Meet Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923)

Meet Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923)

a remarkable scientist who made significant contributions to science, engineering (26 patents), and social causes. She was born in 1854 in England as Phoebe Sarah Marks, the third child of a Polish Jewish immigrant father and an English seamstress mother. She changed her name to Hertha, after a Germanic goddess of the earth, when she was a teenager She was interested in science and mathematics from an early age, and received a scholarship to study at Girton College, Cambridge, where she excelled in her studies and also participated in various extracurricular activities.

After graduating from Cambridge, she became a teacher and also invented a line-divider, a device for dividing a line into equal parts or for enlarging and reducing figures. She patented this invention in 1884, the first of 26 patents she obtained in her lifetime. She also married William Ayrton, an electrical engineer and professor, in 1885. They collaborated on several scientific projects, especially on the study of electric arcs, which were used for lighting at the time.

Hertha Ayrton discovered the cause of the hissing and instability of electric arcs, and proposed ways to improve their efficiency and stability. She also investigated the formation of ripples and waves in sand and water, and developed mathematical formulas to describe them. She published many papers on these topics, and became the first woman to read her own paper before the Royal Society in 1904. She was also awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1906 for her work on electric arcs.

Hertha Ayrton was also a passionate advocate for women’s rights and social justice. She was a suffragette who campaigned for women’s suffrage and education. She also invented a fan-like device to disperse poison gas from the trenches during World War I, which she offered to the British government for free. She continued to work on scientific and humanitarian causes until her death in 1923. She was a pioneer in many fields, and an inspiration for generations of women scientists and engineers. She was described by Albert Einstein as,

“a woman of genius” who “enriched science by important discoveries”

📷 George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress