Hertha Marks Ayrton - Biography

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton, née Marks (28 April 1854 – 23 August 1923) was an English engineer, mathematician and inventor.

Life and work

Hertha Ayrton was born Phoebe Sarah Marks in Portsea, Hampshire, England on 28 April 1854. She attended Girton College, Cambridge where she studied mathematics, and passed the Mathematical Tripos in 1880. At that time, Cambridge gave only certificates and not degrees to women. She successfully completed an external examination and received a B.Sc. degree from the University of London in 1881.

On 6 May 1885, she married one of her teachers at the Technical College at Finsbury, William Edward Ayrton. 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 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 (IEE). Shortly thereafter, she was elected the first female member of the IEE.

She was not as well received by the Royal Society. 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 poem that criticized organized religion.

The Ayrtons' daughter, Barbara Bodichon Ayrton (1886–1950), named after feminist Barbara Bodichon, was a suffragette.

<references />

Further reading

• Reminiscences of Hertha Aryton by A. P. Trotter in CWP at UCLA

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• 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 College
• Hertha Marks Aryton in CWP at UCLA
• Women in Science
• Pam Hirsch, an entry about Hertha Marks Ayrton, Jewish Women, A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia