Hertha Marks Ayrton
Encyclopedia
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
engineer, mathematician and inventor.
Life and work
Hertha Ayrton was born Phoebe Sarah Marks in PortseaPortsea
Portsea is an area of the English city of Portsmouth, located on Portsea Island, within the ceremonial county of Hampshire.The area was originally known as the Common and lay between the town of Portsmouth and the nearby Dockyard. The Common started to be developed at the end of the seventeenth...
, Hampshire, England on 28 April 1854. She attended Girton College, Cambridge
Girton College, Cambridge
Girton College is one of the 31 constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge. It was England's first residential women's college, established in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon. The full college status was only received in 1948 and marked the official admittance of women to the...
where she studied mathematics, and passed the Mathematical Tripos in 1880. At that time, Cambridge gave only certificates and not degrees
Academic degree
An academic degree is a position and title within a college or university that is usually awarded in recognition of the recipient having either satisfactorily completed a prescribed course of study or having conducted a scholarly endeavour deemed worthy of his or her admission to the degree...
to women. She successfully completed an external examination and received a B.Sc. degree from the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
in 1881.
On 6 May 1885, she married one of her teachers at the Technical College at Finsbury, William Edward Ayrton
William Edward Ayrton
-See also:*Henry Dyer*John Milne*Anglo-Japanese relations...
. She assisted him with experiments in physics and electricity, and began her own investigation into the characteristics of the electric arc.
In the late nineteenth century, electric arc
Electric arc
An electric arc is an electrical breakdown of a gas which produces an ongoing plasma discharge, resulting from a current flowing through normally nonconductive media such as air. A synonym is arc discharge. An arc discharge is characterized by a lower voltage than a glow discharge, and relies on...
lighting was in wide use for public lighting. The tendency of electric arcs to flicker and hiss were a major problem. In 1895, Hertha Ayrton wrote a series of articles for The Electrician, explaining that these phenomena were the result of oxygen coming into contact with the carbon rods used to create the arc. In 1899, she was the first woman ever to read her own paper before the Institution of Electrical Engineers
Institution of Electrical Engineers
The Institution of Electrical Engineers was a British professional organisation of electronics, electrical, manufacturing, and Information Technology professionals, especially electrical engineers. The I.E.E...
(IEE). Shortly thereafter, she was elected the first female member of the IEE.
She was not as well received by the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
. She was proposed as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1902, but was turned down when the Council of the Royal Society decreed that married women were not eligible to be Fellows. However, in 1904, she presented a paper at the Royal Society on the motion of ripples in sand and water. For this research and her work with the electric arc, she received the Hughes Medal in 1906.
Ayrton invented a draftsman's device that could be used for dividing a line into equal parts as well as for enlarging and reducing figures. She was also active in devising and solving mathematical problems, many of which were published in "Mathematical Questions and Their Solutions" from the Educational Times.
Ayrton was agnostic, but retained close ties to the Jewish community. In her teens she adopted the name "Hertha" after the eponymous heroine of a Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
poem that criticized organized religion.
The Ayrtons' daughter, Barbara Bodichon Ayrton (1886–1950), named after feminist Barbara Bodichon
Barbara Bodichon
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an English educationalist, artist, and a leading early nineteenth century feminist and activist for women's rights.-Early life:...
, was a suffragette
Suffragette
"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
.
Further reading
- Reminiscences of Hertha Aryton by A. P. Trotter in CWP at UCLA
- Oxford Dictionary of National BiographyDictionary of National BiographyThe Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published from 1885...
- Joan Mason (2006) "Hertha Aryton" in OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press.
External links
- "Hertha Marks Ayrton", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott CollegeAgnes Scott CollegeAgnes Scott College is a private undergraduate college in the United States. Agnes Scott's campus lies in downtown Decatur, Georgia, nestled inside the perimeter of the bustling metro-Atlanta area....
- Hertha Marks Aryton in CWP at UCLA
- Women in Science
- Pam Hirsch, an entry about Hertha Marks Ayrton, Jewish Women, A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia