User:Ryanzhu21/Fanny Hesse

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Hesse was the oldest of 10 children,5 of which who passed away early on in their lives, and they were raised at Laurel Hill Manor in North Arlington, New Jersey. She and her sisters learned about cooking and housekeeping from their mother beginning at an early age. At the age of 15, she attended a finishing school in Switzerland to study French and Home Economics.

Referred to as Lina in her family, Hesse and her husband had 3 sons.

She and her family would later would live in Strehlen, a suburb of Dresden, as a result of Walther purchasing a house to work from home at during his time at the Technical University of Dresden.

During World War I, the Hesse family home in New Jersey was sold and her part of the inheritance was kept as enemy property.It was not until many years later that she began to receive small sums of money and other items included with her inheritance, in addition to the pension she received as a widow of a civil servant.. Hesse would end up outliving her husband by 23 years, and her illustrations and Walther's papers have been passed down to her grandchildren as part of her personal collection. However, as her home in Dresden was destroyed during Allied air raids, many of the Hesse family mementos have been lost aside from those that Hesse managed to collect from family members.

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Hesse became familiar with her husband's work and assisted him in his research, performing a role similar to a modern-day medical technologist. She prepared illustrations of microscopic preparations, drawing pictures of magnified bacterial colonies and coloring them with watercolor. Hesse is the granddaughter of the Swiss painter Leopold Robert, and she and her brother Louis Eilshemius both shared an early interest and talent for painting and illustrations, with Louis earning some fame for his work later on in his life.

Hesse first learned about agar from her mother's friends that had lived in the East Indies, where the seaweed extract itself originates from. She initially utilized agar as a replacement for gelatin in dishes she prepared in her kitchen, finding agar more versatile in resisting summer temperatures for fruit jams and jellies.

Hesse's suggestion of using agar proved to be central to her husband's success in analyzing microbial counts in air, as he initially ran into problems with summertime temperatures resulting in liquefaction of gelatin. Subsequent experiments following her suggestion of using agar as a superior gelling agent revealed its advantages in thermal stability, resistance to liquifying bacterial enzymes, ability to maintain sterility, and benefits for long term storage. At the time of her recommendation for agar as a plating medium, Hesse was also helping her husband culture air-borne bacteria.

Later on in her life, she chose to keep all of her illustrations and Walther's papers and documents, out of respect for Walther's work and her own contributions to his discoveries. The Hesses chose to not exploit their contributions with agar commercially.