English scientist in the 1950s is decisively involved in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA The Nobel Prize for this discovery though is awarded to Francis Crick James Watson and Maurice Wilkins who had availed themselves of the results of her research without her knowledge MARIE CURIE 1867 1934 36 37

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