Adafruit is celebrating Lunar New Year🐍 Wednesday 1/29/2025. In combination with MLK Day, shipping could be delayed. Please allow extra time for your order to ship!
Today we celebrate Katharine Burr Blodgett, was an American physicist and chemist known for her invention of “invisible” or nonreflective glass while working at General Electric. She was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge.
Katharine worked with Irving Langmuir who had worked with her father at the GE Research Lab. They worked on thin films of only a few molecules thick. She developed a way to use single molecule thick coatings of barium to increase the amount of light passing through glass. She developed non-reflective coatings for eyeglasses and improved lenses used in cinematography. She worked on two patents with Vince Schaefer, another great mind of GE at the time.
She developed a method using a color gauge to measure the thickness of thin monomolecular films in 1933. Five years later she creates a system to make non-reflecting glass. Normal glass reflects a significant portion of light, however using a coating consisting of 44 layers of liquid soap at one molecule each (four millionths of an inch) she could get 99% of light to pass through the glass. Later on engineers devised a way to create the same coating which would be durable and not wipe off.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 2025 Wraps, Focus on Using Python, Open Source and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
