Elizabeth Alexander | |
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| Born | Frances Elizabeth Somerville Caldwell (1908-12-13)13 December 1908 Merton, Surrey, England |
| Died | 15 October 1958(1958-10-15) (aged 49) Ibadan, Nigeria |
| Alma mater | Newnham College, Cambridge |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
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Frances Elizabeth Somerville Alexander (née Caldwell; 13 December 1908 – 15 October 1958) was a British geologist, academic, and physicist, whose wartime work with radar and radio led to early developments inradio astronomy and whose post-war work on thegeology of Singapore is considered a significant foundation to contemporary research. Alexander earned her PhD fromNewnham College, Cambridge, and worked in Radio Direction Finding at Singapore Naval Base from 1938 to 1941. In January 1941, unable to return to Singapore from New Zealand, she became Head of Operations Research in New Zealand's Radio Development Lab, Wellington. In 1945, Alexander correctly interpreted that anomalousradar signals picked up onNorfolk Island were caused by the sun. This interpretation became pioneering work in the field ofradio astronomy, making her one of the first women scientists to work in that field, albeit briefly.[1]
Alexander was born Frances Elizabeth Somerville Caldwell on 13 December 1908 inMerton, Surrey.[2] She spent some of her early life in India, where her father, Dr. K. S. Caldwell, was a professor at Patna College. (He was later principal ofPatna Science College after its founding in 1928).[3] In 1918, Alexander returned to the United Kingdom and begansecondary school.
Alexander then attendedNewnham College, Cambridge and studied natural science, initially focusing on physics.[4] She was also offered a place atSomerville College, Oxford andGirton College, Cambridge. She graduated withFirst-class honours in 1931, then received aPhD ingeology for a thesis onAymestry Limestone, under the supervision ofOwen Thomas Jones.[2] She was a member of theSedgwick Club, along with fellow female geologists,Dorothy Hill and Constance Richardson. Like all women graduates of Cambridge University at that time, she could not become a full member of the university until after equal rights were granted post 1945.[5]
In July 1935, Alexander married a physicist,Norman Alexander, from New Zealand. When her husband took the post of Professor of Physics atRaffles College in Singapore, Elizabeth Alexander travelled there and began a study into the effects ofweathering in the tropics. She was particularly interested in erosion and how, under certain circumstances, new rock seemed to be forming at unexpectedly high speed.[6] She thus began experiments, burying samples in order to compare them with lab controls later. Whilst in Singapore, the Alexanders had three children, William in 1937, Mary in 1939 and Bernice in 1941.[2]
Between 1940 and 1941, Alexander held the rank ofCaptain in the Naval Intelligence Service, working onradio direction-finding at Singapore Naval Base.[7]
On 4 January 1942, under Navy orders to take her children to safety and return with specialist equipment being made in Australia, Dr. Alexander and her children were evacuated to New Zealand by a Short S23 Cflying boat.[8][9] After theFall of Singapore on 15 February, she was stranded in New Zealand. She had no information about her husband for six months, and then was misinformed that he was dead.[10] Whilst in New Zealand, Alexander became Senior Physicist and Head of the Operational Research Section of the Radio Development Laboratory inWellington in 1942, where she remained until 1945. There she was responsible for most radio and radar research, including pioneering of radio meteorology[11] in conjunction withWashington State College, development of the microwave radar program, and research on anomalous propagation leading to the post-war international project,Project Canterbury.[10] In 1945, Alexander identified the "Norfolk Island Effect" as solar radiation.[12][13][14][15] This discovery marked the beginning of Australian radio-astronomy after she left New Zealand when her contract ended with the end of the war in 1945.[5]
There has been some debate over whether Alexander orRuby Payne-Scott was actually the first woman to work in the field of radio astronomy.[16] Despite her progress in the field, Alexander only ever considered radio astronomy a job and as soon as the war was over she returned to her passion of geology, never again working in radio astronomy.[4]
Whilst Alexander worked in New Zealand, her husband had continued as Scientific Adviser to the Armed Forces, moving to help out at Singapore General Hospital when Raffles College was on the front line. At the hospital, he kept the X-ray machines going[17] until Singapore fell a few days later. He was theninterned inChangi,[10] then Sime Road camps, along with the senior medical staff of the hospital.
In September 1945 Alexander was reunited with her husband in New Zealand when he was allocated six months' compulsory sick leave. He returned to Singapore in March 1946 to restart the Physics and Chemistry Departments at Raffles College. Both departments had been looted and the Professor of Chemistry and his senior lecturer were both dead.[18] Alexander wound up her work in Wellington and took her children to England, leaving them with her sister as guardian. She rejoined Norman Alexander and they bought equipment for the College, then returned to Singapore together.
On returning to Singapore, Alexander acted as registrar for the conversion of Raffles College to the University of Malaya.[19] She sought to restart her work on tropical weathering, however the lab in her house had been destroyed and, during road building, the top of a hill that she had used for triangulation had been removed thus making it impossible to locate her buried experimental samples.[6] Alexander later returned to England whilst Norman Alexander spent time in both Singapore and New Zealand. In 1947, when their children were old enough to attend boarding school, the couple returned to Singapore and both worked at Raffles College.[18]
Alexander became the geologist to the Government of Singapore in 1949, surveying the island and publishing a report in 1950 which included the first geological map of Singapore.[20] For this work, she is credited with having produced one of the most comprehensive papers on the general geology of Singapore.[21] Alexander's main task was to assess the island's quantities of granite and other useful stone, and she concluded that granite resources should last for 500 years.[22] Alexander was also responsible for introducing the name "Murai Schist" to refer to a part of theJurong Formation, and created the first documented collection of fossils in the area of the Ayer Chawan Facies.[21]
In 1952, the Alexanders moved to Ibadan, Nigeria, both accepting posts atUniversity College Ibadan. Elizabeth Alexander took on the role of Lecturer in Soil Sciences and worked inAgronomy,soil science, and administration. Norman became the Chair of Physics. After the move, a member of staff at Raffles Museum managed to locate one of Alexander's experimental samples of buried rocks, and arranged for it to be sent toRothamsted Research Station near London so that she could examine it during annual leave.[21] The university opened a department of geology in 1958 and appointed Elizabeth Alexander Senior Lecturer and Head of Department. Just three weeks into her new role, Alexander suffered a stroke and she died a week later on 15 October 1958 at the age of 49.[20]
In 2017 Alexander was selected as one of theRoyal Society Te Apārangi's150 women in 150 words project, celebrating women's contributions to knowledge in New Zealand.[23]
Alexander published a number of geological papers between 1951 and 1957, derived from her PhD, along with some derived from her work as a soil scientist in Nigeria. In 1958 Alexander wrote a report on tropical weathering in Singapore, which was published posthumously.
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