Hertha Ayrton

Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks in 1854 and died in 1923, was an English electrical engineer, mathematician and inventor who worked at a time when women faced substantial formal barriers to engineering practice. She investigated why electric arcs, then widely used for public lighting, hissed and flickered, tracing the cause to oxygen reaching the carbon rods that formed the arc, and in 1899 became the first woman to read her own paper before the Institution of Electrical Engineers, on that same research. She patented a line-divider instrument in 1884, later studied ripple patterns formed in sand and water, and in 1906 became the first woman awarded the Royal Society's Hughes Medal.