May 22, 2023 • 35 mins
Ruby Payne-Scott is often called a pioneer in radio astronomy, but she was also a pioneer in advocating for women’s rights. She was clearly brilliant, but her work was cut short by her desire to have a spouse and a family.
- Erickson, Dorothy. “Payne-Scott, Ruby Violet (1912 - 1981).” THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OFWOMEN & LEADERSHIP IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUSTRALIA. https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0692b.htm
- M. Goss and Claire Hooker. “Payne-Scott, Ruby Violet (1912–1981).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/payne-scott-ruby-violet-15036/text26233
- Halleck, Rebecca. “Overlooked No More: Ruby Payne-Scott, Who Explored Space With Radio Waves.” New York Times. August 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/obituaries/ruby-payne-scott-overlooked.html
- “What is an Interferometer?” LIGO Caltech. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-is-interferometer#:~:text=Interferometers%20are%20investigative%20tools%20used,%2Dmeter'%2C%20or%20interferometer.
- Marr, Jonathan M. et al. “Demonstrating the Principles of Aperture Synthesis with the Very Small Radio Telescope.” Bridgewater State University, Virtual Commons. Physics Faculty Publications. 2011. https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=physics_fac#:~:text=In%20aperture%20synthesis%20a%20number,signals%20can%20also%20be%20added
- Robertson, Peter. “Pawsey, Joseph Lade (Joe) (1908–1962).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/pawsey-joseph-lade-joe-11353/text2027
- “Our History.” AWA Technology Services. http://www.awa.com.au/about-us/our-history/
- “Hall (nee Payne Scott), Ruby Violet.” The Sydney Morning Herald. Obituaries. May 30, 1981. https://www.newspapers.com/image/122698551/?terms=Ruby%20Payne-Scott&match=1
- Ward, Colin. “Ruby Payne-Scott [1912-1981].” CSIROpedia. March 23, 2011. https://csiropedia.csiro.au/payne-scott-ruby/
- “Magnetism and Life.” For Worth Start Telegraph. March 29, 1936. https://www.newspapers.com/image/635960090/?terms=Ruby%20Payne%20Scott&match=1
- Freeman, Joan. “A Passion for Physics: The Story of a Woman Physicist.” CRC Press. 1991.
- “Our History.” CSIRO. https://www.csiro.au/en/about/achievements/our-history
- Goss, W. M. and Richard McGee. “Under the Radar: The First The First Woman in Radio Astronomy: Ruby Payne-Scott.” Springer Science & Business Media. 2009.
- Goss, W. M. “Making Waves: The Story of Ruby Payne-Scott: Australian Pioneer Radio Astronomer.” Springer. 2013.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I am still
working through my list. I think we both are forever.
I mean, I'm never gonna get through it, but I'm
(00:24):
trying to refer back to it more and more as
I plan episodes. The woman that we're talking about today
has been on my list for a very long time.
I think she might have even been a listener request,
but that long time means I have lost said requests.
So if you are the person who suggested her to me,
(00:45):
I have a vague memory that it was after our
Joan Curran episode that someone recommended her, but I don't remember.
But if you're the person that recommended her, apologies, also
thank you. This is also a nice bit of Australian history.
Before we get into it, I do want to mention,
just as a heads up, there is a brief discussion
of miscarriage and also some discussion of Alzheimer's and dementia
(01:10):
towards the end, So if those are troubling for you,
you know, maybe not this one. But I am so
excited to talk about Ruby Payne Scott because she is
often called a pioneer in radio astronomy, which she was,
but she was also a pioneer in advocating for women's rights,
and she was clearly brilliant, but her work was cut
(01:32):
short simply by her desire to have a spouse and
a family. Ruby Violet Pain Scott was born on May
twenty eighth, nineteen twelve, in South Grafton, New South Wales, Australia.
That's a little more than six hundred kilometers or three
hundred and seventy five miles north of Sydney, along the
country's east coast. Her parents were Cyril Herman and Amy
(01:55):
Sarah Neil Payne Scott. Cyril was an accountant and had
been born in London. Amy was born in Sydney. Sometime
in the early nineteen twenties, the family moved to Sydney
and Ruby attended the Cleveland Street School and she went
to Fort Street High School and when she graduated at sixteen,
she enrolled at the University of Sydney. She earned her
(02:17):
Bachelor of Science degree in nineteen thirty three with honors
in physics and math, and Ruby next pursued a master's
degree with several scholarships, those who the Dias Thomas Scholarship
for Physics, the Walter Burfett Scholarship for Physics, and the
Norbert Quirk Prize for Mathematics. And while working on her
master's degree, Ruby moved into the role of assistant physicist
(02:40):
in cancer research. This was part of the University of
Sydney's Cancer Research Committee, and while cancer research might sound
like a departure from her physics and math background, it
really wasn't. She was focused on newly developed radiation treatments
for cancer. In nineteen thirty six, she finished her master's
deg with a thesis on wavelength distribution of the scattered
(03:03):
radiation in a medium traversed by a beam of X
or gamma rays. For the next two years she stayed
at the Cancer Research Institute as a physicist. This part
of her life doesn't get talked about all that much,
But there's an interesting news article I found that appeared
in various forms in the US in the spring of
(03:24):
that year that pain Scott received her master's degree, and
it talked about some of her research. One version of
it appears in the four Worth Star Telegram titled Magnetism
and Life, and it reads in its entirety quote, although
electricity and magnetism are inextricably mingled, if not one force,
and electricity undeniably is essential to life, vital processes are
(03:47):
affected little, if at all, by magnetism. According to doctors
Ruby pain Scott and William H. Love of the Cancer
Research Laboratory at the University of Sydney, Australia, they cultivated
it test tubes the living cells from chick embryos. Some
of these they grew in a magnetic field five thousand
times as powerful as that of the Earth. Others they
(04:10):
grew under normal conditions. They reasoned, if the weak field
of the Earth produces any effect on living things, the
powerful field should increase the effect to an observable extent.
They found that the chromosomes in the magnetically tested cells
showed no changes from normal. She might have stayed in
cancer research longer, but her project ended. There wasn't another
(04:33):
opening at the institute. Though she really had excelled academically,
she just wasn't met with a lot of options when
she finished her graduate studies and her research work, so
she got a teaching certificate and took a job at
the Woodlands Church of England Grammar School. Shouldn't stay in
teaching though. Ruby took a job at Amalgamated Wireless Australia
(04:55):
as a librarian, editing the company's internal journal, but was
soon working on research projects in the standards lab. Ruby
was trying to solve problems with existing receiver designs. Amalgamated
Wireless Australia was not much older than Ruby was. It
was founded as Australasian Wireless Limited three years before she
(05:17):
was born in nineteen oh nine, as a telegraph company.
In the nineteen teens, the company had been given exclusive
rights to operate Australia's coastal network of maritime radio stations.
During World War One, it had been instrumental in the
passage of information about the war back and forth between
Britain and Australia. After the war, the Australian government became
(05:38):
the company's majority shareholder, and by the time Ruby started
working for AWA, the company had established global communications networks
and had transmitted the first newsreel picture from Sydney to London.
So for someone interested in radio technology, it was probably
a great place to be in nineteen forty one. Because
many of Australia's physicists were engaged with wartime activities, Ruby
(06:03):
was able to get a job with the CSIR, the
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. She was part of
a group of AWA engineers who were hired by the
CSIR to work in their division of Radiophysics. She wasn't
the only woman on the scientific staff. Another woman named
Joan Freeman was also brought on board at the same time. Yeah,
(06:25):
there are also a couple of other women that came
into the group at various times, but those two are
the ones that get mentioned the most. The CSIR was
founded in nineteen sixteen to create a national laboratory for
Australia that would use science to bolster the country's mining,
agriculture and manufacturing efforts. Under the name Advisory Council of
(06:46):
Science and Industry. The organization started its first research project
by studying pests that had invaded the Prickly Payer and
it changed to the CSIR in nineteen twenty six and
then at the onset of World War Two, the umbrella
of projects that conducted widen to include research that would
help the Australian defense forces, and that is how Ruby
(07:08):
Payne Scott was brought in. Ruby had been brought on
as a probationary employee, and a few months into her
time at the CSIR, her supervisor, Edward George Bowen, who
went by the nickname Taffy, wrote an assessment of her.
According to CSIRO's account, that memo read quote, well, she's
(07:31):
a bit loud, and we don't think she's quite what
we want, and she may be a bit unstable, but
will let her continue and see how she works out.
That kind of cracks me up and also makes me angry.
That I think is the thing that made me say
out loud something as I was reading this over for
the first time. So this move to CSIR was intellectually
(07:56):
really a great fit for Payne Scott. She was finally
doing work that she can really dig into and use
her education and her training, and she definitely advanced science
in her time there. Because the Division of Radiophysics was
working on radar as a new defensive weapon. Ruby's area
of research looked at small signal visibility on radar displays,
(08:18):
and she also worked on receiver noise factors and how
they could accurately be measured. She also was the go
to expert on the planned position indicator system that other
scientists had developed in the UK, and it was through
the work of the team that Ruby was on that
radar devices were developed that were used by Australian and
US forces in the South Pacific. Through the noise measurement research,
(08:42):
pain Scott started working with another physicist, Joseph lad Palsey.
Posey had, like Ruby, been recruited into the CSIR to
work on radar technology and get its manufacture up and running.
Posey had seen a report that indicated that there were
bursts of staff that were altering radar's effectiveness. Very briefly,
(09:03):
he suspected that they were coming from somewhere other than
the Earth. Once World War Two ended, Ruby stayed with
the CSIR, working with Posey and pivoting to work in
the new field of radio astronomy. Their team was one
of only two in the world at the time examining
what they called cosmic static. Was that stuff that Posey
(09:24):
had seen. The report about this team pinpointed the origin
point of various instances of cosmic static, including the Sun
and other heavenly bodies. Pain Scott discovered or was part
of a team that discovered three categories of solar bursts
which came from the corona of the Sun in the
course of just a few years. These were categorized at
(09:47):
the time as type one, Type two, and type three bursts,
and those classifications were based on the h alpha spectrum,
referring to a visible spectral line of red in the
hydrogen attic. This is different from modern classification, which bases
the divisions on peak flux of electromagnetic radiation. Pain Scott
(10:09):
and Posey published a paper in Nature in early nineteen
forty six explaining that solar bursts were not visible like
solar flares, and that they had figured out how to
detect and monitor them using radio waves. We'll talk about
some of the challenges that Ruby pain Scott experienced from
the beginning of her career at CSIR right after we
(10:30):
pause for a sponsor break. Although she was pretty much
by everyone's account, doing really great work, Ruby's time at
the CSIR wasn't exactly easy. She often got in trouble
(10:51):
for silly things like wearing shorts instead of a skirt,
and when she was called into a meeting about this
clothing choice, she stated, quote, well, this is absurd we're
climbing up on ladders, up on aerials every day. I'm
not going up on a ladder with a skirt on.
The shorts are much better at tire for us, and
she was not afraid to speak her mind on just
(11:12):
about any topic that came up. She wanted women to
be treated equally at work and pointed out when they weren't.
She talked politics with her colleagues and argued with them
about it. Despite problems with the organization's leadership, Ruby was
promoted in nineteen forty four into the position of research Officer.
That was also the year that she and Posey made
(11:33):
their first radio astronomy observations from the RPL building using
radar equipment at ten centimeters. That means they were detecting
wavelengths of ten centimeters, which today would be known as
the S band. The idea of quantifying the light in
the sky mathematically was really new, and Ruby, Payne Scott,
and the team at the Radio Physics Lab were leaders
(11:55):
in the field. Ruby was a participating author on nine
Publishers works in the years from nineteen forty five to
nineteen fifty two, and the department overall published sixty two
papers in the rapidly expanding field of radio astronomy. Something
else happened in nineteen forty four that would have ended
Ruby's career had she not kept it a secret. And
(12:18):
if you're imagining that, maybe she committed a crime or
did something really horrifying. No, she got married on September
eighth of that year. Ruby's new husband, William Holman Hall,
who was a telephone technician, supported her work, but it
was expected that women would resign when they got married,
and that wasn't just a social convention. As a public servant,
(12:41):
she was, according to the rules of that field, supposed
to resign when she got married. So Ruby, who had
no interest in ending her career, kept her marriage secret
to avoid having to leave her. Colleagues, who knew about
it helped her do so. Initially, Ruby had just let
people think that she and Bill were living together, which was,
(13:03):
of course quite bold in the nineteen forties. Many biographical
accounts I read of her described as using the old
school phrase living in sin. Most women would not want
anyone to think that they were just living with a man,
because of the social stigma that it would have invited.
But Ruby kind of didn't care or She saw that
(13:23):
as preferable to disclosing her married status and losing her job.
But the truth did come out among her colleagues after
a couple of years. Even once the people in her
department knew about the couple, though they just chose not
to say anything to the bureaucratic heads of the organization.
According to her colleague Joan Freeman, quote, all her radiophysics friends,
(13:45):
having developed a strong affection for Ruby as well as
respect for her scientific abilities, greeted the story with hilarity
and sympathized with her attitude. Although they had very different personalities,
Ruby and Bill seem like they were a great match.
Bill was just a little older than Ruby. Born on
August twenty second, nineteen eleven in Inveral, New South Wales,
(14:07):
to a Scottish mother and an English father. Bill and
Ruby often went bushwhacking together. They actually met through the
Sydney Bushwalkers Club several years before they married. They shared
that hobby together for years. He treated her as an equal,
and Ruby had helped him with the mathematics he had
to learn to pass his exam to get his telephone
(14:27):
mechanic license. Bill wanted her to keep doing the work
that she found so fulfilling. In nineteen forty six, John G. Bolton,
who had served in the British Navy, moved from his
military career to become the new head of the Radiophysics
Lab at CSIR. He and Ruby pain Scott did not
(14:47):
hit it off, and then when Joseph Posey, who she
had a great working relationship with, went overseas for a
year for research, both Ruby and Bolton tried to work
at the same site at Dover Heights. That's a coastal
area just east of Sydney. It was where the inferometer
testing that she had been doing had started, so it
would make sense that pain Scott would continue taking readings there,
(15:10):
but she and Bolton fought constantly, and because he ranked
higher than she did, Ruby ended up having to move
to another site. Sometimes this is described as an exile.
While at that other site, which was Hornsby's Station, one
of the technologies that Ruby helped to develop in her
time at the Radiophysics Lab was an interferometer that could
(15:32):
sweep the sky rapidly more than two dozen times a second.
Interferometers work by combining multiple sources of light to make
an interference pattern for analysis. The one pain Scott worked
on could rapidly identify radio wave formations. They could be
examined more closely, and it made it possible to use
(15:53):
the collected images of the Sun to make a movie
that showed solar bursts happening. This is a hugely significant thing,
and it enabled scientists to more deeply understand space emissions.
She's credited by biographer W. M. Goss with taking quote
the first ever interferometric measurements in radio astronomy. Was part
(16:15):
of the work on her sweptlope interferometer. She also developed
the mathematical concept that would later lead to the aperture
synthesis system that's been used ever since. In simple terms,
aperture synthesis is the use of multiple antennas to simultaneously
monitor an astronomical source. The signals are then mixed or
(16:37):
combined to create a greater sized sample. Yeah, if you
are familiar with the work of things like the very
large array, that's how they work. In nineteen forty nine,
Ruby was involved in a controversy at work. During the war,
she and Joan Freeman and the other women on staff
were paid the same wages as their male colleagues. But
(16:59):
in nineteen forty nine the CSIR instituted a new policy
that women were to receive pay scaled to two thirds
of what the men were making. I also saw one
account that said it was seventy five percent, so that
would have been three quarters either way significantly less. This
was basically seen as the organization as a correction, because
(17:19):
that had been the scaled salary before the war. This
was also part of a subtle shift that happened in
the name of the organization to CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organization. Ruby was very vocal about how absolutely
wrong this change in pay was, and so were many
(17:40):
of her colleagues. Painne Scott led a letter writing campaign
to CSIRO leadership and also to the press, so anyone
who read a paper in Australia knew that the women
who had worked on radar technology for the war effort
were now getting a pay cut. To try to appease
existing staff, the company declared that it would give equal
(18:01):
pay to anyone who had been hired six months or
more before June of nineteen forty nine if they were
working in the same division and doing the same work,
but that any new hires would be paid what was
referred to by the organization as the quote female rate.
So this would have secured Ruby's old salary, but she
(18:21):
was not okay with newly hired women getting paid a
cut rate, and especially not okay with the idea that
any woman transferring from one department or project to another
could initiate a pay cut, she said, so she continued
her campaign and wrote an open letter to the company's
Officers Association bulletin that women should quote stick like glue
(18:46):
to their current work until the rules of the situation
were clearly defined and equitable. She had a meeting with
the chairman of the company to discuss the sixty women
who were currently on staff as research and technical oars
and was promised that he would investigate the situation. This
campaign didn't really fix anything in any immediate sense. Instead,
(19:09):
Ruby ended up with a dossier on file at the
Australian Security Intelligence Organization or ASIO, although that was not
discovered until years later. Yeah, she had basically become a
known rebel rouser. And we're going to talk about what
happened when Ruby was outed as a married woman. Oh
the scandal. After we hear from our sponsors that keep
(19:32):
stuff you missed in history class going. In nineteen fifty,
CSIRO management got wind of Ruby and Bill's marriage. She
had a meeting with the chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clooney's Ross,
(19:53):
in February of nineteen fifty, and that was the first
of several such meetings. She told him that she had
poured over are the regulations regarding the civil service and
did not see any specific directive to demote or let
go married women. She also refused to disclose the date
of her marriage to Clooney's Ross. Ruby fought hard, and
(20:15):
the whole conflict played out in a series of letters
that she exchanged with the chairman. She stated, in one quote,
all the married women research officers I have met feel
that their classification as temporary puts them at a considerable
psychological disadvantage in their work. Personally, I feel no legal
or moral obligation to have taken any other action than
(20:38):
I have in making my marriage known. She also told
him quote the present procedure is ridiculous and can lead
to ridiculous results. Basically, she was like, we're working on
important stuff and you're going to mess it up because
we got married. But she ultimately did have to give
up her salaried position. She was allowed to stay as
(20:59):
a temp contract employee. Sometimes this tempt status is characterized
as having been the work of her boss, Posey, who
made the case that he needed to rehire her back
in some capacity because her work was so important. Other
accounts make it sound like it was an organization initiated demotion.
Either way, the whole thing understandably made pain Scott incredibly angry.
(21:25):
At this point, she had contributed more to her field
than many of her male peers. She pointed out the
sexism of the rule that robbed her of a title
that she had earned simply because she was married. It
also meant she was no longer eligible for a pension,
and that the retirement contributions the organization had made were
(21:46):
pulled from her accounts, and the interest that had been
earned on her own contributions to the retirement fund that
was part of her benefits package that was also stripped away.
Because she had been married when she was making those jaments,
you can see why she was angry. She had been integral,
truly integral to making Australia the global leader in the
(22:09):
emerging field of radio astronomy. There was so much talk
at the time of how exciting it was that Australia
was a leader in a new scientific field. According to
biographer Wm Goss, even though Joseph Posey was her boss,
he often would not make decisions about their projects unless
he had gotten Ruby's input first. That is how key
(22:30):
she was to the department, and because of her marriage,
that meant very little in the eyes of the organization's bureaucracy.
But although Posey still wanted Ruby on his team. In
nineteen fifty one, another life change happened, and this one
finally did end her time working at CSIRO. She became
(22:51):
pregnant once again. Different biographies treat this differently. Some say
she was forced to leave. Others make it sound as
though her resignation was maybe her choice, But since the
CSIRO didn't have any kind of maternity leave policy, there
really wasn't much choice, and according to the organization's account,
(23:11):
she gave two days notice and left. Either way, this
is a brilliant career in science that ended way too early.
The CSIRO biography of Ruby notes that she had a
miscarriage several years before nineteen fifty one. She might have
just wanted to prioritize her pregnancy over her career, take
care of her physical well being and the babies. I
(23:35):
feel like regardless of what the reasoning was like, CSIRO
was not supportive of pregnancy and new motherhood in any way.
Ruby and Bill welcomed their son Peter on November twentieth,
nineteen fifty one. They also had a daughter, Fiona. In
nineteen fifty three, Ruby became a full time mom for
(23:57):
more than a decade. In operation for their family, Ruby
and Bill had moved to Oatly. That's a suburb about
eighteen kilometers or eleven miles southwest of Sydney. They had
designed and built their own house there, and they camped
on the property during the process. She did receive a
note from the CEO of CSIRO, who told her that
(24:18):
while there was not maternity leave, he would be happy
to welcome her back quote in due course, She replied
that she was really sad to leave behind her projects
and her friends at work, but she didn't expect to
return to any kind of work for years. When she
left the organization, Paine Scott had been promoted to the
highest research category an employee could receive short of a
(24:41):
formal leadership position. Ruby had also started going by Ruby
Hall once the marriage was out in the open and
she had left her career. Sometimes Ruby's exit from the
CSIRO is told as though it was only being a
married woman or being a mother that was the reason
she had to leave. That was absolutely the huge primary
(25:04):
part of it, but there is also a little more
nuance because her opinions were constantly at odds with the
policies and stances of the organization, even if her collaborators
in her department valued her and really liked her. For one,
Ruby really felt strongly that the work that had been
done at the CSIAR during the war should have been
declassified after the war, and she did not think the
(25:27):
organization should have any secret research projects when the country
was not at war, and she was as outspoken about
that as the other issues she had with the organization.
She went so far as to write a letter to
the Sydney Morning Herald on July twenty ninth of nineteen
forty eight that stated that she and many of her
colleagues who had all signed this letter, thought that if
(25:49):
the research of the CSIR remained classified on an ongoing basis,
creativity was going to be impeded. Additionally, her clashes with
leadership and her un wavering willingness to defend her position
to her organizational superiors had probably taken a toll over
the years. Her proclivity to openly challenge the status quo
(26:11):
when she thought it was wrong, combined with her status
as a member of the Communist Party at least through
the mid nineteen fifties while also working on cutting edge
scientific concepts, also drew a lot of attention to her.
An addition, garnered her the nickname Red Ruby among her colleagues.
To the Australian Intelligence Security Organization, she also posed a
(26:33):
risk to national security. Taking all that together, it's maybe
more accurate to say that Ruby's career ended because she
was a married woman who was also outspoken in ways
that did not mesh with her organization's higher ups. Yes,
if you're thinking you didn't say much about that Communist
Party thing, we will talk about that a little bit
(26:54):
more in the behind the scenes. But the honest answer
is there's not a lot to know, and it wasn't
even known that that was the case until well after
her death, when Ruby and Bill's son was twelve and
their daughter was ten. Payne. Scott went back to work,
returning to her first job of teaching. She taught at
the Danebank Anglican School for Girls. Starting in nineteen sixty three.
(27:15):
She went by Missus Hall at the tiny school, where
she taught math and science. She did not really talk
about her time working as a physicist, and she didn't
seem to develop the kinds of friendships that she had
had with her colleagues at CSIRO. She organized the labs,
and she made sure the science program met all the
requirements of state and federal standards, and she oversaw senior
(27:36):
mathematics programs. She was apparently not especially well liked by
most of her students, although there were exceptions, and she
was dismayed that a lot of her pupils were kind
of lacking scholastically and academically. She also was often in
conflict with her colleagues on the faculty. Ruby retired from
teaching in nineteen seventy four, when she was sixty two.
(28:00):
In nineteen seventy six, Ruby and Bill took a trip together,
traveling to Japan, then Vladivostok to take the Trans Siberian Express.
They stopped in Moscow and Paris before arriving in London,
where their son Peter was working on his mathematics dissertation,
and Peter saw a lot of change in his mother.
In the years following her retirement, pain Scott had developed Alzheimer's.
(28:23):
She was likely having issues even before leaving her teaching career,
and that might have contributed to her difficulty connecting with
other teachers and students there. When she got to London,
Ruby seemed both physically depleted and confused. Bill took her
to the doctor, but the visit didn't result in a
lot of benefit to Ruby. At the end of nineteen
(28:45):
seventy six, they were back in Australia. Bill really doted
on Ruby as she declined until she had to be
moved to a nursing home in nineteen eighty. Bill would
cook her favorite foods and bring them to her there.
Ruby died of precina dementia on May twenty fifth, nineteen
eighty one, in Sydney. I hunted for an obituary for Ruby,
(29:06):
but I was only able to turn up a very
brief notice of her death in the Sydney Morning Herald,
which ran on May thirtieth, nineteen eighty one, and it
reads in its Entigrity Hall Nay Payne Scott Ruby Violet
May twenty fifth, nineteen eighty one, Late of Warrinora Parade,
Oatly dearly loved wife of Bill, loving mother of Peter,
(29:27):
Fiona and Jeanie. Privately cremated. This is such a short
footnote to a life of such great scientific achievement. Presumably
that mention of Genie is a reference to Ruby's miscarriage.
I did not find any other reference to it anywhere else.
It's interesting that the family would have chosen to include it,
and it offers an insight into how much Ruby valued
(29:49):
her family. In two thousand and eight, the Payne Scott
Award was established by CSIRO quote for researchers returning from
family related career breaks. This award grants new parents financial
support after an extended leave, which they can use for
training and to quote, re establish themselves and reconnect with
(30:10):
the research underway in their fields and related fields of research.
Do you know if this same thing is available to
people who take an extended break to care for an
elder family member. I don't know the way it's worded.
Everything I read it sounds like it is specifically for
parental new parents, which makes sense given the context. I
(30:32):
was just curious. Yeah, yeah, so that is Ruby Payne Scott.
I know I got all choked up and weep you
at the end, But I have what I think is
hilarious listener mail great as a sav awesome listen. I'm
still on the Doctor Pepper recipes. This is from our
listener Libby, who writes, hey, you wonderful people. As soon
(30:55):
as I heard the Friday episode about Doctor Pepper, I
knew I had to share my lifelong connection to doctor Pepper.
My grandfather owned a soda bottling plant and for a while,
bottled for Doctor Pepper. As such, my family practically memorized
the cookbook that doctor Pepper put out, and Doctor Pepper
is either an ingredient or a staple at our family gatherings.
(31:15):
Some of my favorite ways to consume it include sloppy
Joe's gravy for Thanksgiving, Choco PEPs that's doctor Pepper, and
chocolate ice cream that actually sounds amazing to me, and
doctor Pepper milk. I mix mine one part doctor Pepper
to two parts milk. When we were kids, there was
always doctor Pepper in glass bottles at my grandparents' house.
And you knew you had made it when you got
(31:37):
to have the bottle and the other person had to
have it in a glass. We always had to share.
I even drink it when I'm sick because I'm convinced
that it will make me well anyway. That is all.
Thank you for all your hard work. You're honestly the
best Libby. I love this. I actually want the gravy recipe.
I'm going to have to go looking for it now,
because here's the thing, Like, I don't I have lost
(31:58):
track of how common it might be in more northern places,
but I know in the South that's pretty common to
use soda in various cooking things, right, Like a lot
of pot roasty type recipes will include soda of some sort,
and often it does make them very tender and super delicious.
(32:19):
So I'm very curious about the gravy. Yeah. So Patrick
has a braised short rib recipe that uses prune juice
as one of the ingredients for the braising liquid, and
I kind of feel like Doctor Pepper would have some
similar notes, yeah to go with that. Yeah, apparently you
(32:44):
can get the official Doctor Pepper Cookbook in a variety
of formats. I'm sure there have been various different ones
over the years. I'm gonna hunt one down and get
one for myself and find out what it's all about.
Just listen. We love to play in the kitchen. But
that does sound great. I feel like that's such a
comforting and delightful thing to have as part of all
your family traditions. I love it again. I think, uh,
(33:09):
doctor Pepper on chocolate ice cream sounds oh very good. Yeah.
I do like to make an ice cream float, and
I think that sounds possibly yummy. My thing lately is
what things can I put on a doll whip. Yeah,
I think Doctor Pepper would be good because I invested,
you know, as all wise consumers do, in a soft
(33:30):
serve machine for my house. So I like to make
dol whip at home and put things on it. Well,
And as you have explained to me, you cannot just
make a dull whip. You have a whole thing of
doll whip mix that you got to you gotta use
it or you gotta throw it away. So you can
just have a whole Doctor Pepper dole whip party. Yeah.
(33:50):
We only bring that out for parties because it's like
the industrial mix that we get and like, we still
end up having to pull some into pints and putting
it in the freezer before we out the machine. I
don't know why I have decided, in my advancing years
to purchase a thing that requires me to do the
work that normal places of business would hire like a
seventeen year old to do. But here I am cleaning
(34:13):
out that soft serve machine at like three in the morning,
after everybody's left. But it's a delight makes parties very fun.
If you have any other ideas of things I might
put on top of my doll whip or soft serve,
you'd send those right to me. You could do that
historypodcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us
(34:34):
on social media as Missed in History pretty much everywhere,
and if you haven't subscribed yet, that's the easiest thing
in the world. You can do that on the iHeartRadio
app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
(34:54):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I am still
working through my list. I think we both are forever.
I mean, I'm never gonna get through it, but I'm
(00:24):
trying to refer back to it more and more as
I plan episodes. The woman that we're talking about today
has been on my list for a very long time.
I think she might have even been a listener request,
but that long time means I have lost said requests.
So if you are the person who suggested her to me,
(00:45):
I have a vague memory that it was after our
Joan Curran episode that someone recommended her, but I don't remember.
But if you're the person that recommended her, apologies, also
thank you. This is also a nice bit of Australian history.
Before we get into it, I do want to mention,
just as a heads up, there is a brief discussion
of miscarriage and also some discussion of Alzheimer's and dementia
(01:10):
towards the end, So if those are troubling for you,
you know, maybe not this one. But I am so
excited to talk about Ruby Payne Scott because she is
often called a pioneer in radio astronomy, which she was,
but she was also a pioneer in advocating for women's rights,
and she was clearly brilliant, but her work was cut
(01:32):
short simply by her desire to have a spouse and
a family. Ruby Violet Pain Scott was born on May
twenty eighth, nineteen twelve, in South Grafton, New South Wales, Australia.
That's a little more than six hundred kilometers or three
hundred and seventy five miles north of Sydney, along the
country's east coast. Her parents were Cyril Herman and Amy
(01:55):
Sarah Neil Payne Scott. Cyril was an accountant and had
been born in London. Amy was born in Sydney. Sometime
in the early nineteen twenties, the family moved to Sydney
and Ruby attended the Cleveland Street School and she went
to Fort Street High School and when she graduated at sixteen,
she enrolled at the University of Sydney. She earned her
(02:17):
Bachelor of Science degree in nineteen thirty three with honors
in physics and math, and Ruby next pursued a master's
degree with several scholarships, those who the Dias Thomas Scholarship
for Physics, the Walter Burfett Scholarship for Physics, and the
Norbert Quirk Prize for Mathematics. And while working on her
master's degree, Ruby moved into the role of assistant physicist
(02:40):
in cancer research. This was part of the University of
Sydney's Cancer Research Committee, and while cancer research might sound
like a departure from her physics and math background, it
really wasn't. She was focused on newly developed radiation treatments
for cancer. In nineteen thirty six, she finished her master's
deg with a thesis on wavelength distribution of the scattered
(03:03):
radiation in a medium traversed by a beam of X
or gamma rays. For the next two years she stayed
at the Cancer Research Institute as a physicist. This part
of her life doesn't get talked about all that much,
But there's an interesting news article I found that appeared
in various forms in the US in the spring of
(03:24):
that year that pain Scott received her master's degree, and
it talked about some of her research. One version of
it appears in the four Worth Star Telegram titled Magnetism
and Life, and it reads in its entirety quote, although
electricity and magnetism are inextricably mingled, if not one force,
and electricity undeniably is essential to life, vital processes are
(03:47):
affected little, if at all, by magnetism. According to doctors
Ruby pain Scott and William H. Love of the Cancer
Research Laboratory at the University of Sydney, Australia, they cultivated
it test tubes the living cells from chick embryos. Some
of these they grew in a magnetic field five thousand
times as powerful as that of the Earth. Others they
(04:10):
grew under normal conditions. They reasoned, if the weak field
of the Earth produces any effect on living things, the
powerful field should increase the effect to an observable extent.
They found that the chromosomes in the magnetically tested cells
showed no changes from normal. She might have stayed in
cancer research longer, but her project ended. There wasn't another
(04:33):
opening at the institute. Though she really had excelled academically,
she just wasn't met with a lot of options when
she finished her graduate studies and her research work, so
she got a teaching certificate and took a job at
the Woodlands Church of England Grammar School. Shouldn't stay in
teaching though. Ruby took a job at Amalgamated Wireless Australia
(04:55):
as a librarian, editing the company's internal journal, but was
soon working on research projects in the standards lab. Ruby
was trying to solve problems with existing receiver designs. Amalgamated
Wireless Australia was not much older than Ruby was. It
was founded as Australasian Wireless Limited three years before she
(05:17):
was born in nineteen oh nine, as a telegraph company.
In the nineteen teens, the company had been given exclusive
rights to operate Australia's coastal network of maritime radio stations.
During World War One, it had been instrumental in the
passage of information about the war back and forth between
Britain and Australia. After the war, the Australian government became
(05:38):
the company's majority shareholder, and by the time Ruby started
working for AWA, the company had established global communications networks
and had transmitted the first newsreel picture from Sydney to London.
So for someone interested in radio technology, it was probably
a great place to be in nineteen forty one. Because
many of Australia's physicists were engaged with wartime activities, Ruby
(06:03):
was able to get a job with the CSIR, the
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. She was part of
a group of AWA engineers who were hired by the
CSIR to work in their division of Radiophysics. She wasn't
the only woman on the scientific staff. Another woman named
Joan Freeman was also brought on board at the same time. Yeah,
(06:25):
there are also a couple of other women that came
into the group at various times, but those two are
the ones that get mentioned the most. The CSIR was
founded in nineteen sixteen to create a national laboratory for
Australia that would use science to bolster the country's mining,
agriculture and manufacturing efforts. Under the name Advisory Council of
(06:46):
Science and Industry. The organization started its first research project
by studying pests that had invaded the Prickly Payer and
it changed to the CSIR in nineteen twenty six and
then at the onset of World War Two, the umbrella
of projects that conducted widen to include research that would
help the Australian defense forces, and that is how Ruby
(07:08):
Payne Scott was brought in. Ruby had been brought on
as a probationary employee, and a few months into her
time at the CSIR, her supervisor, Edward George Bowen, who
went by the nickname Taffy, wrote an assessment of her.
According to CSIRO's account, that memo read quote, well, she's
(07:31):
a bit loud, and we don't think she's quite what
we want, and she may be a bit unstable, but
will let her continue and see how she works out.
That kind of cracks me up and also makes me angry.
That I think is the thing that made me say
out loud something as I was reading this over for
the first time. So this move to CSIR was intellectually
(07:56):
really a great fit for Payne Scott. She was finally
doing work that she can really dig into and use
her education and her training, and she definitely advanced science
in her time there. Because the Division of Radiophysics was
working on radar as a new defensive weapon. Ruby's area
of research looked at small signal visibility on radar displays,
(08:18):
and she also worked on receiver noise factors and how
they could accurately be measured. She also was the go
to expert on the planned position indicator system that other
scientists had developed in the UK, and it was through
the work of the team that Ruby was on that
radar devices were developed that were used by Australian and
US forces in the South Pacific. Through the noise measurement research,
(08:42):
pain Scott started working with another physicist, Joseph lad Palsey.
Posey had, like Ruby, been recruited into the CSIR to
work on radar technology and get its manufacture up and running.
Posey had seen a report that indicated that there were
bursts of staff that were altering radar's effectiveness. Very briefly,
(09:03):
he suspected that they were coming from somewhere other than
the Earth. Once World War Two ended, Ruby stayed with
the CSIR, working with Posey and pivoting to work in
the new field of radio astronomy. Their team was one
of only two in the world at the time examining
what they called cosmic static. Was that stuff that Posey
(09:24):
had seen. The report about this team pinpointed the origin
point of various instances of cosmic static, including the Sun
and other heavenly bodies. Pain Scott discovered or was part
of a team that discovered three categories of solar bursts
which came from the corona of the Sun in the
course of just a few years. These were categorized at
(09:47):
the time as type one, Type two, and type three bursts,
and those classifications were based on the h alpha spectrum,
referring to a visible spectral line of red in the
hydrogen attic. This is different from modern classification, which bases
the divisions on peak flux of electromagnetic radiation. Pain Scott
(10:09):
and Posey published a paper in Nature in early nineteen
forty six explaining that solar bursts were not visible like
solar flares, and that they had figured out how to
detect and monitor them using radio waves. We'll talk about
some of the challenges that Ruby pain Scott experienced from
the beginning of her career at CSIR right after we
(10:30):
pause for a sponsor break. Although she was pretty much
by everyone's account, doing really great work, Ruby's time at
the CSIR wasn't exactly easy. She often got in trouble
(10:51):
for silly things like wearing shorts instead of a skirt,
and when she was called into a meeting about this
clothing choice, she stated, quote, well, this is absurd we're
climbing up on ladders, up on aerials every day. I'm
not going up on a ladder with a skirt on.
The shorts are much better at tire for us, and
she was not afraid to speak her mind on just
(11:12):
about any topic that came up. She wanted women to
be treated equally at work and pointed out when they weren't.
She talked politics with her colleagues and argued with them
about it. Despite problems with the organization's leadership, Ruby was
promoted in nineteen forty four into the position of research Officer.
That was also the year that she and Posey made
(11:33):
their first radio astronomy observations from the RPL building using
radar equipment at ten centimeters. That means they were detecting
wavelengths of ten centimeters, which today would be known as
the S band. The idea of quantifying the light in
the sky mathematically was really new, and Ruby, Payne Scott,
and the team at the Radio Physics Lab were leaders
(11:55):
in the field. Ruby was a participating author on nine
Publishers works in the years from nineteen forty five to
nineteen fifty two, and the department overall published sixty two
papers in the rapidly expanding field of radio astronomy. Something
else happened in nineteen forty four that would have ended
Ruby's career had she not kept it a secret. And
(12:18):
if you're imagining that, maybe she committed a crime or
did something really horrifying. No, she got married on September
eighth of that year. Ruby's new husband, William Holman Hall,
who was a telephone technician, supported her work, but it
was expected that women would resign when they got married,
and that wasn't just a social convention. As a public servant,
(12:41):
she was, according to the rules of that field, supposed
to resign when she got married. So Ruby, who had
no interest in ending her career, kept her marriage secret
to avoid having to leave her. Colleagues, who knew about
it helped her do so. Initially, Ruby had just let
people think that she and Bill were living together, which was,
(13:03):
of course quite bold in the nineteen forties. Many biographical
accounts I read of her described as using the old
school phrase living in sin. Most women would not want
anyone to think that they were just living with a man,
because of the social stigma that it would have invited.
But Ruby kind of didn't care or She saw that
(13:23):
as preferable to disclosing her married status and losing her job.
But the truth did come out among her colleagues after
a couple of years. Even once the people in her
department knew about the couple, though they just chose not
to say anything to the bureaucratic heads of the organization.
According to her colleague Joan Freeman, quote, all her radiophysics friends,
(13:45):
having developed a strong affection for Ruby as well as
respect for her scientific abilities, greeted the story with hilarity
and sympathized with her attitude. Although they had very different personalities,
Ruby and Bill seem like they were a great match.
Bill was just a little older than Ruby. Born on
August twenty second, nineteen eleven in Inveral, New South Wales,
(14:07):
to a Scottish mother and an English father. Bill and
Ruby often went bushwhacking together. They actually met through the
Sydney Bushwalkers Club several years before they married. They shared
that hobby together for years. He treated her as an equal,
and Ruby had helped him with the mathematics he had
to learn to pass his exam to get his telephone
(14:27):
mechanic license. Bill wanted her to keep doing the work
that she found so fulfilling. In nineteen forty six, John G. Bolton,
who had served in the British Navy, moved from his
military career to become the new head of the Radiophysics
Lab at CSIR. He and Ruby pain Scott did not
(14:47):
hit it off, and then when Joseph Posey, who she
had a great working relationship with, went overseas for a
year for research, both Ruby and Bolton tried to work
at the same site at Dover Heights. That's a coastal
area just east of Sydney. It was where the inferometer
testing that she had been doing had started, so it
would make sense that pain Scott would continue taking readings there,
(15:10):
but she and Bolton fought constantly, and because he ranked
higher than she did, Ruby ended up having to move
to another site. Sometimes this is described as an exile.
While at that other site, which was Hornsby's Station, one
of the technologies that Ruby helped to develop in her
time at the Radiophysics Lab was an interferometer that could
(15:32):
sweep the sky rapidly more than two dozen times a second.
Interferometers work by combining multiple sources of light to make
an interference pattern for analysis. The one pain Scott worked
on could rapidly identify radio wave formations. They could be
examined more closely, and it made it possible to use
(15:53):
the collected images of the Sun to make a movie
that showed solar bursts happening. This is a hugely significant thing,
and it enabled scientists to more deeply understand space emissions.
She's credited by biographer W. M. Goss with taking quote
the first ever interferometric measurements in radio astronomy. Was part
(16:15):
of the work on her sweptlope interferometer. She also developed
the mathematical concept that would later lead to the aperture
synthesis system that's been used ever since. In simple terms,
aperture synthesis is the use of multiple antennas to simultaneously
monitor an astronomical source. The signals are then mixed or
(16:37):
combined to create a greater sized sample. Yeah, if you
are familiar with the work of things like the very
large array, that's how they work. In nineteen forty nine,
Ruby was involved in a controversy at work. During the war,
she and Joan Freeman and the other women on staff
were paid the same wages as their male colleagues. But
(16:59):
in nineteen forty nine the CSIR instituted a new policy
that women were to receive pay scaled to two thirds
of what the men were making. I also saw one
account that said it was seventy five percent, so that
would have been three quarters either way significantly less. This
was basically seen as the organization as a correction, because
(17:19):
that had been the scaled salary before the war. This
was also part of a subtle shift that happened in
the name of the organization to CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organization. Ruby was very vocal about how absolutely
wrong this change in pay was, and so were many
(17:40):
of her colleagues. Painne Scott led a letter writing campaign
to CSIRO leadership and also to the press, so anyone
who read a paper in Australia knew that the women
who had worked on radar technology for the war effort
were now getting a pay cut. To try to appease
existing staff, the company declared that it would give equal
(18:01):
pay to anyone who had been hired six months or
more before June of nineteen forty nine if they were
working in the same division and doing the same work,
but that any new hires would be paid what was
referred to by the organization as the quote female rate.
So this would have secured Ruby's old salary, but she
(18:21):
was not okay with newly hired women getting paid a
cut rate, and especially not okay with the idea that
any woman transferring from one department or project to another
could initiate a pay cut, she said, so she continued
her campaign and wrote an open letter to the company's
Officers Association bulletin that women should quote stick like glue
(18:46):
to their current work until the rules of the situation
were clearly defined and equitable. She had a meeting with
the chairman of the company to discuss the sixty women
who were currently on staff as research and technical oars
and was promised that he would investigate the situation. This
campaign didn't really fix anything in any immediate sense. Instead,
(19:09):
Ruby ended up with a dossier on file at the
Australian Security Intelligence Organization or ASIO, although that was not
discovered until years later. Yeah, she had basically become a
known rebel rouser. And we're going to talk about what
happened when Ruby was outed as a married woman. Oh
the scandal. After we hear from our sponsors that keep
(19:32):
stuff you missed in history class going. In nineteen fifty,
CSIRO management got wind of Ruby and Bill's marriage. She
had a meeting with the chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clooney's Ross,
(19:53):
in February of nineteen fifty, and that was the first
of several such meetings. She told him that she had
poured over are the regulations regarding the civil service and
did not see any specific directive to demote or let
go married women. She also refused to disclose the date
of her marriage to Clooney's Ross. Ruby fought hard, and
(20:15):
the whole conflict played out in a series of letters
that she exchanged with the chairman. She stated, in one quote,
all the married women research officers I have met feel
that their classification as temporary puts them at a considerable
psychological disadvantage in their work. Personally, I feel no legal
or moral obligation to have taken any other action than
(20:38):
I have in making my marriage known. She also told
him quote the present procedure is ridiculous and can lead
to ridiculous results. Basically, she was like, we're working on
important stuff and you're going to mess it up because
we got married. But she ultimately did have to give
up her salaried position. She was allowed to stay as
(20:59):
a temp contract employee. Sometimes this tempt status is characterized
as having been the work of her boss, Posey, who
made the case that he needed to rehire her back
in some capacity because her work was so important. Other
accounts make it sound like it was an organization initiated demotion.
Either way, the whole thing understandably made pain Scott incredibly angry.
(21:25):
At this point, she had contributed more to her field
than many of her male peers. She pointed out the
sexism of the rule that robbed her of a title
that she had earned simply because she was married. It
also meant she was no longer eligible for a pension,
and that the retirement contributions the organization had made were
(21:46):
pulled from her accounts, and the interest that had been
earned on her own contributions to the retirement fund that
was part of her benefits package that was also stripped away.
Because she had been married when she was making those jaments,
you can see why she was angry. She had been integral,
truly integral to making Australia the global leader in the
(22:09):
emerging field of radio astronomy. There was so much talk
at the time of how exciting it was that Australia
was a leader in a new scientific field. According to
biographer Wm Goss, even though Joseph Posey was her boss,
he often would not make decisions about their projects unless
he had gotten Ruby's input first. That is how key
(22:30):
she was to the department, and because of her marriage,
that meant very little in the eyes of the organization's bureaucracy.
But although Posey still wanted Ruby on his team. In
nineteen fifty one, another life change happened, and this one
finally did end her time working at CSIRO. She became
(22:51):
pregnant once again. Different biographies treat this differently. Some say
she was forced to leave. Others make it sound as
though her resignation was maybe her choice, But since the
CSIRO didn't have any kind of maternity leave policy, there
really wasn't much choice, and according to the organization's account,
(23:11):
she gave two days notice and left. Either way, this
is a brilliant career in science that ended way too early.
The CSIRO biography of Ruby notes that she had a
miscarriage several years before nineteen fifty one. She might have
just wanted to prioritize her pregnancy over her career, take
care of her physical well being and the babies. I
(23:35):
feel like regardless of what the reasoning was like, CSIRO
was not supportive of pregnancy and new motherhood in any way.
Ruby and Bill welcomed their son Peter on November twentieth,
nineteen fifty one. They also had a daughter, Fiona. In
nineteen fifty three, Ruby became a full time mom for
(23:57):
more than a decade. In operation for their family, Ruby
and Bill had moved to Oatly. That's a suburb about
eighteen kilometers or eleven miles southwest of Sydney. They had
designed and built their own house there, and they camped
on the property during the process. She did receive a
note from the CEO of CSIRO, who told her that
(24:18):
while there was not maternity leave, he would be happy
to welcome her back quote in due course, She replied
that she was really sad to leave behind her projects
and her friends at work, but she didn't expect to
return to any kind of work for years. When she
left the organization, Paine Scott had been promoted to the
highest research category an employee could receive short of a
(24:41):
formal leadership position. Ruby had also started going by Ruby
Hall once the marriage was out in the open and
she had left her career. Sometimes Ruby's exit from the
CSIRO is told as though it was only being a
married woman or being a mother that was the reason
she had to leave. That was absolutely the huge primary
(25:04):
part of it, but there is also a little more
nuance because her opinions were constantly at odds with the
policies and stances of the organization, even if her collaborators
in her department valued her and really liked her. For one,
Ruby really felt strongly that the work that had been
done at the CSIAR during the war should have been
declassified after the war, and she did not think the
(25:27):
organization should have any secret research projects when the country
was not at war, and she was as outspoken about
that as the other issues she had with the organization.
She went so far as to write a letter to
the Sydney Morning Herald on July twenty ninth of nineteen
forty eight that stated that she and many of her
colleagues who had all signed this letter, thought that if
(25:49):
the research of the CSIR remained classified on an ongoing basis,
creativity was going to be impeded. Additionally, her clashes with
leadership and her un wavering willingness to defend her position
to her organizational superiors had probably taken a toll over
the years. Her proclivity to openly challenge the status quo
(26:11):
when she thought it was wrong, combined with her status
as a member of the Communist Party at least through
the mid nineteen fifties while also working on cutting edge
scientific concepts, also drew a lot of attention to her.
An addition, garnered her the nickname Red Ruby among her colleagues.
To the Australian Intelligence Security Organization, she also posed a
(26:33):
risk to national security. Taking all that together, it's maybe
more accurate to say that Ruby's career ended because she
was a married woman who was also outspoken in ways
that did not mesh with her organization's higher ups. Yes,
if you're thinking you didn't say much about that Communist
Party thing, we will talk about that a little bit
(26:54):
more in the behind the scenes. But the honest answer
is there's not a lot to know, and it wasn't
even known that that was the case until well after
her death, when Ruby and Bill's son was twelve and
their daughter was ten. Payne. Scott went back to work,
returning to her first job of teaching. She taught at
the Danebank Anglican School for Girls. Starting in nineteen sixty three.
(27:15):
She went by Missus Hall at the tiny school, where
she taught math and science. She did not really talk
about her time working as a physicist, and she didn't
seem to develop the kinds of friendships that she had
had with her colleagues at CSIRO. She organized the labs,
and she made sure the science program met all the
requirements of state and federal standards, and she oversaw senior
(27:36):
mathematics programs. She was apparently not especially well liked by
most of her students, although there were exceptions, and she
was dismayed that a lot of her pupils were kind
of lacking scholastically and academically. She also was often in
conflict with her colleagues on the faculty. Ruby retired from
teaching in nineteen seventy four, when she was sixty two.
(28:00):
In nineteen seventy six, Ruby and Bill took a trip together,
traveling to Japan, then Vladivostok to take the Trans Siberian Express.
They stopped in Moscow and Paris before arriving in London,
where their son Peter was working on his mathematics dissertation,
and Peter saw a lot of change in his mother.
In the years following her retirement, pain Scott had developed Alzheimer's.
(28:23):
She was likely having issues even before leaving her teaching career,
and that might have contributed to her difficulty connecting with
other teachers and students there. When she got to London,
Ruby seemed both physically depleted and confused. Bill took her
to the doctor, but the visit didn't result in a
lot of benefit to Ruby. At the end of nineteen
(28:45):
seventy six, they were back in Australia. Bill really doted
on Ruby as she declined until she had to be
moved to a nursing home in nineteen eighty. Bill would
cook her favorite foods and bring them to her there.
Ruby died of precina dementia on May twenty fifth, nineteen
eighty one, in Sydney. I hunted for an obituary for Ruby,
(29:06):
but I was only able to turn up a very
brief notice of her death in the Sydney Morning Herald,
which ran on May thirtieth, nineteen eighty one, and it
reads in its Entigrity Hall Nay Payne Scott Ruby Violet
May twenty fifth, nineteen eighty one, Late of Warrinora Parade,
Oatly dearly loved wife of Bill, loving mother of Peter,
(29:27):
Fiona and Jeanie. Privately cremated. This is such a short
footnote to a life of such great scientific achievement. Presumably
that mention of Genie is a reference to Ruby's miscarriage.
I did not find any other reference to it anywhere else.
It's interesting that the family would have chosen to include it,
and it offers an insight into how much Ruby valued
(29:49):
her family. In two thousand and eight, the Payne Scott
Award was established by CSIRO quote for researchers returning from
family related career breaks. This award grants new parents financial
support after an extended leave, which they can use for
training and to quote, re establish themselves and reconnect with
(30:10):
the research underway in their fields and related fields of research.
Do you know if this same thing is available to
people who take an extended break to care for an
elder family member. I don't know the way it's worded.
Everything I read it sounds like it is specifically for
parental new parents, which makes sense given the context. I
(30:32):
was just curious. Yeah, yeah, so that is Ruby Payne Scott.
I know I got all choked up and weep you
at the end, But I have what I think is
hilarious listener mail great as a sav awesome listen. I'm
still on the Doctor Pepper recipes. This is from our
listener Libby, who writes, hey, you wonderful people. As soon
(30:55):
as I heard the Friday episode about Doctor Pepper, I
knew I had to share my lifelong connection to doctor Pepper.
My grandfather owned a soda bottling plant and for a while,
bottled for Doctor Pepper. As such, my family practically memorized
the cookbook that doctor Pepper put out, and Doctor Pepper
is either an ingredient or a staple at our family gatherings.
(31:15):
Some of my favorite ways to consume it include sloppy
Joe's gravy for Thanksgiving, Choco PEPs that's doctor Pepper, and
chocolate ice cream that actually sounds amazing to me, and
doctor Pepper milk. I mix mine one part doctor Pepper
to two parts milk. When we were kids, there was
always doctor Pepper in glass bottles at my grandparents' house.
And you knew you had made it when you got
(31:37):
to have the bottle and the other person had to
have it in a glass. We always had to share.
I even drink it when I'm sick because I'm convinced
that it will make me well anyway. That is all.
Thank you for all your hard work. You're honestly the
best Libby. I love this. I actually want the gravy recipe.
I'm going to have to go looking for it now,
because here's the thing, Like, I don't I have lost
(31:58):
track of how common it might be in more northern places,
but I know in the South that's pretty common to
use soda in various cooking things, right, Like a lot
of pot roasty type recipes will include soda of some sort,
and often it does make them very tender and super delicious.
(32:19):
So I'm very curious about the gravy. Yeah. So Patrick
has a braised short rib recipe that uses prune juice
as one of the ingredients for the braising liquid, and
I kind of feel like Doctor Pepper would have some
similar notes, yeah to go with that. Yeah, apparently you
(32:44):
can get the official Doctor Pepper Cookbook in a variety
of formats. I'm sure there have been various different ones
over the years. I'm gonna hunt one down and get
one for myself and find out what it's all about.
Just listen. We love to play in the kitchen. But
that does sound great. I feel like that's such a
comforting and delightful thing to have as part of all
your family traditions. I love it again. I think, uh,
(33:09):
doctor Pepper on chocolate ice cream sounds oh very good. Yeah.
I do like to make an ice cream float, and
I think that sounds possibly yummy. My thing lately is
what things can I put on a doll whip. Yeah,
I think Doctor Pepper would be good because I invested,
you know, as all wise consumers do, in a soft
(33:30):
serve machine for my house. So I like to make
dol whip at home and put things on it. Well,
And as you have explained to me, you cannot just
make a dull whip. You have a whole thing of
doll whip mix that you got to you gotta use
it or you gotta throw it away. So you can
just have a whole Doctor Pepper dole whip party. Yeah.
(33:50):
We only bring that out for parties because it's like
the industrial mix that we get and like, we still
end up having to pull some into pints and putting
it in the freezer before we out the machine. I
don't know why I have decided, in my advancing years
to purchase a thing that requires me to do the
work that normal places of business would hire like a
seventeen year old to do. But here I am cleaning
(34:13):
out that soft serve machine at like three in the morning,
after everybody's left. But it's a delight makes parties very fun.
If you have any other ideas of things I might
put on top of my doll whip or soft serve,
you'd send those right to me. You could do that
historypodcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us
(34:34):
on social media as Missed in History pretty much everywhere,
and if you haven't subscribed yet, that's the easiest thing
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you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
(34:54):
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