Anna Mani
Birth- 23 August 1918
Death -16 August 2001.
Inventor of Metrological (weather) Instrument
Back in the days when women were barely visible in the scientific domain, Anna Modayil Mani from Travancore, Kerala, was a distinguished meteorologist and physicist who astounded the world with her amazing inventions.
Our country, India, is not rich today, but it is not poor either. The country awaits the day when every Indian will be prosperous, educated, empowered, and well-behaved. Our portal www.shashvatsatya.com also remembering and paying tribute to those personalities who have given India a new lease of life with their knowledge, science and inventions but his or her names are in darkness and only countable persons knows about them.
Among other accomplishments, she devised novel methods to gauge the weather—by standardising around 100 meteorological instruments—and established a series of stations to measure solar radiation.
She also pioneered the research to utilise solar and wind power as renewable sources of energy and set up her instruments in over 700 sites. Her study on ozone level measurement using her apparatus ‘ozonesonde’ is also strikingly remarkable.
Mani was born in 1918 to an affluent family, and displayed immense interest in reading and learning from her childhood. On her eighth birthday, she rejected a gift of diamond earrings and opted for a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica instead.
Inspired by Gandhiji’s principles and the ideals of Vaikom Satyagraha, Mani started wearing only khadi garments to express her solidarity with the stirring rebellion. While all her sisters got married in their adolescent years, she persisted on her wish to pursue higher studies and enrolled for an honours degree in Physics at Presidency College in Madras (Chennai).
Later, she landed the opportunity to work as a researcher in Nobel Laureate Sir CV Raman’s laboratory.
Despite her detailed thesis on the luminescence of diamonds and rubies, unfair gender biases by the Madras University barred her from earning her PhD degree.
Undeterred, she used her scholarship savings to head to Imperial College in London to pursue higher physics research and later specialised in meteorological instrumentation.
Mani returned to a newly independent India in 1948 and designed radiation instrumentation from scratch at Indian Meteorological Department, Pune. Mani is also credited for setting up a meteorological observatory and an instrumentation tower at the Thumba rocket launching facility.
Following a paralysing stroke in 1994, Anna Mani breathed her last on 16 August 2001. (Courtesy Internate website- in favour of country and for motivation to citizens)(UPDATED ON 3RD FEB 2026)
