Kathleen Lonsdale

Born Kathleen Yardley in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, in 1903. She became an X-ray crystallographer and, in 1929, showed that the six carbon atoms in the benzene ring form a flat hexagon. She found their positions without beginning with an assumed molecular shape.

On 22nd March 1945, Lonsdale and the biochemist Marjory Stephenson became the first women elected as Fellows of the Royal Society. The Society had been founded in 1660. It had taken 285 years.