You’re standing in a street in a British town in the late Victorian era,
the old Queen is still on the throne. It’s a time between the old world and the new.
It’s a winter’s night – cold and moonless. You should also imagine one more thing –
there’s electric street light, high off the ground the lamp is flickering and hissing.
Underneath the street light stands a woman.
She has an intelligent, determined face and curly hair pinned in a mound on top of her head.
She’s staring up at the electric light – it’s an arc lamp, a wisp of lightning crackling between
two electrodes. She’s listening to the hiss, noticing that when the ark buzzes, the light dims.
She knows those lights throw off sparks, they can start fires. She’s imagining a future where
electric light could be bright, even and safe. She’s thinking: “How can I make that happen?”
Hertha Marks Ayrton had always had to be ingenious.
Born into a Jewish family in Portsmouth in 1854, her father was dead by the time she was seven
leaving the family with little more than a pile of debt but Hertha Marks Ayrton was what
you might call a bright spark and always inventive. She was stubborn, tomboyish and outspoken.
Every evening for a year after a full day of work Marks Ayrton studied for
the Cambridge University entrance exam. She passed in 1874 with honours in mathematics and English.
She was an astonishingly hard worker and made her first recorded invention – a sphygmomanometer
that would draw a graph of a person’s pulse. After graduating she carried on teaching and inventing.
In 1888 she delivered a series of six hugely popular public lectures on electricity,
in which she held out to her audience a compelling vision of an electrified future.
Electric arc lights were used in street lamps, they provided incredibly bright lightning in a bottle
but they were volatile and poorly understood. To make them safe and reliable,
someone needed to invent a way to precisely control their dangerous temperamental power so Hertha Marks Ayrton
asked herself: why did arc lights flicker and how could she stop them doing it?
She put together an intricate and comprehensive set of experiments to test out every possibility.
She often had to hold the arc steady by hand for four or five hours to get consistent results
and Marks Ayrton deduced the electric arc hissed when oxygen was present
in small craters in the carbon surface. The hiss was the sound of the carbon oxidising.
To stop this happening, Hertha Marks Ayrton invented and patented a new kind of carbon rod
coated with a copper film to stop oxygen reaching the sides of the electrodes. As she predicted this
gave a steadier arc a more dependable light. Marks Ayrton wanted to make street lights safer
and she did. The arc light helped create a new after dark world of working, playing,
shopping and exploring. She ended up sparking life into detonators, 3d printing and maybe one day
rocket launchers for space travel. Hertha Marks Ayrton tamed lightning – the ark that burned so
brightly between the electrodes of those early lights was uncontrollable. A wisp of lightning,
if you like. Marks Ayrton got that lightning under her control and gave it to the world.
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