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For the #SciArtSeptember prompt electrified: British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook). 
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#linocut #printmaking #sciart #WomenInSTEM #histstm #suffragette #MastoArt
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd of 8 children of a Polish Jewish immigrant watchmaker father & seamstress mother. After her father’s death she had to care for her younger siblings until she was 9 & her aunts invited her to join them at their school & her cousins introduced her to math & science. She attended Girton College & passed the Mathematical Tripos in 1880 but Cambridge wouldn’t grant women degrees. She passed the U of London exam and was given a BSc in 1881.
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She earned an income teaching embroidery & math. By 1884 she had her 1st patent for a line divider. She began evening classes on electricity with Prof Ayrton, trailblazer in engineering education at Finsbury Technical College. They married in 1885 & began collaborating on physics experiments. She began her own studies of the electric arc, solving the pressing problem of why they would flicker & hiss. Denied the right to present her paper to the 3/n
Royal Society due to her sex, renown engineer John Perry presented it on her behalf in 1901. After she published her textbook The Electric Arc, Perry proposed her as Fellow of the Royal Society but they rejected this (as she was married). By 1906 she won the Hughes Medal for her work on ripples & the electric arc.
She was deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement (& recruited her friend Marie Curie to the cause).
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She also invented a fan to protect WWI soldiers from poison gas and organized the production of 100,000 sent to the Western Front.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/966154261
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