Women in STEM & a Mechanical Flying Machine: A Guest Post from The Inventors at No. 8 Author A. M. Morgen
My favorite book when I was a kid was an abridged biography of Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. I read it over and over, enthralled by Marie’s story. She fought to get an education, and then she fought to be recognized as a scientist. Her research on radioactive elements saved lives and changed the world.
The Inventors at No. 8
Hardcover $16.99
The Inventors at No. 8
By A. M. Morgen
Hardcover $16.99
While I was growing up, I was lucky to have lots of women in science to look up to in addition to Marie Curie, including other well-known scientists like Rachel Carson and Dr. Jane Goodall. My own mom was a biologist. Every summer, she gathered caterpillars from her garden, put them in plastic cages, and together we watched them transform into butterflies.
While I was growing up, I was lucky to have lots of women in science to look up to in addition to Marie Curie, including other well-known scientists like Rachel Carson and Dr. Jane Goodall. My own mom was a biologist. Every summer, she gathered caterpillars from her garden, put them in plastic cages, and together we watched them transform into butterflies.
Because many women paved the way ahead of me, I have often wondered if I was in Marie’s position, would I have fought as hard as she did for an education? Would I have persisted in the face of so many obstacles to my career? I’m glad I didn’t have to find out because for me those obstacles had already been shattered. In college, I majored in neuropsychology. But in the end, I realized that I liked reading about science more than actually doing it.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that when I started writing books of my own, I was drawn to the STEM world. The heroine of my debut novel, The Inventors at No. 8, is inspired by another female scientific pioneer, Ada Lovelace. Ada was a gifted mathematician and a scientific visionary born 50 years before Marie Curie. She collaborated with Charles Babbage, the inventor of a remarkable calculating machine. By imagining a future for the machine far beyond Babbage’s intent, Ada was the first person to describe the capabilities of the modern computer and is regarded as the first computer programmer.
What is most impressive about Ada is that, in spite of living in a time when female scientists were an anomaly, she was unfailingly confident in her talents. She was funny, curious, smart, and often arrogant. When she was 12, Ada wrote letters to her mother about her plans to build a steam-powered flying horse based on her observations of bird wings. Ada’s mother told her to stop being ridiculous. She was worried Ada would get swept away in flights of fancy like her father, the infamously roguish poet Lord Byron.
But what if Ada had persevered? What if she had made her flying machine? In the slightly magical world of my book, she did! Rather than using her mechanical flying machine to deliver mail like the real Ada imagined, fictional Ada takes it on daring adventures.
I wrote Ada’s character in the hopes that she will inspire other kids in the same way Marie inspired me. Girls are still underrepresented in STEM fields in both fiction and in the real world. Little by little, those numbers are improving because of the efforts of trailblazers. If my book nudges those numbers further along, then I’ll feel like I have lived up to Marie’s and Ada’s legacies.
The Inventors at No. 8 is on B&N bookshelves May 8.