She worked out why the electric arc hissed — and was refused the Royal Society because a married woman had no standing in law.
Every arc lamp in Victorian London hissed. The carbon rods spat, the light guttered, and nobody could say why. In 1895 Hertha Ayrton — no post, no salary, no laboratory of her own, working in the one her husband ran — took the problem apart with a bank of batteries and a great deal of patience, and found the answer: oxygen was reaching the crater burnt into the positive carbon. Keep the air out and the arc burned silent and steady. She published twelve papers on it in The Electrician, then a book, The Electric Arc, which stayed the standard work for a generation of engineers.
The institutions were slower than the physics. In 1899 the Institution of Electrical Engineers elected her — the first woman it had ever admitted, and the only one for the next fifty-nine years. In 1902 the Royal Society was asked to make her a Fellow and refused: its Council took legal advice and concluded that a married woman, having no independent standing in law, was ineligible. In 1906 the same Society gave her its Hughes Medal. No other woman received it for the next hundred and two years.
Portsea to the Royal Society
The lifeline
1854
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks in Portsea, Hampshire, to a Polish-Jewish watchmaker
1876
Enters Girton College, Cambridge, on money raised by Barbara Bodichon and George Eliot
1899
First woman elected to the Institution of Electrical Engineers
1902
Royal Society Fellowship refused — a married woman has no standing in law
1906
Wins the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal — the first woman to receive it
1923
Dies at 69 in Sussex, of blood poisoning from an insect bite
By the numbers
The measure of her
26
Patents, from a draughtsman's line-divider to anti-gas fans
59
Years she was the only woman in the Institution of Electrical Engineers
102
Years she stood alone as the Hughes Medal's only woman
104,000
Ayrton fans issued to soldiers on the Western Front
What she made and found
The work
1884
The line-divider — British patent 5,543, for splitting a line into equal parts. Sold by W. F. Stanley & Co. of London; the first of twenty-six patents.
1895–96
Twelve papers in The Electrician on the electric arc, showing the hiss and flicker came from oxygen reaching the crater in the carbon.
1899
“The Hissing of the Electric Arc,” read before the Institution of Electrical Engineers on 23 March — the first paper a woman had read there herself.
1902
The Electric Arc, the standard textbook on the subject until after the First World War.
1904
“The Origin and Growth of Ripple-mark,” read to the Royal Society on 16 June — the first woman to read her own paper to the Society.
1915–18
The Ayrton fan — three and a half feet of waterproofed canvas on a handle, swung to sweep poison gas out of a trench.
Refused, then remembered
Recognition
In her lifetime
Sat the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos in 1880; Cambridge would not give her the degree
Her 1901 Royal Society paper had to be read aloud for her by a man, John Perry
Proposed as a Fellow in 1902 and refused on the grounds of her marriage
The War Office dismissed her anti-gas fan as too simple to take seriously, and made her wait more than a year
Never held a laboratory or a salaried post of her own
Today
An English Heritage blue plaque at 41 Norfolk Square, Paddington, since 2007
A second plaque in Portsea, the dockyard streets where she was born
Girton College funds the Hertha Ayrton Research Fellowship
The British Society for the History of Science awards an annual Ayrton Prize
Her line on misattributed work is now quoted wherever the crediting of women in science is argued
The dockyard town
Portsea
She was born in the crowded naval streets of Portsea, beside the Portsmouth dockyard, to Levi Marks — a watchmaker who had fled Tsarist Poland — and Alice Theresa, a seamstress. He died when she was seven and left debts. At nine she was sent to London to be schooled by her aunt Marion Hartog; by sixteen she was working as a governess, and she taught and sewed to keep her mother's house going. Somewhere in her teens she put aside Phoebe Sarah and took the name Hertha, from a poem by Swinburne.
7
Her age when her father died, leaving the family in debt
9
Her age when she was sent to her aunt's school in London
1876
The year friends' subscriptions carried her through the gates of Girton
“Errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”
— Hertha Ayrton, letter to the Westminster Gazette, 14 March 1909
