Glagoleva-Arkadeva, Aleksandra

Born Feb. 16 (28), 1884, in the village of Tovarkovo, now in Tula Oblast; died Oct. 30, 1945, in Moscow. Soviet physicist.

Upon graduating from the physics and mathematics department of the Moscow Advanced Courses for Women in 1910, she began working there. From 1914 to 1918 she worked in the X-ray department of a military hospital. From 1918 she was at Moscow University, becoming a professor both at the university and at the Second Moscow Medical Institute in 1930. In 1916, Glagoleva-Arkad’eva constructed an instrument for measuring the depths of bullets and shell fragments in wounds—the X-ray stereometer. In 1922 she constructed a new source of electromagnetic waves, the so-called mass radiator, a vessel with aluminum filings suspended in a viscous oil. The filings, being moving hertz oscillators, radiate electromagnetic waves when electric sparks are passed through them. Because of the small dimensions of the oscillators, Glagoleva-Arkad’eva was able to obtain (in 1923) wavelengths of 5 cm to 82 μm, filling a gap in the scale of electromagnetic waves between the spectra of infrared and radio waves.