Trailblazers of diversity

In the years between 1637, when Amye Everard Ball was the first woman to apply for an English patent and 1898, when Hertha Ayrton became the first female member of a British engineering institution, numerous women took out patents, developed and adapted technologies and contributed to innovations. Ayrton’s membership of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE, now Institution of Engineering and Technology, IET) in 1898 marks not the start of women’s contributions to British engineering, but an important step in their efforts to take their place alongside men in the engineering profession.

Although she was already a patent holder before she married her former teacher William Aryton, Hertha’s research career benefitted from the marriage and she established her reputation through work on the ‘hissing’ of the electric arc and on ripples and vortices. These were the topics when she became the first women to deliver a lecture at the IEE in 1899 and at the Royal Society in 1904. The award of the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1906 cemented her reputation and she continued her work after William’s death, as well as being an active campaigner for women’s suffrage.