Many of the scientific endeavours featured in our collections are the work of women with a connection to Scotland. 

Below, we've highlighted key contributions to entomology, biomedicine, mathematics and astronomy - to name but a few - made by pioneering women in science. 

1. June Almeida

June Almeida (1930 – 2007) was a virologist, who discovered human coronavirus in 1964. She was born in Glasgow and had no formal qualifications, but started work as a lab technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.   

Almeida moved to Canada, where she worked as an electron microscope technician. She became an expert in negative staining, a technique used to find and identify viruses quickly and clearly.  

A colleague working on the common cold had a virus sample – B814 – they could not identify and asked her to help. A pioneer in electron microscope imaging, her detailed image of the virus highlighted the spike proteins which look like a crown, or halo, around the sample. This phenomenon gave the virus in sample B814 the name coronavirus – from 'corona', meaning crown in Latin.  

At first, Almeida’s discovery was dismissed as a blurred picture of the influenza virus, but through her determination, her research was finally published in 1967.  

Her work also allowed for the first visualisation of rubella virus and hepatitis A virus. After retirement she trained as a yoga teacher and china restorer, but returned to electron microscopy in the late 1980s. Almeida and her colleagues then produced some of the first photos of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).  

June Almeida's contribution to identifying coronavirus is featured in Injecting Hope: The Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine at the National Museum of Scotland.

2. Alice Blanche Balfour

Alice Blanche Balfour (1850 – 1936) was an entomologist, whose collection of nearly 10,000 Scottish moths was donated to National Museums Scotland. Most of these were collected at Whittingehame House in East Lothian, where she was born and later managed the estate on behalf of her brother Arthur Balfour, who was British Prime Minister 1902-1905.

Balfour's scientific work extended to genetics and the patterns of zebra stripes. Despite needing to fit this work around around her family commitments, her accomplishments were acknowledged. She was elected to the Royal Entomological Society in 1916.  

Some of the moths collected by Balfour, and a sweeping net used to catch them, are on display in the Collecting Stories display at the National Museum of Scotland. 

3. Williamina Fleming

Williamina Fleming (1957 – 1911) was a computer. She was born in Dundee, but emigrated to the United States of America where she was abandoned by her husband, while pregnant. She found a job as a maid with Edward Pickering, who was the Director of Harvard College Observatory.   

Pickering is said to have become frustrated with his male assistants, and informed them that his Scottish housemaid could do better. He followed through by hiring Fleming to work at the observatory. There, she carried out the repetitive work of measuring and cataloguing the stars and other astronomical features shown on photographs of the sky, taken with the observatory’s telescopes.   

She was a success, and women were paid less than men, so soon the entire team of computers at the observatory were women. 

Fleming was highly respected for her work cataloguing and classifying stars. This led to her discovery of white dwarf stars.  

4. Isabella Lovi

In the first decades of the 19th century, Isabella Lovi (d. 1826) advertised herself in Edinburgh’s trade directories as a ‘glassblower’, ‘artificer in glass’ and ‘chemical apparatus maker’. It was a business she inherited from her husband Angelo (d. 1805), but she quickly made herself known with an innovation that received a patent, a monetary reward and wider recognition. 

Isabella Lovi’s ‘aerometrical beads’, can be seen in the Collecting Stories gallery at the National Museum of Scotland. They were an improved set of specific gravity beads, also known as hydrostatic, philosophical or brewers’ bubbles. The glass balls are precisely blown to different densities, and used to measure the relative density of liquids to establish, for example, the alcohol content of spirits or fat content of milk.  

While other sets consisted of 12, 18, or perhaps 30 beads, Isabella Lovi’s was over 350. Presented together with a thermometer, sliding rule and set of tables for temperature correction and scale conversion, it offered a wide range of applications and, according to the Edinburgh Institute, ‘superior accuracy’. Lovi’s invention earned her a reward of 5 guineas from the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland.

5. Flora and Jane Sang

Today, the huge numbers of arithmetical calculations which are needed for science and engineering are done by electronic computers. This was not always the case. Before electronic computers, people spent huge amounts of time doing calculations by hand, aided by mechanical calculators, slide rules, and tables. Of course, these tables themselves needed to be calculated. 

A particularly huge work of calculation – in 47 volumes – was undertaken by the Edinburgh mathematician, engineer and scientific instrument maker Edward Sang (1805 – 1890) and two of his daughters, Jane Sang (1834 – 1878) and Flora Sang (1838 – 1925). Initially, Flora Sang preferred to remain private and not be acknowledged as one of the calculators of the tables, but she later changed her mind and she and her sister are acknowledged for their work.  

However, the tables (logarithms to 15 places) were too large and too expensive to be printed. They were acknowledged as a huge achievement, but were not able to carry out their intended use: helping people make highly accurate calculations. 

6. Maria Short

Maria Short (d.1868) opened a popular observatory on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, in 1835. It was moved Castlehill 20 years later. The centrepiece of Short’s Observatory was a large camera obscura, projecting a scene of the city view onto a flat tabletop. It can still be visited today, on the Royal Mile.  

Short also displayed scientific instruments, models and demonstrations. Top billing was given to a large reflecting telescope, called the Great Telescope, made by the celebrated James Short (1710 – 68). It had furnished the first observatory set up on Calton Hill, which was run by James Short’s brother Thomas (d. 1788). 

The history that follows is complicated, but decades later, Maria Short gained possession of the Great Telescope, claiming to be Thomas’s posthumously born daughter. Like him, she ran a ‘popular observatory’, accessible to a fee-paying public. She ensured, a supporter claimed, that ‘the sublime truths of science’ were not ‘confined to the wealthy and the learned’.  

However, by 1855 the Royal Observatory was also established on Calton Hill, and Maria Short was forced to move. Despite this, Short’s Observatory thrived, and continued to offer scientific amusements and spectacle to visitors until the 1890s.  

7. Mary Somerville

Born Mary Fairfax in Jedburgh, Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872) was a mathematician known for her books on astronomy and the physical sciences. Gaining admiration from the male scientific elites, she was elected as an Honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. Since 2017 she has appeared on the Royal Bank of Scotland £10 note.  

While Somerville lived much of her life in London and Italy, her Scottish upbringing and connections shaped her education and scientific ideas. She learned arithmetic at an Edinburgh school and family tutors and libraries helped develop her skill in languages and mathematics. She made the acquaintance of Edinburgh professors John Playfair and William Wallace, and formed friendships with Scottish men of science such as Henry Brougham (later Lord Chancellor), David Brewster (optical researcher and inventor of the kaleidoscope) and James Veitch (a ploughwright-turned-scientific instrument maker).  

Veitch, who she knew from childhood, made Somerville the only telescope she ever owned. She noted him as the first discoverer of the great comet of 1811 in her book, 'On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences' (1834).   

8. Jessie May Sweet

Jessie May Sweet (1901 – 1979) was a mineralogist and historian. Born and brought up in England, she went to university in Edinburgh. After a distinguished career in London, she returned to Edinburgh, and in retirement continued to work on the collections of the Royal Scottish Museum. 

NMS holds Sweet’s petrological microscope (Museum reference T.1983.214). Sweet used it to identify rocks and minerals, by observing them in thin sections. Made by J. Swift & Son, it is inscribed ‘British Museum’, reflecting Sweet’s employment by the Department of Mineralogy there as Temporary Assistant (1927), Scientific Assistant (1936) and Senior Experimental Officer (1946-61). 

Sweet published widely on the British Museum collections, which she also rearranged to modern standards. During the Second World War, she remained in London, safeguarding the collection during the Blitz. 

In Edinburgh, Sweet became an expert on the work and collections of the naturalist and mineralogist Professor Robert Jameson, who played a key role in the creation of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art in the 1850s. As an active collector of specimens, Sweet was posthumously honoured in 1984 with the naming of the mineral Sweetite.