Pennington, Mary Engle (1872–1952)

US chemist who set standards for food refrigeration. She also designed both industrial and household refrigerators.

Pennington was born in Nashville, Tennesse, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania but was initially denied a degree on account of her sex. In 1898 she opened her own Philadelphia Clinical Laboratory. She was head of the Food Research Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture 1908–19. From 1922 she worked as an independent consultant on the storage, handling, and transportation of perishable goods.

In Philadelphia, from research into the preservation of dairy products, Pennington developed standards of milk inspection that were later used by health boards across the USA. During World War I she conducted experiments into railway refrigeration cars and recommended the standards that remained in use into the 1940s. As a consultant, she turned her interest to frozen food.