Hertha Marks Ayrton

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Hertha Marks Ayrton

British physicist

Also known as: Phoebe Sarah Marks

Written by Erik Gregersen

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Hertha Marks Ayrton

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Category: Science & Tech

Original name in full:: Phoebe Sarah Marks

Born:: April 28, 1854, Portsea, Eng.

Died:: Aug. 26, 1923, North Lancing, Sussex (aged 69)

Subjects Of Study:: electric arc

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Hertha Marks Ayrton (born April 28, 1854, Portsea, Eng.—died Aug. 26, 1923, North Lancing, Sussex) British physicist who was the first woman nominated to become a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1861 Marks’s father died, and two years later she went to live with her aunt, author Marion Moss Hartog, who ran a school in London. When she was a teenager, Marks changed her first name to Hertha, after the German earth goddess of Algernon Swinburne’s poem “Hertha” (1869), and renounced Judaism to become an agnostic. In 1876 Marks entered Girton College at the University of Cambridge, where she ...(100 of 616 words)

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