Florence Martin

Florence Martin (25 December 1867 – 27 October 1957) was an Australian-American physicist and philanthropist. She performed research at the University of Sydney under Sir Richard Threlfall and at Cavendish Laboratory under J. J. Thomson. Her donations of land in Douglas County, Colorado, led to the creation of Daniels Park, a Denver Mountain Park. Early life and education Martin was born on 25 December 1867 to Sir James Martin, Premier of New South Wales, and his wife Isabella Long, the daughter of a convict turned successful businessman. The eleventh of fifteen children, she was educated by a governess and later at Madame Gilder's school, Campbell Lodge. Her father died in 1886, and in 1891, she enrolled at the University of Sydney in arts. She completed her first year with honours in physics and enrolled again in 1892. Research In 1892 Martin took on the role of an unpaid research assistant to Professor Sir Richard Threlfall, a family friend. She worked with him from 1892 to 1893, during which time they produced a paper, "On an Approximate Method of finding the Forces acting in Magnetic Circuits", which was published first in the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and then in the Philosophical Magazine. After this was published, Martin went to England with a recommendation from Threlfall to J. J. Thomson. Only the second Australian research student to work at the Cavendish, she took advanced undergraduate practical classes and performed research under the direction of Thomson for about eighteen months. During this time she published a paper on gas expansion in capacitors in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (in which she is called "Miss Martin"). Though Martin was the sole author on the paper, Thomson orally presented the paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on her behalf.