Hertha: From the mother Goddess to the mother of science

History of Hertha Ayrton is about a person who breaks and wishes to get free from the shackles of society in her epoch. Antagonist of the ideal, she lived chasing her goals and faithfull of her convictions. Professionally she was an engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor; in her personal life: wife, mother and feminist.
She was born in the womb of a Jewish family in England in 1854, under the name of Phoebe Sarah Marks. During her adolescence, she participated activately in the movements of the Women´s suffrage and also she from the religious beliefs of her family, declaring herself as agnostic. For that reason, she changed her name into Hertha, goddess of fertility and the Mother Earth according to Teutonic mithology. The election of the name was inspired by the poem of Algernon Charles Swinburne, where Hertha proclaims herself as life and mother, neither goddess nor creator, and, therefore, more authentically than any god.

She was able to go to the school thanks to her uncles and then she studied in Cambridge. However, she had to finish her studies in the University of London, due to Cambridge didn’t graduate women in those days. For that reason she had to make way to science through the invention, taking her to publish 26 patents. Great figures of Women´s suffrage from the time, like Louisa Goldsmid and Barbara Bodichon, financiered their researches letting her to produce many of these patents.
Her first transcendent invent was a caliper that made possible the division of a line in a wanted number of same parts. Despite the idea was conceived for the artists could the scale of their works, it gained a lot of interest due to its applications among architects and engineers.

Through the time, her inquietudes took path to physics, and during her studies in the electricity field, she met to her professor William Edward Ayrton, widower whom she married later.
Result of those studies, emerged some of the researches she did about the electric arc. And they are the ones which led to greater acceptance in the scientific society. The electric arc is a discharge that occurs between two electrodes in such a way that light and heat are generated. Although today the electric arc is used in welders, at that time, it was used as a source of artificial light of great intensity, much brighter than incandescent bulbs, and it is in this application that she proposed her improvements. Hertha’s patents made it possible to make electric arcs more stable, durable and silent by discovering how factors such as voltage, the distance between the electrodes and the oxygen that comes into contact with the electrodes affected their operation.
The findings were published in The Hissing of the Electric Arc in 1901.

She was the first woman allowed to give a talk at the IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) and also the first one to be accepted as a member. Instead, despite the interest it caused, she was not allowed to exhibit her work in person at the Royal Society – a man had to do it for her – nor was she admitted as a fellow, even though the issue was on the table.
During these investigations, she invented a fan capable of recreating characteristic desert air eddies. Although it was not very successful, Hertha proposed that it be used during the First World War to dissipate gas, a product of new warfare technologies: chemical warfare.

In addition to her prolific scientific-inventor career, Hertha continued to participate in feminist movements and openly support women’s suffrage. She supported and housed many women under her roof and position, including Marie Curie when it was questioned whether her work was her husband’s product rather than hers.

In short, she was a woman who was interested in art, she wanted to give light to the world and understand its form. He took care of and brought forward his children, his friends and his ideas. She lived by honoring the name she chose for herself.