Hertha Marks Ayrton: Inventions, facts, and biography of British electric arc scientist
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 162nd birthday of Hertha Marks Ayrton.
The doodle was created by artist Lydia Nichols and shows the famous scientist surrounded by ripples – one of her key findings and demonstrating her legacy as an engineer.
The doodle is shown on internet browsers in the UK, Egypt, Iceland, Qatar, Singapore, Spain and Tunisia.
Who was Hertha Marks Ayrton?
Phoebe Sarah Marks, who later adopted the name Hertha after the earth goddess, was an award-winning British mathematician, physicist, inventor and engineer, famous for her work on sand ripples and electric arcs.
She was born to a Polish Jewish seamstress mother Alice Moss and clockmaker father in Portsea, Portsmouth, on April 28, 1854.
Her father Levi Marks, who was also a jeweller, died when she was just seven years old, leaving her family – with eight children – in debt.
Hertha, who was known for her ‘fiery’ personality, was sent to a school in London, which was owned by her aunt Marion Harzog, when she was nine.
She went on to attend Girton College, University of Cambridge, in 1876, and passed the Cambridge University Examination for Women in 1874 with honours in both English and maths.
Cambridge did not give degrees to women at the time so she received this through the University of London instead.
Hertha married William Ayrton in 1885 and they had a child, Barbara Ayrton who went on to become a labour MP between 1945 and 1950 and a suffragist for Womens’ Rights. Barbara Ayrton’s son Michael Ayrton was a writer and artist.
In her lifetime, Hertha Marks Ayrton registered 26 different patents before dying in 1923, aged 69 from blood poisoning caused by an insect bite.
Important things she invented and discovered
1) Mathematical dividers
In 1884 Hertha patented her first major invention, an instrument used for dividing lines into a number of equal parts
2) Ayrton fan
In 1915, the scientist developed a device to blow away poisonous gases from the trenches, keeping soldiers fit. More than 100,000 of the fans were used on the Western Front.
3) Sand ripples
Hertha realised that ripples appear when waves wash over sand, which had previously been a scientific mystery.
4) Arc lamps and electrodes
In 1893, Hertha began looking at highly luminous discharges of electricity that would fire between two electrodes when gases ionize, known aselectric arcs. These ‘arc lamps’ were used as public lighting at the time but they would flicker and hiss on the streets. Her work led to fixing this issue by binding the arc together to form one constant whole.
How she raised the profile of womens’ rights
Hertha was the first women to read her own paper – The Origin and Growth of Ripple Mark – to the Royal Society in 1904 and received the Huighes Medal for her work on ripples and electric arcs. She is only one of two women to receive the award, which is only given for original discovery.
The scientist also took part in suffrage rallies in 1906 and 1913 and was the founding member of the International Federation of University Women and the National Union of Scientific Workers.
In 1899, Hertha was elected as the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Famous Hertha Marks Ayrton quotes
1) An error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.
2) In experimenting on the arc, my aim was not so much to add to the large number of isolated facts that had already been discovered, as to form some idea of the bearing of these upon one another, and thus to arrive at a clear conception of what takes place in each part of the arc and carbons at every moment.
The attempt to correlate all the known phenomena, and to bind them together into one consistent whole, led to the deduction of new facts, which, when duly tested by experiment, became parts of the growing body, and, themselves, opened up fresh questions, to be answered in their turn by experiment.
