To mark International Women’s Day this month, we are delving into the records to find a pioneering and talented woman who was ahead of her times. She was the granddaughter of a Jewish emigree innkeeper, who had fled to England to escape the Polish pogroms. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweller. Unfortunately his life was cut short and so left behind a large impoverished family in Portsmouth. Breaking the mould, she became a respected engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, as well as being a supporter of the suffragette movement.

This exceptional woman would go on to be awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water in 1906. As such she remains a rare female recipient, with Professors Michele Dougherty in 2008 and Dame Clare Grey in 2020 being the only others of her sex to receive the award since its inception in 1902. The medal is awarded by the Royal Society ‘in recognition of an original discovery in the physical sciences, particularly electricity and magnetism or their applications’.

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton (28 April 1854 – 26 August 1923), better known as Hertha Ayrton, was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks to parents Levi and Alice Marks. As she grew up she preferred to be known as Sarah Marks, but would later adopt the name Hertha. This name had first been bestowed upon her by her friend Ottilie Blind, the daughter of Karl Blind, a German revolutionist and writer on politics, history, mythology and German literature. Some accounts say that Ottilie had called her fellow student after the Mother Earth goddess in Swinburne’s poem ‘Hertha’. Others, however, say it was after the feminist writer Fredrika Bremer’s novel of the same name that was published in 1856. As both women supported the suffragette movement and had taken the Cambridge University (local) examination for women, this second explanation certainly fits well.

When her father Levi died in 1861, leaving her mother Alice with seven children and an eighth expected, the seven-year-old Phoebe then took up some of the responsibility for caring for the younger children in the family and could so easily have missed out on an education. At the age of nine, however, she was invited by her maternal aunts, who ran a school in London, to live with her cousins and be educated with them. The aunts, Marion Hartog and Isabelle Leo, were sisters of Alice Marks née Moss. The household was highly educated as Marion’s husband, Alphonse Hartog, was a professor of French and German while Isabelle’s husband, Louis Leo, was a professor of music. Hertha’s cousins became well known in adulthood as scientists and artists and while she was with them her cousin Marcus introduced her to science.

Marion Hartog’s school can be found recorded in the Trade, Residential and Telephone Directories on TheGenealogist in 1856 at 18 Bury Street, St Mary Axe at a time before they moved to North London. If we take a look in the 1861 census then we find Marion and Alphonse recorded at 9 Carlton Villas, in Islington West. This is also the same address as Marion’s sister Isabella and her brother-in-law, Louis Leo. As their niece came to live with them in 1863, when she was nine, this then would be where her education began.

But it certainly wasn’t where it ended, even if for a time she had to make a living. By the time she was 16 she had begun working as a governess, tutoring children in a private house in London to support her mother. From an examination of the census we see that in 1871 her employers were a Harley Street dentist and his wife. Ten years later, in 1881, she was still recorded as a governess, though now as a boarder in the home of a farrier at St Albans Place in Hammersmith. In the intervening period, however, we can tell from the Girton College Register 1869–1946, to be found in the Educational Records on TheGenealogist, that she went to Cambridge University. The Girton College Register indicates that she had become a daily governess while, at the same time, preparing for the scholarship examination to enter the college between the years 1870 and 1876. She attended this famous college for women between 1876 and 1881, and when she left she taught for a time at Kensington High School and at Wimbledon before taking private pupils between 1881 and 1883.

Cambridge rules – no degree
A close friend of hers had been Mary Ann Evans, better known as the famous author George Eliot. Evans had supported Hertha’s application to Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge University. Here Hertha studied mathematics and was coached by physicist Richard Glazebrook. She was bright enough to be able to pass the Mathematical Tripos in 1880, but at this time Cambridge did not award full degrees to women so she could not be awarded the academic recognition that her male counterparts received. Though the Cambridge degree was not to be hers, Hertha then passed an external examination at the University of London and it was this university that awarded her a Bachelor of Science in 1881.

During her time at Cambridge she had thrown herself into life at Girton College where she had been responsible for founding the Girton fire brigade, leading the choral society, forming a mathematical club with Charlotte Scott, and was credited with constructing a sphygmomanometer, a blood pressure monitor that recorded the pulse in arteries. It would be in 1884 that she devised and constructed her first notable invention, a line divider that consisted of a number of parallelograms that could divide a line into any number of equal parts. The invention could be used by artists for enlarging and diminishing an object and would also have been used by architects and engineers. With the financial help of her contacts in the suffrage movement, Barbara Bodichon, a co-founder of Girton, and Lady Goldsmid, a major benefactor of the college, together these women advanced Hertha enough money to take out the necessary patents for her invention, which was then shown to the public at the Exhibition of Women’s Industries where it attracted attention from the press.

Sparking a romance
In 1884 Hertha began to attend evening classes in electricity at Finsbury Technical College. The lectures were given by a fellow of the Royal Society, Professor William Edward Ayrton, a pioneer in electrical engineering and physics education. The professor was a widower and soon they had begun a romance which would see Hertha marry Will Ayrton on 6 May 1885. She became the stepmother of his four-year-old daughter, Edith, and in 1886 Barbara Bodichon Ayrton, Hertha’s own daughter, was born. This child, who would grow up to become a Labour MP, was thus named in honour of Hertha’s mentor who had been instrumental in her life, having helped financially so that she could attend Girton. In fact Bodichon had continued to support Hertha financially throughout her education and career, including bequeathing Hertha her estate when she died. (You can learn more about Bodichon’s own interesting life here .)

With her husband, Professor Ayrton, Hertha assisted in a number of experiments on the electric arc. When he travelled to America in 1893, Hertha continued working on the electric arc and made a significant discovery when she developed the theory connecting the length of arc with pressure and voltage, tracing the hissing noise to oxidation rather than evaporation of the electrode material. Electric arcs were used to produce bright light, the carbon electrodes and the gas between them being heated white hot by the high-voltage discharge tended to cause them to flicker and hiss – this was seen as a major problem. In 1895, Hertha Ayrton had a series of articles published in The Electrician, explaining that these phenomena were the result of oxygen coming into contact with the carbon rods used to create the arc. Four years later she became the first woman ever to read her own paper, ‘The Hissing of the Electric Arc’, in front of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). She also gained the distinction of being the first female member to be elected to the IEE.

But the glass ceiling was not completely shattered yet. Hertha petitioned the Royal Society to allow her to present before them a paper entitled ‘The Mechanism of the Electric Arc’. The Royal Society, however, refused her on the grounds of her sex and in the end it was read for her in 1901 by the renowned electrical engineer John Perry. Then, in 1902, she published The Electric Arc summarising her research and work. With it her contribution to the field of electrical engineering began to be secured and John Perry then proposed that she should be elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. This was turned down by its council who, having sought legal advice, decreed that married women were not eligible to be fellows!

Two years later in 1904, however, Mrs Hertha Ayrton became the first woman to read a paper before the Royal Society when she presented her work ‘The Origin and Growth of Ripple Marks’, later published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. In 1906, notwithstanding that she was a woman, they awarded her their prestigious Hughes Medal ‘for her experimental investigations on the electric arc, and also on sand ripples’.

In 2007 a blue plaque was attached to her former house at 41 Norfolk Square in Paddington. Just a few minutes from Paddington Station and St Mary’s Hospital we can find out more about her home by using the Lloyd George Domesday Survey records on TheGenealogist as she was the occupant. This record gives us certain information about the type of house it was and the state of repair as well as allowing us to view it plotted exactly on a contemporary map. Using the features of the powerful Map Explorer we are also able to switch the map layer in order to see it located on georeferenced modern maps. Hertha’s 56-year lease, we can read from the linked field book, had begun on 24 June 24 in 1902 – the very year that she was turned down by the Royal Society for fellowship of this august body. The records tell us that 41 Norfolk Square was in good repair, sported electric lighting, and had been laid out over five floors, plus a basement.

Over the years from 1883 until her death in 1923 Hertha registered 26 patents which legally staked her claim to the intellectual property of her inventions – these included five mathematical dividers, 13 patents on arc lamps and electrodes and eight on the propulsion of air.

These patents provide certainty that it was Hertha that had created them when in a male-dominated world it was so easy for mistakes to be made and the attribution to be wrongly accredited – something that could easily happen when a woman scientist was married to a more famous male scientist.

Impressive inventions
Hertha’s interest in vortices in water and air inspired the Ayrton fan, or flapper, a device that was eventually used in the trenches of the First World War to dispel poison and foul gas. To get the War Office to adopt it, however, required persistence on her part, taking a year from her offering it to them to it being used in the trenches in 1916.

Hertha Ayrton remained strongly committed to campaigns for female suffrage throughout her life, and became involved with the newly founded International Federation of University Women. Her death came in August 1923 when, having been bitten by an insect, she died of septicaemia.

Celebrating the life of a pioneering woman scientist for International Women’s Day, TheGenealogist’s records allowed us to find Hertha Ayrton in the Girton College Register 1869–1946, discover her in the 1906 Jewish Chronicle in the Newspaper and Magazine collection, locate her in census records and also in the Lloyd George Domesday property records from the 1910s. {