“You probably read a number of articles about the impending energy crisis during the 1970’s,” Mária Telkes, Ph.D., posited in a July 11, 1972, letter to SWE Vice President Carolyn Phillips. Dr. Telkes’ work since the 1940s on solar energy and its applications, for which she received the Society’s first Achievement Award in 1952, gained new import in the 1970s. Increased energy consumption converged with geopolitical unrest, oil and natural gas embargos, and reduced production to ellicit increased concern about the natural environment.
As a biophysicist and research engineer, Dr. Telkes worked at the University of Delaware’s Institute of Energy Conversion. “The aim of our project here,” she explained, “is to substitute the clean energy of the sun for at least some of the polluting fuels.”
Although interest in solar energy fluctuated throughout her career, Dr. Telkes recognized its promise and potential for the future. “It is 25 years ago that I received SWE’s Achievement Award, when the use of Solar Energy was almost unthinkable,” she explained to SWE Newsletter editor Barbara Krohn in an Aug. 19, 1977, letter. “Now it has grown to a $300 million R[e]search and Development activity funded by ERDA,” referring to the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration. “This may be an auspicious field of activity for SWE engineers.”
Others, however, worried that the economic recession partly caused by the mid-1970s energy crisis might instead push women out of engineering. Eleanor Baum, Ph.D., the future first woman engineering dean in the United States at Pratt Institute, and a future SWE Fellow and award recipient, reflected on this in the SWE New York Section’s newsletter. She had attended a February 1974 presentation titled “The Energy Crisis and Its Impact on the Women’s Movement” by women’s rights activist and The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan. “I felt that Mrs. Friedan made some interesting points in her talk,” Dr. Baum wrote. “I very much share her concern that women, the last hired, will be the first fired as the Energy Crunch forces lay-offs[sic].”
The crises also weighed heavily on Roberta Nichols, environmental engineer and SWE Los Angeles Section chair. In the section’s November 1975 newsletter, Nichols argued that advocacy, government support, and research funding could lead to important innovations in alternative energy.
“As responsible engineers, we must help to educate the rest of the community as to what the forecast for the future is and what needs to be done to maintain our way of life,” she wrote. In subsequent decades, Nichols developed and promoted alternative fuels at Ford Motor Company, work for which she received the SWE Achievement Award in 1988.
“Engineers are problem solvers,” she further explained in her 1975 column, “and while this is one huge problem, it is our challenge for the future and our chance to show that technology really does enhance our lives rather than destroying our planet earth.”
Watch the Archives Come to Life
You can watch SWE Archivist Troy Eller English, a dynamic and enthusiastic speaker, on the SWE YouTube channel as she presents photos, artifacts, and inside information on SWE’s history of allowing men to become members.
