Goober Nice To Meep You

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rovingjack

on Oct. 6, 2009

Ellen Henrietta (Swallow) Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 1800s. Richards was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.

Richards was a consulting chemist for the Massachusetts State Board of Health from 1872 to 1875, and the official water analyst from 1887 until 1897. She also served as a consultant to the Manufacturers Mutual Fire Insurance Co, and in 1900 wrote the textbook Air, Water, and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint, with A. G. Woodman. Her interest in the environment led her in 1892 to introduce into English the word ecology which had been coined in German to describe the "household of nature".

Also applying scientific principles to domestic situations, such as nutrition, clothing, physical fitness, sanitation, and efficient home management, she created the field of home economics.