Powerful chemistry is inside jewelry. In the 1960s industrial chemist Edith Marie Flanigen created synthetic emeralds. Big, flawless emerald crystals were essential for making microwave lasers, and Flanigen’s emeralds delivered the lasers' powerful beams. Her colleagues quickly realized that her emeralds were gem-quality, and her company also marketed them to jewelry makers.
Flanigen is also known for creating catalysts, molecules that make chemical reactions happen faster and more easily. Her creations lower industrial costs and make manufacturing more environmentally friendly.
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Photos courtesy
Edith Flanigen.
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About Her Life
Edith Marie Flanigen (born 1929) is a native of Buffalo, New York, where she spent most of her childhood and early adult life. While attending a private Catholic high school, Holy Angels Academy, Flanigen was first introduced to chemistry. All of the Flanigen sisters were taught by Sister St. Mary, who emphasized hands-on activities in her classes. After high school, first Joan, then Edith, and four years later Jane, as well, majored in chemistry at D'Youville College. There they took courses with Dorothea Fitzgerald, who was responsible for all chemistry courses. Both Joan and Edith received master's degrees in chemistry from Syracuse University. All three Flanigen sisters eventually came to work at Union Carbide.
While a student at Syracuse, a lab accident left Flanigen with third-degree burns on her hands, and she had to spend the rest of the semester in the infirmary. Fortunately, her sister Joan went to her graduate courses for her and taught the undergraduate classes for which Edith was responsible as a teaching assistant. As a result of the experience, Flanigen says, she has always been "extremely religious about laboratory safety."
When Flanigen joined the Linde Division at Union Carbide in 1952, she was first assigned to silicone chemistry, and in 1956 she joined the molecular sieve group. Molecular sieves (or zeolites) are made of microporous materials that catch only molecules small enough to fit into their cavities while excluding larger molecules. This characteristic makes zeolites ideal for use as catalysts in various industrial processes.
For a time in the 1960s, though, Flanigen was engaged in a program unrelated to zeolites, which is how she got into emeralds. At that time, when masers (the microwave forerunners of lasers) were a hot research area, the federal government was considering the emerald as a new material for the crystals that concentrate light in masers, and wanted a reliable supply of single crystals. Since the Linde Division was already involved in making sapphires, it entered into a contract to develop laboratory-grown, or synthetic, emeralds. Flanigen and a coworker developed an emerald synthesis process that grew emeralds to a high level of perfection. They were of such high quality that for almost ten years the emeralds were also sold in a line of jewelry called the Quintessa Collection.
It was primarily Flanigen's work on zeolite materials, however, that in 1992 earned her the first Perkin Medal ever awarded to a woman; the Perkin Medal is the highest honor for outstanding work in applied chemistry in the United States. Since natural zeolite minerals are rare and difficult to obtain in large quantities, scientists developed methods of synthesizing zeolites in the laboratory as early as 1949. In the late 1970s, a team led by Flanigen was called upon by Union Carbide management to develop a new class of synthetic molecular sieves. By 1985 Flanigen and her team had filed more than 30 patents and had succeeded in developing a whole new generation of synthetic zeolites.
In case you’re wondering if you ever met a zeolite–––every gallon of gasoline that you put in your car is made with a zeolite-based catalyst. Zeolites dry and purify the natural gas that heats your home. They keep refrigerants in your refrigerator and air conditioning fluid in your automobile from freezing. They are used to clean up nuclear wastes. They are found in household detergents to take the place of environmentally suspect phosphates. And the list goes on.
What are the ingredients for innovative success? In Flanigen’s acceptance speech for the Perkin Medal, she described her fellow researchers this way: “Creative minds stretched and emboldened by excellence in their educational training. Dreamers, visionaries, free spirits. At home with concepts. Thinkers with uncanny chemical intuition. Persistent, almost stubborn, in their resolve. With a childlike impetus at play—and just a little bit of luck.”
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