Agnes Pockels

Agnes Luise Wilhelmine Pockels (14 February 1862 to 21 November 1935) was a German scientist whose pioneering research was fundamental in establishing the modern discipline of surface science, which describes the properties of liquid and solid surfaces and interfaces. Born in Venice, then part of the Austrian Empire, where her father served in the Austrian Army, she moved with her family in 1871 to Brunswick in the German Empire and attended the Municipal High School for Girls there. Women could not enter universities, so she studied science at home while caring for her parents, using textbooks and literature shared by her younger brother Friedrich, who studied physics at the University of Göttingen. Observing soaps and soapy water while washing dishes, she began experiments at home by age 18 and by age 20 had devised a slide trough for quantitative measurements of the surface properties of soapy water. She devised a surface film balance technique to study how molecules such as soaps and surfactants behave at air-liquid interfaces, and from these studies defined the Pockels point, the minimum area that a single molecule can occupy in monomolecular films.