Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) was an acclaimed British mathematician, engineer, inventor, physicist, suffragist, and women’s rights activist.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
It’s a brand new month and therefore time for a new theme. This month we’re highlighting STEMinists: women who did incredible things in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We’ll be talking about women from all over the world and all throughout history.
Today’s STEMinist was an acclaimed British mathematician, engineer, inventor, physicist, suffragist, and women’s rights activist. She was awarded the prestigious Hughes Medal, among other awards, for her groundbreaking work on electric arcs and ripples and currents in water and sand. Let’s talk about Hertha Ayrton.
Phoebe Sarah Marks was born in Portsea, England on April 28, 1854 to Levi Marks, a Polish-Jewish jeweler and watchmaker and his wife Alice, who worked as a seamstress. Sarah, as she was known as a child, was the third of their eight children.
In 1861, when Sarah was 7 years old, her father died quite suddenly, leaving his large family penniless. The circumstances forced Sarah’s mother to reenter the workforce as a seamstress. Sarah, whose extraordinary intellect was apparent even at a young age, was left with limited opportunities to utilize or grow her talents.
When Sarah was 9, she was invited to move in with her aunt Marion, uncle Alphonse and their children in London. Though her mother was unsure about letting Sarah leave home, she realized that her talented daughter would have many more opportunities and greater access to high-quality education living in London. Sarah’s Aunt Marion was headmistress of a school and her family was generally more affluent and well-connected than Sarah’s own family in Portsea. Sarah was particularly close with her cousins, who were also quite intellectual and introduced Sarah to higher level science and math.
By the age of 16, Sarah was already working as a governess and living on her own. During this period she became close friends with a Jewish-German family of immigrants named the Blinds. It was their daughter, Ottile Blind, who gave her the nickname by which she would go for the rest of her life- “Hertha.”
Hertha and Ottile became close friends, a relationship that would last. They started attending suffragist meetings together, and they studied together for the Cambridge University entrance exam. Ottile also introduced Hertha to the woman who would become her greatest mentor, well-known feminist and education advocate Barbara Bodichon. Bodichon was one of the founders of Cambridge University’s Girton College, the first residential college for women in England.
Despite the fact thatCambridge University did not yet award degrees to women, Hertha desperately wanted to attend. Barbara encouraged Hertha to apply to Girton college, and Hertha was accepted in 1874 after passing the entrance exam with flying colors.
Hertha entered Girton College as a Mathematics major in 1876. During her time there, she became interested in the science of invention, and invented a number of items, including a sphygmograph, which is used to record the pulse in arteries, and a line-divider capable of dividing a line into any number of equal parts. Hertha’s line-divider was her first invention to gain traction. It became a popular tool for engineers and architects. Barbara and a couple of other friends from the suffrage movement gave Hertha the funds to take out a patent and arranged for this new invention to be shown at the Exhibition of Women’s Industries.
In 1884, Hertha began taking evening classes at Finsbury Technical College with Professor William Ayrton, a pioneering electrical engineer and physicist. The professor and his student quickly fell in love, and on May 6, 1885, they were married. The following year, Hertha gave birth to their daughter, Barbara, named in honor of Hertha’s mentor.
In 1893, Hertha made her first major scientific discovery. After a servant used her husband’s research papers on the electric arc to light a fire, Hertha helped him replicate the experiments on which those papers were based. While doing so, she came up with the theory that there was a relationship between the length of the electric arc and its pressure and voltage. She also noted that the hissing noise heard during experimentation was the result of oxidation rather than evaporation of the material.
Hertha’s theory on electric arcs was published in 1895 in a journal called The Electrician. It was a hit. She was the first woman ever elected to join the Institution of Electrical Engineers, not to mention the recipient of their most prestigious award. She was also chosen to speak at the 1900 International Electrical Congress in Paris, which garnered her so much fanfare that it led the British Association for the Advancement of Science to allow women to serve on committees.
In 1908, Hertha’s husband died. Her response was to throw herself even further into her work. She was focused on how oscillations of water form sand ripples. While this may sound a bit esoteric, it wasn’t long before she was able to put her new research into practice. Starting in 1915, new chemical weapons like mustard gas and phosgene became increasingly popular in the trenches of World War I. Mustard gas was particularly nasty. It not only caused excruciating blisters, but slowly ate away at victims’ lung tissue. When Hertha learned about this issue, she applied her research on currents in water to understand the movement of gas in air. She then used her findings to build an anti-gas fan meant to move gas away from soldiers in the trenches. At first, the War Office dismissed these new fans, but after the press got hold of the story, they sent 104,000 Ayrton Fans to the front lines.
Following the war, Hertha continued her research on air currents and advocacy for suffrage, one of her greatest passions. Between 1883 and 1923, she registered 26 total patents, including multiple patents for mathematical dividers, arc lamps, electrodes, and devices related to air propulsion.
Hertha also maintained a close friendship with fellow scientist and Nobel prize winner Marie Curie. Hertha adamantly defended Curie in the press after her discovery of radium was attributed to her husband. Hertha told one paper, “errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”
Hertha died of Septicemia on August 26, 1923 in Bexhill-On-Sea, England. She was 69 years old.
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Talk to you tomorrow!