Agnes Pockels (Venice, 1862 – Brunswick, 1935) was a German scientist and pioneer in the field of monolayers. As a woman she could not go to university, but thanks to her younger brother Friedich, who studied at the University of Göttingen, she had access to scientific literature. Legend has it that while washing dishes in her kitchen she discovered the influence of impurities on the surface tension of liquids. To measure the surface tension, he developed the Pockels cuvette, the precursor of the Langmuir cuvette. In 1891, with the help of the physicist Lord Rayleigh, he published his first work on “surface tension” in the journal “Nature”. In 1932 the Technische Hochschule of Braunschweig awarded him an honorary doctorate.
