Alice Armstrong

Alice H. Armstrong was an American physicist known as one of the first female scientists at the National Bureau of Standards and as the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University, via Radcliffe College.

She began work checking radium-dial watches used by the army, and then transferred to the radium section as an assistant physicist.

"So," Armstrong later recalled, "after only a few months, I found myself more or less in charge of certifying all the radium sold in the United States.

[6][7] While working with Duane on her graduate studies, a laboratory accident exposed Armstrong to half a lethal dose of x-ray radiation.

[6] Armstrong was awarded her Ph.D. in 1930, with a thesis entitled "The Relative Intensities of Some Lines in the X-Ray Spectrum."

Although she returned to Wellesley in 1952, she retired from the college only a year later to work as a permanent staff member at Los Alamos.

[6] In 1958 she and her colleague Glenn Frye obtained some of the first evidence of the annihilation of antiprotons with nucleons in a nuclear emulsion.

black and white photograph of a brick and stone laboratory building. a large tree stands in front of the building, with a bicycle leaned up against the tree
Armstrong worked at this building at the National Bureau of Standards, which was devoted entirely to the work in Electricity, Photometry, Radium, X-Ray, and Radio Communication.