Hertha Ayrton was multitalented mathematician and engineer who filed 26 patents, but ran up against prejudice against women scientists all her life. She married her electical engineering professor, who was in awe of her genius. William Ayrton distanced himself from Hetha's projects, lest he be given credit for what she did, yet that happened quite a few times anyway. She came up with enormously useful breakthroughs and inventions.
In 1893, Hertha took over a project from William investigating the cause of an irritating hissing noise coming from the electric arc, which powered lamps in London at the time. The lamps consisted of two carbon rods with a charge running between them that produced an arc of light in the space between the rods. Hertha was the first to figure out that this loud hissing was due to the oxidation of the carbon electrodes. If you simply enclosed the whole contraption in a bulb so that it was not exposed to open air, the hissing stopped.
Hertha’s remarkable work on the electric arc won the attention and admiration of contemporary scientists. She was the first woman invited to give a paper at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1899 and became the first woman elected to membership of that Institution. She spoke about her findings at the International Congress of Women in London and at the Electrical Congress in Paris. Her appearances convinced the British Association for the Advancement of Science to include women on scientific committees.
But even with all this success, she still faced barriers. In 1901, her paper on the electric arc was presented to the Royal Society by a man standing in for her, since women were not allowed admission. In 1902, her name was put forth for admission to the Royal Society but was rejected by a majority of votes because, simply, they were “of the opinion that married women are not eligible as fellows of the Royal Society.”
This decision held even after, in 1906, Hertha became the first woman — and only the second woman to date — to be awarded the Hughes Medal for outstanding research in the field of energy.
Naturally, Ayrton became a suffragist, and even led Marie Curie to come out of her laboratory long enough to support the cause. Read about Hertha Ayrton at Massive Science. Curiously, the article does not say much about her fan invented to clear WWI trenches, but you can read about it here. -via Damn Interesting