The Lonsdale Project

In 1924 Kathleen Lonsdale joined the crystallography research team headed by Nobel Prize winner Sir William Henry Bragg at the Royal Institution, 5 years later she proved that the benzene ring is flat by using X-ray diffraction methods to elucidate the structure of hexamethylbenzene. She was also the first woman, alongside Marjory Stephenson, to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, first woman tenured professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union of Crystallography, and first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. She was an Irish pacifist and a former inmate of Holloway Prison (she spent one month in the prison for refusing to register for civil defence duties or to pay a fine for the refusal), a prison reformer, a mother of three and a vegetarian before it was cool. In other words, Kathleen Lonsdale was a pioneering scientist and citizen. Despite being lauded in her field and renowned in her time, Lonsdale’s name and scientific legacy are curiously unknown by the general public – The Lonsdale Project aims to change that. With playful dialogue and design, vivid characters, and pressing relevance to the scientific and political debates of today, The Lonsdale Project asks its audiences to consider how we feel towards science, how we remember (or forget) the great scientists of times gone by, and whether we value curiosity, creativity, hard work and personal conviction enough to let them shape our collective future.