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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.