Grace Hopper / Nanosecond Earrings

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, pioneering computer scientist and educator, is celebrated in our hard enamel earrings, part of our Women in Science series. As one of the first computer programmers, Hopper used binary code to program the Mark I computer. But she had a vision for a better way: She created the first computer language that used words to tell computers what to do. Hopper also dedicated her life to educating people about how computers work. She always carried “nanosecond wires” with her to use in her lectures. These 11.8” (30cm) wires represented the maximum distance a signal can travel in 1 billionth of a second. These earrings are wearable versions of her nanosecond wires: The white line on each earring is 11.8” long. (To fit a light-nanosecond into a small space, we made it into a pattern called a “labyrinth.”) These 24k gold-plated earrings come with a fold-out card with Hopper's story.