{"id":7356,"date":"2026-09-03T12:18:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T02:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/?p=7356"},"modified":"2026-09-03T12:18:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T02:18:12","slug":"hertha-ayrton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/women-who-built-the-future\/hertha-ayrton\/","title":{"rendered":"HERTHA AYRTON"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>SHE USED SCIENCE TO PUSH POISON GAS OUT OF THE TRENCHES<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hertha Ayrton had already spent years breaking barriers before the First World War began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Born in 1854, she became a mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor and campaigner for women's rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her research into the <strong>electric arc<\/strong> brought international recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She became the <strong>first woman elected to the Institution of Electrical Engineers<\/strong> and later the first woman to receive the Royal Society's prestigious Hughes Medal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then war came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And science suddenly had a horrifying new problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Poison gas.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hertha turned research she had been conducting into the movement of air and developed an extraordinarily simple device: the <strong>Ayrton fan<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was manually operated and designed to move contaminated air and gas away from trenches and enclosed positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Getting the military establishment to listen to her wasn't easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the device was eventually adopted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thousands were sent to the Western Front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The number eventually reached around <strong>104,000<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Think about what that represents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A woman born in Victorian Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A physicist studying electricity and waves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Taking her understanding of science and turning it into a physical object that soldiers could hold in their hands while trying to survive one of the ugliest weapons ever introduced to warfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Brilliant engineering doesn't always need to be complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes it needs to solve the problem in front of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Women Who Built the Future \u2014 Steampunk Australia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Leading to <strong>Wrinkles in the Fabric with Dr Kathryn Spurling<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The women who shaped our world weren't standing on the sidelines of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They were building things in the middle of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The IET and Science Museum Group document Ayrton's engineering achievements and her wartime fan; the IET records an eventual military supply of approximately 104,000 fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The engineer who fought poison gas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-women-who-built-the-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7358,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7356\/revisions\/7358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}