landofnowhere | Where's all the steampunk Hertha Ayrton? (Reply)

Vaguely prompted by

skygiants's post on Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's race around the world, I've been thinking about badass women of the late 19th century, and remembered Hertha Ayrton, who I think should be used in steampunk way more than she is.

"Who is Hertha Ayrton?" you are probably asking. I actually didn't know about her until I went to a museum exhibit fairly recently.

Hertha Ayrton:

was born Phoebe Marks into a large and impoverished Jewish immigrant family in London

moved in with her aunt, who owned a school where she "established her reputation both as a scholar and a fighter in the cause of justice, once going on hunger strike for two days when wrongly accused of some misdemeanour"

changed her name to Hertha after the protagonist of a popular feminist novel

worked as a governess briefly, but then was prevailed upon by suffragette friends to study at Cambridge, where she started the math club *and* a womens' fire brigade

after that, she taught, patented her first invention, and took evening classes on electricity, where she met her husband, an electrical engineer.

when the only copy of one of her husband's papers caught fire, and he couldn't be bothered to write it up again, she took over the project

she proceeded to write 12 papers on the electric arc lamp, which succeded gas lamps as the next big thing in outdoor lighting.

for this work she was nominated to the Royal Society, but married women were deemed ineligible.

However the Royal Society did allow her to read a paper at their meeting.

That paper was on her new interest, turbulence, ripples, and vortices in air and water. Nowadays we know that turbulence is hard because Chaos Theory, so her mathematical methods weren't up to the task, but her experiments were of very high quality.

When WWI hit, she applied her knowledge of turbulence to the war effort! She developed the Ayrton fan (historical footage of one in action) which was designed to help clear poison gases from the trenches.

She had some trouble convincing the men at the War Office to use her invention, but ultimately 100,000 Ayrton fans were shipped over.

There was some controversy as to exactly how effective these fans were. Some soldiers at the front expressed the opinion they were useless devices sent over by people unfamiliar with the real conditions, and mainly useful for kindling. She complained that her critics weren't using the fans properly and had needlessly endangered lives because they were unwilling to trust a woman's invention.

She was a good friend of Marie Curie and a lifelong feminist. When Marie's invention of radium was misattributed to her husband Pierre, Hertha commented: "errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat."

And yet, despite all this, I've never seen her represented in fiction, even though she seems a natural fit for steampunk. She got a Google doodle, and there are a couple steampunk-themed games that have her as a character, but really, that's it. But there are so many possibilities: arc lamp pyrotechnics! action scenes in the air/water where she harnesses the power of vortices! alternate history where Ayrton fans were in widespread use! And to be honest, I'm getting a little tired of Ada Lovelace being the one female historical character in Victorian-set fantasy, and would like to see more representation of women who grew up in humbler backgrounds.

Though, actually, when researching this I learned that there is actually *one* novel based on Hertha Ayrton's life: The Call by her stepdaughter Edith Ayrton Zangwill about a woman scientist and suffragist. I should read it and see if it's any good!