Hertha Ayerton

This is Hertha Ayerton, a British Engineer whose discoveries unveiled mysteries about the behavior of electricity and helped develop technology to protect soldiers in the trenches of the First World War from poisonous gasses.

Sarah Phoebe Banks was born in 1854 to a family of eight children, her father dying when she was just eight. Hertha took on her chosen surname in her teens after a character in a poem that criticized organized religion. That act of nomenclature speaks loads about Hertha’s independent-minded thinking. She also showed this by her lifelong activism in the British women’s suffrage movement, and by the extensive education in mathematics and electrical engineering that she sought — despite the lack of opportunities for women in those fields.

Hertha Ayrton (she got her surname from her husband William, her former teacher who wholeheartedly supported her intellectual pursuits, building her a laboratory on the top floor of their home) ended up becoming an inventor, earning 26 patents. A major branch of her work involved understanding electric lamps and the way that they made a hissing sound because of the oxidation of the carbon electrodes. A paper she wrote on this topic was read at the prestigious Royal Society — although presented by a man, since married women were forbidden to do so.

Hertha’s work was acknowledged in 1906 with the Hughes medal for outstanding research in the field of Energy — she was the first woman to get this award (only two have ever done so to this date).

Hertha Ayrton also studied the motion of waves, and research in this area led to her invention of a fan which she promoted as a way to blow away poisonous gasses in the brutal trench warfare of WWI. Over 100,000 Ayrton fans were eventually distributed, with Hertha’s understanding of wave motion having hugely important practical applications.

Hertha died in 1923. Her obituary acknowledged her accomplishments but also stated that “she was a good woman, despite of her being tinged with the scientific afflatus.”