Edith Stoney
| Edith Anne Stoney | |
|---|---|
Edith Anne Stoney c. early 1890s
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| Born | 6 January 1869 Dublin, Ireland |
| Died |
25 June 1938 (aged 69) Bournemouth, England |
| Alma mater | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Medical Physics |
| Institutions | |
Edith Anne Stoney (6 January 1869 – 25 June 1938) was a physicist born in Dublin in an old-established Anglo-Irish scientific family. She is considered to be the first woman medical physicist.
Edith Stoney was born at 40 Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin; the daughter of George Johnstone Stoney, FRS, an eminent physicist who coined the term electron in 1891 as the ‘fundamental unit quantity of electricity’, and his wife and cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney. One of her two brothers, George Gerald, was an engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). One of her two sisters, Florence Stoney, was a radiologist and received an OBE. Her cousin was the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald FRS (1851–1901), and her uncle Bindon Blood Stoney FRS was Engineer of Dublin Port, renowned for building a number of the main Dublin bridges, and developing the Quayside.
Edith Stoney demonstrated considerable mathematical talent and gained a scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieved a First in the Part I Tripos examination in 1893. However, she was not awarded a University of Cambridge degree as women were excluded from graduation until 1948. During her time at Newnham, she was in charge of the College telescope. She was later awarded a BA and a MA from Trinity College, Dublin, after they accepted women in 1904.
After briefly working on gas turbine calculations and searchlight design for Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, she took a mathematics teaching post at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
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