Today’s Illustrated Women in History is a written submission by James Purvis.
Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor. She is best known for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.
I wasn’t aware of Hertha Ayrton until last month google commemorated her 162nd birthday with a google doodle. Judging from the number of articles that were published about her at the time, and the comments that I read at the bottom of them, I wasn’t the only person who was unaware of her prodigious accomplishments, and the contributions that she made to science and mathematics.
Born in 1854, her father died in 1861 leaving her mother with seven children to care for, and pregnant with an eighth. Ayrton’s considerable intellectual gifts were evident from an early age, and her mother, despite the family’s difficult circumstances was determined that she should have an education and sent her to school in London.
In 1880 she passed the mathematical tripos exam at Cambridge, but because Cambridge did not confer degrees on women at the time, she later enrolled at the University of London and was awarded a bachelor of science degree in 1881.
Throughout her university life, she was deeply involved in women’s suffrage, as well as founding a mathematical club, leading the choral society. She constructed a sphygmomanometer to measure blood pressure, and a line divider based on parallelograms to aid with enlarging and reducing images. Her other inventions include a fan to dispel poison gas which was widely used in the trenches during the first world war.
Her keen problem solving mind led her to isolate the reason for the hissing in electric arc lighting (due to the intrusion of oxygen into the vacuum tube). This improved the lighting, as the hissing noise was due to burning away of the carbon element which was used to generate the arc. Ayrton published a series of letters in The Electrician on the subject, and in 1899 she became the first woman to present a paper to the Institute of Electrical Engineers. She was later elected to full membership of the Institute.
In 1901 she petitioned the Royal Society to read her paper ‘The Mechanism of the Electric Arc’, but was disqualified from doing so because of her gender. She went on the become the first woman to present a paper before the Royal Society in 1904, reading “The Origin and Growth of Ripple Marks”. In 1906 she was awarded the Hughes medal by the Royal Society for her work on the electric arc, and the motion of sand ripples.
She is honoured today by a blue plaque at her address in Paddington, a research fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge and the Ayrton prize awarded by the British Society for the History of Science.
If you would like to submit a biography of a woman in history to be illustrated and featured, please send me a message!