Hertha Marks Ayrton Fellowship

This award was inaugurated in 2009 to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Panasonic Trust. Its purpose is to promote the further education of under-represented groups in the engineering profession by supporting a suitably qualified engineer to study a full-time Masters’ degree course specifically related to sustainable development or some other environmental technology.

The prestigious fellowship is awarded as part of the Trust’s annual Fellowship programme. Prospective applicants must therefore submit an application through this scheme to be considered for this award.  

• List of awardees

Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854 – 1923)

Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, Hertha attended Girton College, Cambridge where she passed the Mathematics Tripos in 1880. At that time Cambridge only awarded certificates and not degrees to women and so she completed an external examination and received her degree from the University of London in 1881.

In 1884 Hertha patented a line-divider, an engineering drawing instrument for dividing a line into any number of equal parts and for enlarging and reducing figures. She married William Ayrton in 1885 and went on to work with him on experiments in physics and electricity eventually becoming an acknowledged expert on the subject of the electric arc.

Hertha established a number of firsts for women in the engineering profession: she was the first to be elected a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1899. In the same year she was awarded a prize of £10 by the Institution for a paper on the hissing arc and allowed to read it at one of their meetings. In 1902 she was the first woman to be nominated as a Fellow of the Royal Society, although this was eventually blocked as she was married. However in 1904 Hertha became the first woman to read her own paper before the Royal Society and in 1906 received the Hughes Medal for experimental investigations into the electric arc and sand ripples.

Hertha’s personal and social values were greatly affected by personal experiences of poverty whilst growing up and discrimination as a woman. This led to her involvement with the Suffragette movement in the early 20th century. On her death in 1923 she left a legacy to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the one organisation who had welcomed her without prejudice.