Margaret Eliza Maltby

Margaret Maltby (center) with her sisters Betsy (Maltby) Mayhew and Martha Jane Maltby, 1892

Maltby was born on her family's farm in Bristolville, Ohio, on December 10, 1860, to Edmund Maltby and Lydia Jane Brockway. She had two older sisters: Betsy (Maltby) Mayhew and Martha Jane Maltby.[6]

As an adult, Maltby recalled that she was interested in science at a young age—often questioning how nature worked—and that her parents encouraged her. They taught her how to use basic machinery, and her father especially supported her interest in mathematics. After Edmund's death, the Maltby family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, for educational opportunities.[7]

During her years at Oberlin College, Maltby also explored her interest in music. Music became a lifelong passion of hers, from enjoying classical music on the radio at her home to developing one of the first academic courses about the physics of music during her tenure at Columbia University.[7][8]

• A.B. Oberlin College 1882
• A.M. Oberlin College 1891
• B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1891
• Ph.D. University of Göttingen 1895 under Walther Hermann Nernst.[9]

In 1887, Maltby enrolled at MIT and earned a B.S. degree in 1891. She was the first American woman allowed to take a graduate degree at the University of Göttingen in 1895.[10] She was also the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from Göttingen; in fact, she was the first woman to obtain a physics Ph.D. from any German university. After she received her doctorate she worked at the newly founded Institut für Physikalische Chemie at Göttingen under Walther Hermann Nernst.[11][12] Invited back to Germany in 1898 to work at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg, Maltby was research assistant to the President, Friedrich Kohlrausch, and helped set the research methodology in the field of conductivity.[11] After returning to the United States, Maltby studied mathematical physics with Arthur Webster at Clark University from 1899 to 1900.[13]

• 1889-93 Instructor, Physics Department, Wellesley College
• 1893-96 Doctoral student and research assistant, University of Göttingen
• 1896-97 Associate professor, Physics Department, Wellesley College [14][15]
• 1897-98 Instructor of mathematics and physics, Lake Erie College
• 1898-99 Research assistant, Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, Charlottenburg, Germany
• 1900-03 Instructor, Chemistry Department, Barnard College, Columbia University
• 1903-10 Adjunct professor, Physics Department, Barnard College
• 1910-13 Assistant professor, Barnard College
• 1913-31 Associate professor and chair, Physics Department, Barnard College

Maltby conducted her most significant research before she began teaching at Barnard College, where her involvement in administration left her little time for research. Maltby was a mentor to her students, supporting their professional advancement. During her 31 years of teaching at Barnard, and the nearly 20 years that she was chair of the physics department, Maltby reportedly took a great interest in her students' learning, even introducing physics courses for non-physicists, including probably the first course in the physics of music.

There are many examples of Maltby's efforts to support the professional advancement of female physicists. As chair of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Committee on Fellowships, Maltby administered funds that supported women actively engaged in physics research during the early part of their careers. Since women were not eligible for many research fellowships because of their gender, the AAUW Fellowships were critical for maintaining a cadre of women physicists. Maltby's enormous effort contributed to the Fellowships' preservation.

Despite Barnard College's Dean's Rule that stated, "the College cannot afford to have women on the staff to whom the college work is secondary; the College is not willing to stamp with approval a woman to whom self-elected home duties can be secondary," Maltby supported women's efforts to do both. As chair of the physics department, she vigorously opposed the forced resignation of Harriet Brooks when she planned to marry.

Physicist and History of Science interviewer Katherine Sopka wrote that her students greatly admired her. One wrote to her that "Professor Maltby was my mentor--a gracious lady--a friend and a counselor. Her most memorable advice to me was not to forego marriage for a career--which I followed and lived happily ever after."[16] Maltby never married.

The first edition of American Men of Science, published in 1906, recognized Maltby's name with a star denoting her as one of the country's top scientists.[17]

• The first woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from Göttingen University, 1895
• American Association of University Women European Fellow, 1895–96
• Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1889
• Fellow American Physical Society, 1900
• Appeared in the first seven editions of American Men of Science, 1906
• Margaret E. Maltby Fellowship was established by the American Association of University Women, 1926[2][10]

Margaret Maltby with her son Philip Randolph Meyer, home from flight training at Kelly Field, San Antonio, Texas, circa 1918.

"Maltby herself never married but nevertheless enjoyed some of the pleasures of motherhood and grandmotherhood through the adoption in 1901 of the orphaned son of a close friend."—Katherine Sopka.[16]

The quote above was the polite fiction accepted by Maltby's friends and associates in the academic world of Barnard College and Columbia University in the first half of the 20th century.

Autosomal DNA tests of Margaret Maltby's "adopted" son's two daughters, available at Ancestry.com, show their descent from ancestral families of Maltby's mother and of her father, evident in the DNA his daughters share with numerous other descendants of those families.[1] It is clear that Philip Randolph Meyer was Maltby's natural son. He was born in June 1897, six months after Maltby's sudden resignation at the end of the Fall 1896 term "in consequence of an accident"[15] from her post as associate professor of physics at Wellesley College.[7]

Maltby reappeared to resume her teaching career as an instructor at Lake Erie College in September 1897. She returned to a research position in Germany in 1898, leaving her son in the care of a friend with a nursery. Upon her return to the United States in 1901, Maltby was reunited with her son.[1] She resumed her post at Barnard College that same year.

Maltby spent the rest of her life in the Columbia University Morningside Heights community except for a year's sabbatical at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, in 1910, a short-lived attempt to relocate to California for her retirement, and frequent and extensive traveling and touring.

Maltby died on May 3, 1944, at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.[18]

• Barr, E. Scott (May 1960). "Anniversaries in 1960 of Interest to Physicists". American Journal of Physics. 28 (5): 462–475. Bibcode:1960AmJPh..28..462B. doi:10.1119/1.1935838.
• Ferris, Helen; Moore, Virginia (1926). Girls Who Did: Stories of Real Girls and Their Careers. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. pp. 211–226.
• Gill, Raymond (Spring–Summer 2016). "Genetics & Genealogy - Miss Maltby and Her Ward: Using DNA to Investigate a Family Mystery". American Ancestors. 17 (2): 49–52.
• Kidwell, Peggy (2006). "Margaret Maltby 1860–1944". In Byers, Nina; Williams, Gary (eds.). Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics (1 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 26–35. ISBN 9780521821971.
• Lotze, Barbara, ed. (1984). Making Contributions: A Historical Overview of Women's Role in Physics. College Park, MD: American Association of Physics Teachers.
• Proffitt, Pamela, ed. (1996). Modern Women Scientists. Farmington Hills, Mich: Gale Group. ISBN 978-0-7876-3900-6.

Shearer, Benjamin F; Shearer, Barbara Smith (1997). Notable women in the physical science: a biographical dictionary (Print Book ed.). Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press.