Frances was born on 14 October 1894 to Sir William Heaton Hamer (1862–1936) and Agnes Conan in
Kentish Town,
London. Her father studied medicine at Cambridge and in 1912 was named Medical Officer of Health of the London County Council.
Education Hamer attended the same school as her mother and aunts on both sides of the family, the
North London Collegiate School. Hamer was named after the founder of the school, and her godmother, educator
Frances Mary Buss. Hamer graduated in 1916 and that same year, she read chemistry at
Girton College, Cambridge.
Wartime chemist chloride. Even as an undergraduate at Girton during the
first World War, Hamer joined the research group of Sir William Pope who was investigating a reliable synthetic photographic sensitizer. They needed a substitute for the chemical
pinacyanol (invented by a German company in 1905 and used by them to their advantage during the war), which when incorporated into
photographic plates improved their sensitivity toward the red end of the visible spectrum. By using pinacyanol, the photographs taken by German planes showed much more detail than those taken by Allied pilots of German battlefronts. During her time at Ilford and Kodak, she authored more than 70 research papers and filed many patents. In the process she discovered new classes of photographic sensitizers.). When Hamer moved to Kodak in 1934, Fisher followed, and together they authored seven publications and several patents. Hamer became active in several professional associations, Councils of the
Chemical Society, the
Royal Society of Chemistry, and she was the first woman elected to the
Royal Photographic Society (RPS). She remained disappointed that she was never elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society but, according to author Rayner-canham, "in addition to the handicap of being a woman, Hamer's applied research was outside the mainstream academic chemical circles, and thus, she would have had few champions among the Fellows of the time." In 1945, she returned to her academic research roots and was named an honorary lecturer at
Imperial College while continuing to work as a research chemist and consultant at Kodak.
Post retirement Hamer retired fully in 1959 and immediately began writing the book called "the definitive monograph about
cyanine dyes."
The Cyanine Dyes and Related Compounds, published in 1964. A serious accident in 1964, and a second in 1971, reduced Hamer's mobility and she could only walk with the aid of a cane. Still, she remained an enthusiastic gardener. She died on 29 April 1980 in
Hastings at 85. == Selected awards ==