Hertha Ayrton was born into a poor Jewish family in Portsmouth , but good fortune led to a meeting with the great feminist campaigner, Barbara Bodichon. Encouraged to attend university, Hertha was one of the earliest women students at Cambridge where she studied physics. After marrying her professor, she devoted her studies to electricity and was soon carrying out pioneering work on the electric arc.
She became the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and was invited to read papers at the Royal Society, though as a married woman, she wasn't eligible for membership. After becoming a suffragette in 1906, she had to juggle her time between research and protest. During WWI she invented the Ayrton Fan, to dispel poisonous gases in the trenches.
