Draft:Janina Bartkowska

Janina Bartkowska (born Romańska) (November 5, 1922 – ) was a professor of optics and one of the inventors of the Janpol Color. She was born in Poznań to a family of technical intelligentsia. Her father Captain Józef Romański and grandfather were all surveyors. Her mother Olga Fleminger was a music teacher, rumored to be a student under Teodor Leschetizky.

Their family was very patriotic and her father and uncle fought in the Legions. They're closely related to the Galician Intelligentsia but because of the lack of universities, they left for Poznań where he taught future surveyors at the State School of Machine Building in Poznań.

Unfortunately, both parents left them orphaned before the war. The children were then taken care of by the Opuszyński couple. Zygmunt who after the war in 1958-1972 was vice-president of the Court Supreme and Hanna. Hanna Opuszyńska was her second mother until her death. This was until the Nazi occupiers ordered the "immigration" population to leave Greater Poland which was annexed to the Reich. Evicted suddenly from Poznań late in the fall of 1939, the Opuszyński family found shelter in Opatów with Hanna's family.

Janina started secretly teaching students. This period of occupation, she endured many death-threatening episodes, such as escaping from a truck carrying young Polish women to "work" for the Germans. As well as the dramatic experiences of the inhabitants of the Baranów-Sandomierz bridgehead winter of 1944/1945. She also forged birth certificates for Jewish women to escape Poland.

After liberation, the Opuszyński family returns to Poznań. Janina Romanska chooses an unusual field for a woman to study, physics. She meets another faculty member, her future husband Zygmunt Bartkowski. Zygmunt was a physics and mathematics teacher. He was a soldier of the Polish army in the West and meteorologist during D-Day. They marry in 1948 and were together for 56 years, until his death in 2004. They have four children: Wanda Kacprzak, sons Jerzy and Stanisław, and daughter Jadwiga, who died prematurely from leukemia.

At this time, she begins her professional career, which is also her great passion in life in optics. It already covers her master's thesis, which is the construction of a lamp for a lantern marine. At a time when the country was in ruins and there was a severe shortage of industry technical staff depleted by the war, she joined the branch of the Institute of Precision Mechanics that was being organized in Wrocław. The first such achievement was the speculum inside the gun barrel, enabling the assessment of its quality and important for the quality of its operation. For this, the team received high awards. At that time it was considered so important for the country the facility should be located entirely in the center of the country in Warsaw. And so family Bartkowskich became residents of Warsaw. They include the period of work in the PZO design department and in the Central Optics Laboratory her greatest professional successes. Among others it was a Polish projector design film (optical recording of the soundtrack). Another important structure was the hatch observation for the pilot of an airplane scattering chemicals over a large space or fertilizers. This was important when fighting plant blight or harmful locusts insects. The difficulty was to prevent it from settling on the surface of the speculum dust blown away by the wind. Planes equipped with such a device were later a Polish export "hit" in African and Middle Eastern countries, helping them combating their plagues.

During this period, she obtained a doctorate in technical sciences. The basis is working on tolerances actuators in optical devices. It was work of great practical importance. Technical instruments and machines are assembled from many parts. They are never the same. And these "small" differences have a huge impact on the functioning of the whole. In optics it is especially important, where even minor deviations can greatly distort the results obtained picture. Hence the question arises about their permissible limits, and the answer is of great importance practical. The work addressed this issue, developing appropriate templates-guidelines for production. The value of her works may be proven by the fact that she once met someone in the Soviet Union its scientific "shadow". He was a researcher whose job was to read her works, if they appeared. She was also on the team that invented the Janpol Color enlarger. The name Janpol was a derivative of the main surname designer engineer Jana Jasny and the names Jan and Janina. The enlarger allowed for obtaining very good quality enlargements of color photos. The problem is from the side technical problem was that a color photo is not one photo, but several photos taken in different colors and superimposed on each other. Here's the right effect several colors had to be obtained simultaneously. The structure and the entire team were honored with the "Master of Technology" award in 1969. It was then awarded by "Życie Warszawy" on the eve of May Day, trying to appreciate and honor the most important achievements of Polish technology. To show practical value of this invention, the Christmas edition of the newspaper had a colorful cover using Janpol Color.

In the 1970s, there was a new stage of work related to cooperation with the team of prof. New Year's Eve Kaliski, a pioneer in Poland in the implementation of optical techniques based on lasers and masers, a so light and infrared, with new unusual properties - coherent light. Near military applications were also sought in the civilian sphere. She participated in construction of a methane sensor for mines, based on the change in the properties of the light waveform polluted air in it. Another design used a laser for measurement the height of the cloud base, an extremely important parameter for those taking off and landing machines. There was also work on the application of new techniques in medicine to cells therapeutic and diagnostic thanks to their ability to perform non-invasive activities based on the permeability of electromagnetic rays. She was also present when implementing new techniques. Since they appeared in Poland electronic computing machines tried to use them in construction work optical devices. They involve many time-consuming and difficult calculations. The machine doesn't only performs them faster, but is also more reliable, and the result can be easily repeated, if verification needed. Here it accompanied the development of the application of computational techniques from their very beginnings.

Retirement was approaching then, but not the end of his activity. Then Janina Bartkowska gave herself up another field, also a branch of applied optics, but related to helping people visually impaired. One of the most annoying and excluding disabilities, it rarely takes an extreme form. More often it is a significant and severe limitation. But it can be alleviated with appropriate devices. Knowledge about them is important for their use operation of optical devices. This is also knowledge very necessary for ophthalmologists and optometrists.

She wrote several books in this field: "Seeing in the non-blurred eye and visually impaired” (1993, Published by the Polish Association of the Blind), “Optics and correction of defects eyesight” (1996, Publisher PZWL) and published in the year of his centenary “Sight: correction and vision protection, lighting, poor vision, architectural barriers” (2022, Ed. "Typographer").

Recently she celebrated her 101 birthday with her family in Warsaw.

References

Famous Resident Turns 100

Sight by Janina Bartkowska and Zygmuny Bartkowski