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This month marks 160 years since the birth of Hertha Ayrton, the first female member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the first woman to read a paper at the
Royal Society.
She carried out research on wave motion and vortices in water, and later investigated vortices in air. She went on to invent the Ayrton Flapper Fan, which was used in World War One to clear the air of gases.
As she noted in The Times, “On May 6, 1915, I conceived the idea that it might be possible for our men to drive off poisonous gases and bring in fresh air from behind by simply giving impulses to air with hand fans. By May 14, I had made a small model, giving surprisingly good results, and I wrote to the only authority at the War Office I knew at all, to offer it to the army.”
Her invention was later adapted to improve ventilation in mine shafts.
Ayrton was born Phoebe Sarah Marks in Hampshire in 1854, and was educated in London while working as a governess. She began calling herself Hertha after reading a poem of that name by Algernon Charles Swinburne. She attended Girton College, Cambridge, and completed the mathematical tripos in 1880. But because women were granted only certificates and not degrees at Cambridge at that time, her BSc was awarded by the University of London a year later.
At Cambridge she was active in university life, forming the college fire brigade, a choral society and a mathematics club. After her degree, Ayrton worked as a teacher in London, and registered her first patent in 1884 for a line divider.
In the following year she married fellow scientist William Ayrton, who was a staunch supporter of his wife’s work and wished her success in her own right – not through the lens of being his wife. He is reported to have said: “Hertha is a genius; I have come to realise this more and more.”
Ayrton was the first woman to give a paper at the Institution of Electrical Engineers – now known as the Institution of Engineering and Technology – in 1889. The paper was entitled “The hissing of the electric arc”, and two days later the institution elected her as its first female member.
Her work on the electric arc was important, particularly with regard to the noise that street lamps made. She detailed in The Electrician that this hiss was caused by oxygen coming into contact with the carbon rods within the lamps.
This work won her recognition, and she spoke in Paris at the International Electrical Conference of 1900. Her prowess in electrical engineering impressed fellow scientists to the point that the British Association for the Advancement of Science – known today as the British Science Association – decided to allow women to serve on its
general committees.
In 1904 Ayrton became the first woman to read a paper at the Royal Society. Entitled “The origin and growth of a ripple mark”, it documented her work on sand ripples and vortices in water. She had been put forward for membership of the Royal Society but was rejected, as it was felt that “married women are not eligible” to become fellows.
In 1906, the society awarded her the Hughes Medal for her work on the electric arc and sand ripples, but still did not make her a fellow.
In an interview in The Daily News in 1919, she stated that a woman “should be given opportunities, and her work should be studied from the scientific, not the sex, point of view”.
Ayrton was a lifelong liberal and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She participated in the militant demonstrations of 1910 and was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, even providing shelter to Sylvia Pankhurst and others when they were being shadowed by detectives.
She believed her dedication to scientific research and discovery, and her success in this, would help the movement and further equality. But being a woman in science at that time was a constant struggle.