Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards has been recognized as a pioneer in numerous fields, ranging from home economics, ecology, sanitary engineering, public health, nutrition, and women’s education. Richards was not only a teacher and chemist but also a prominent minerologist.
Richards was born in Massachusetts and grew up on a family farm. Her parents had attended the New Ipswich Academy, a historic private academy in New Hampshire, meaning that Richards had access to a high level of homeschooling. When the Swallow family moved when Richards turned 16, she was able to enroll at the Westford Academy, from which she graduated in 1862.
Richards’s education continued at Vassar College, which was, back then, for young women. She entered in 1868 and studied astronomy with Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), the first female astronomer in the U.S. and the first American scientist to discover a comet, and chemistry with Charles S. Farrar (1825-1903), who was the first Chair of Chemistry and Physics at Vassar.
Richards graduated from Vassar in 1870 and was then accepted by Boston Tech, which is now called MIT. She enrolled in December as the university’s first female student, where she studied mineralogy with Professor Robert Richards (1844-1945), an American mining engineer, metallurgist, and educator, who she later married. She also assisted Professor William Ripley Nichols (1847-1886), a chemist who specialized in sanitation, with his survey of public water bodies for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. Finally, she collaborated with Professor John Ordway on problems surrounding industrial chemistry and worked with Professor James Mason Crafts on various chemistry problems.
Richards began her first independent project while at Boston Tech. It involved her analyzing silver-bearing minerals from Colorado mines from a chemical standpoint. She worked with several samples of minerals that had previously never been analyzed, classifying and categorizing their compositions. During this project, she also analyzed arsenic and antimony, which were combined with other metals in the samples she were using. In 1873, Richards described this work in her thesis for the Bachelor of Science degree at Boston Tech, becoming the university’s first female graduate.
In addition to her Bachelor of Science degree, Richards also received a Master of Arts degree from Vassar for her work in analyzing an iron ore sample. The sample was reported to contain vanadium, but its composition wasn’t known. Richards spent multiple months examining the substance and found that the ore consisted of 0.02% vanadium.
This wasn’t Richards’s only experience with analyzing complex residues. Indeed, her first published article centers around her chemical analysis of around 7 grams of samarskite. Samarskite is a black orthorhombic mineral, which is currently known to be a complex mixture of the oxides of numerous rare earth elements and other metals.
Richards’s analyzed this substance three different ways. She first emulated the analysis of Rudolph Hermann, then did that of T. Sterry Hunt, and finally created an analysis of her own, combining Hermann’s analysis with other modifications based on her observations of the previous analyses. With her third analysis, Richards was able to detect not only all the metals found in her previous analyses but also a small amount of material precipitated by ammonium oxalate. This material was insoluble in both water and hydrochloric acid, and Richards noted that she believed that the material contained unknown elements. Eventually, the material was shown to contain samarium and gadolinium.
Around two years later, Richards worked with Margaret S. Cheney on a method for estimating nickel in pyrrhotites and smelting mattes. Pyrrhotite is an iron sulfide mineral, which is a nonstoichiometric variant of FeS. Nonstoichiometric simply means that stoichiometry does not apply to these materials.
In 1875, Richards was inducted into the American Institute of Mining Engineers as its first female member. In addition, she performed a number of analytical work in a study of industrial and domestic pollution for Massachusetts, headed the science section of the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, which was dedicated to self-educating women, was key to obtaining funding for and taught at the Women’s Laboratory, which provided scientific training for about 500 women between 1876-1883, and investigated the purity of foods sold in stores.