Piedad de la Cierva

She grew up with four brothers, being the oldest and the only woman, in a family of political and economic power. She was the niece of Juan de la Cierva Peñafiel (1864-1938), a lawyer and politician who held several ministries with Alfonso XIII; and cousin of Juan de la Cierva Codorníu (1895-1936), engineer, aviator, and inventor of the autogiro, forerunner of the helicopter.

She began her Science degree in 1928 at the Universidad de Murcia and continued her studies at the Universidad de Valencia, where she graduated in 1932. Recently graduated in Science, Chemistry section, Piedad de la Cierva moved to Madrid to do her doctoral thesis. She brought an introduction letter that her professor Antonio Ipiens had written for Julio Palacios, professor at the University of Madrid and director of the X-ray department of the then newly inaugurated National Institute of Physics and Chemistry, known as the Rockefeller for funding this foundation for its construction. It was the first Spanish school of physics and chemistry-physics, where Piedad de la Cierva began her work on the diffusion of X-rays in crystalline networks under the direction of Palacios. In 1934 she defended her doctoral thesis about Los factores atómicos del azufre y del plomo (The atomic factors of sulphur and lead) before a tribunal formed by physicists and chemists, all of them men, who led the area in Spain: Luis Bermejo, Ángel del Campo, Enrique Moles and Miguel Catalán.

In 1936 the Scientific Studies and Research Expansion Board (JAE) awarded her a scholarship to study at George Hevesy's laboratory at the University Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. There, she learned about the clinical use of radioactive isotopes and experimented with techniques using isotopes as indicators, pioneering techniques that were recognized in 1943 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Hevesy.

In 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, the National Institute of Physics and Chemistry became part of CSIC. The new authorities of the Franco regime reorganized it and renamed it Instituto Alonso de Santa Cruz de Física, religion was imposed to laicity. Piedad de la Cierva continued her work in the Optics section of this Institute, which would be the nucleus from 1946 of the Instituto de Óptica Daza de Valdés.

In 1941 she took up professorships, but did not like the discriminatory treatment she received and never tried again. She held a stable position at Instituto de Óptica until 1949, which she first combined with classes at the University on atomic-molecular structure and spectroscopy and, since 1945, with work in Laboratorio Taller del Estado Mayor de la Armada (LTIEMA), which had been created in March 1944 to design and build special prototypes for the Navy with the aim of being mass-produced by domestic industry.

In 1947 Piedad de la Cierva received the commission of the engineer of the Navy José María Otero Navascués, authority of scientific policy -especially nuclear- of the Franco regime and director of the Instituto de Óptica and the LTIEMA, to organize a military laboratory to build optical glass. With the arrival in 1949 at the CSIC of Franz Weidert, founder and director of the Berlin Optics Institute, work on technical optics took central stage, and high precision glass was one of the priorities. After the Second World War, the production of optical glass, although expensive and complex, became very important due to its military interest. In this context it must be understood that the Spanish Navy would like to build a semi-industrial plant to manufacture glass and to promote the construction of instruments. The commission to Piedad de la Cierva suggests a political power bet to promote national construction in full autarky and international isolation. But it also shows the confidence and recognition that Otero Navascués had of the capabilities of this researcher, a support that Piedad de la Cierva never hid and always valued.

To organize the LTIEMA laboratory Piedad de la Cierva was inspired by Spanish laboratories -the Industrial Research Laboratory founded by José Antonio de Artigas- Germans - Deutsche Glastechnische Gesellschaft in Offenbach am Main-the activities of the English Society of Glass Technology and the North American degrees of Glass Technology and Ceramic Ingenieur. In 1948 she travelled to the United States to visit the optical glass factory of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington. She also witnessed the Glass Technology operation at Toledo University in Ohio, and the Bausch and Lomb and Kodak factories in New York. 

In 1950 they began to obtain the first glasses in the LTIEMA. Four years later the works of Piedad de la Cierva and her team were recognized with the annual Juan de la Cierva prize for scientific and technical research.

Piedad de la Cierva led a civilian laboratory in a military environment in which she formed a research group that she led until her retirement and where women researchers (Francisca de Andrés, Áurea Perales, María Teresa Díaz, Luisa Arroyo, Antonia Muñoz Turnes, Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri) and also the techniques -the female calculators- (Encarnación Rodríguez , María Domínguez Esteban, María Olvido Gómez García, Carmen Santiago, María Begoña Díaz Lequerica , Ana María Fernández Cantos) had an important role. The Navy laboratory was her workplace until July 1976, when she applied for voluntary retirement.

The trajectory of this female researcher opens a new field yet to be explored in the history of science: the presence of civilian women in military institutions.

Ana Romero de Pablos