[BITList] Fwd: Life on the wire

[John Feltham]

G'day folks,

Begin forwarded message:


> To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
> visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2012-09-14
> 
> 
> 
> Ayrton,  William Edward  (1847-1908), electrical engineer and physicist, was born in London on 14 September 1847 to the accomplished barrister and linguist Edward Nugent Ayrton (1815-1873), and his wife, thereby joining a family long connected with law and music, and traditionally supportive of women's rights. William's uncle was Acton Smee Ayrton, a notably unpopular minister in Gladstone's first administration. William early embraced the study of mathematics in response to unsuccessful paternal efforts to make him learn a different language every day of the week. He performed outstandingly at University College School from 1859, especially in geometry, but still endeavoured to win classical prizes to please his father. Enrolling as a student at University College, London, in 1864, he won Andrews scholarships in mathematics in 1865 and 1866; in the latter year Ayrton became engaged to his cousin and fellow London student, Matilda Charlotte Chaplin, (1846-1883) [see Ayrton,  Matilda Charlotte], daughter of John Chaplin, a solicitor, and strongly encouraged her to train for the medical profession. In 1866-7 his talent was acknowledged by both George Carey Foster and Thomas Archer Hirst, whom he assisted in teaching experimental physics and mechanics respectively; Ayrton won praise too from Augustus De Morgan for his 'very scrutinizing turn'  (Solomon and Mather, 65) in pure mathematics.
> 
> Service in India
> 
> Ayrton's interest in the Indian government telegraph service developed when, as an undergraduate finalist, he was asked to prepare ten students for the service's examinations. He took such interest in this work that, though achieving only second-class BA honours, he excelled in the service's entrance examinations. The secretary of state for India rewarded him by financing a year's study of electrical theory and laboratory technique with Sir William Thomson at the department of natural philosophy, University of Glasgow, for 1867-8; Ayrton later described this experience as the inspiration of his life  (Ayrton, 'Kelvin in the sixties', 268). In the second service examination, Ayrton won a scholarship for study in Europe, so he then took the opportunity to gain practical experience of Post Office telegraph operations under William Preece at Southampton, and also at the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company works in London.
> 
> As fourth grade assistant superintendent in the Indian telegraph service from 1 September 1868 Ayrton worked with the electrical superintendent, C. Louis Schwendler, to develop a speedy method for locating the prevalent faults in the overland telegraph lines that were severely impeding colonial communications. Their solution was so effective that it pre-empted emergency proposals to lay an alternative coastal submarine cable around the subcontinent, Ayrton accordingly receiving rapid promotion. He returned briefly on leave to London to marry Matilda Chaplin, on 21 December 1871 at St Matthew's parish church, Bayswater, London, she having been controversially ejected from her medical studies at Edinburgh University. Returning to India without Matilda, Ayrton deputized for Schwendler during the latter's illness and strove to improve the telegraph network in the Bombay and Calcutta districts. On leave in England in 1872 to study the signalling problems caused by dampness in porcelain line insulators, he was elected a member of the Society of Telegraph Engineers (STE). Up to mid-1873 he also assisted Sir William Thomson and Fleeming Jenkin in testing a new transatlantic cable for the Great Western Telegraph Company at Millwall and later at Mitcham.
> 
> Japanese telegraphs
> 
> It was through the patronage of Thomson and W. J. M. Rankine at Glasgow University that Ayrton was offered a five-year contract as professor of physics and telegraphy at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo, to commence in autumn 1873. Even for the dynamic young Ayrton, who characteristically embossed his notepaper with the motto 'Energy', the task set him by the Meiji government of turning samurai warriors into westernized English-speaking telegraph engineers proved daunting. According to family legend, after two suicides and one murder in his first term in Tokyo, Ayrton discouraged ritual sword wielding by discharging a large revolver into the ceiling of his small laboratory. He was not a gentle teacher, being quick to criticize passivity and slowness, but won over his students by employing them in collective class researches, and, in contrast to many European colleagues, in maintaining that the Japanese were indeed capable of independent scientific work. Soon Ayrton secured unprecedentedly lavish finance from the Meiji exchequer for a palatial new laboratory, although the execution of his designs brought him into considerable conflict with government officials and workmen. When it opened in 1877 its facilities and equipment compared favourably with contemporary laboratories in Britain and served as a model for several later institutions.
> 
> After the birth of their daughter, Edith, in 1874, Matilda Ayrton continued to teach midwifery to Japanese women, and to entertain her husband's students and colleagues. The next significant arrival for Ayrton was John Perry who, soon after taking up the chair of mechanical engineering in 1875, began a long series of joint researches with him, Ayrton experimenting day and night at fever-heat. Ayrton's activities became yet more intensive after Matilda, showing early signs of tuberculosis, departed with Edith in early 1877 to complete her medical doctorate at the Sorbonne. More than twenty papers by Ayrton and Perry from the Tokyo laboratory were published in British and Japanese journals between 1877 and 1880; these included the first ever determination of the dielectric constant of gases, and studies on the viscosity of dielectrics, Japanese magic mirrors, seismology, telegraphic tests, and contact electricity-a paper on the latter winning praise, if not agreement, from James Clerk Maxwell in 1879. As a later colleague, H. E. Armstrong, said of their Japanese period: 'In those days what Ayrton and Perry did not know or do or claim to have done was not worth knowing, doing or claiming'  (Armstrong, 751).
> 
> Ayrton antagonized the Meiji administration by insisting that foreign supervision was necessary for the operation of its national telegraph system, and his contract at the Imperial College was not renewed. He nevertheless came to be venerated as the founder of electrical engineering in Japan, and 25 March is still acknowledged as 'Electricity day' to commemorate the occasion in 1878 on which he and his students opened the nation's first public electric lighting system at Tokyo's central telegraph station. Relinquishing to Perry his role as Japanese secretary for the STE, Ayrton became honorary editor of its Proceedings and chairman of its editorial committee for seven years after he returned to London in the autumn of 1878. Employed as an adviser to the telegraph company, Latimer, Clark, and Muirhead, he also soon took an interest in the newer technologies of electrical power and lighting. It was at the British Association meeting in Sheffield in 1879 that Ayrton first proposed alternate current transmission with step up and step down transformers as the safest and most economical means of distributing energy over long distances, a system almost universally adopted by the end of the twentieth century.
> 
> Teaching in London
> 
> His reputation as an expert on both technical and educational matters won him the City and Guilds professorship of physics (later electrical engineering) at Finsbury in the autumn of 1879. Ayrton's teaching for this archetypal experiment of British technical education was initially undertaken in rooms borrowed from the Cowper Street School. Here dozens of day students and hundreds of evening students each year received a training in electrical measurement and construction techniques; indeed so broad was the constituency of Ayrton's uniquely practical course that, on at least one occasion in 1886, about three-quarters of the audience at STE meetings were Ayrton's former students. The popularity of his evening classes caused such overcrowding in 1881, however, that the laboratories often descended into chaos; the situation improved markedly with the opening of the purpose-built Finsbury Technical College in 1883 on an adjacent site.
> 
> Ayrton's fertile collaborations with Perry continued in London much as in Tokyo, particularly after Perry became a Finsbury colleague in 1881, the year in which Ayrton became a fellow of the Royal Society. Their researches, and now also patents, focused very much on the practical applications of electromagnetism, the restless Ayrton generally posing the practical problem, the less worldly Perry suggesting a solution which was then criticized and improved by Ayrton until both were satisfied. After experimenting, like many contemporaries in 1880-81, with televisual techniques of 'seeing at a distance', they soon devoted most of their energy to developing portable measuring instruments for lighting engineers. In 1881 they christened their first proportional reading devices for gauging current and potential difference as 'ammeters' and 'voltmeters' respectively. Dissatisfied, however, with the need for users to multiply readings by a contingent and unstable calibration value, they accomplished the first direct-reading instruments by late 1883. These radically new devices yielded numerical values at a glance, using a range of innovative techniques such as a proportional spiral spring; these were very widely adopted but were soon improved beyond recognition by others in the electrical industry. Ayrton and Perry's unparalleled instrumental output during the period 1881-4 also included dynamometers, wattmeters, dispersion photometers, and an ingenious ohmmeter for measuring resistance. Their clock-based domestic electricity meter would have made them a substantial fortune from royalties when such devices came into wide use in the 1890s if the pair had bothered to renew their 1882 patent.
> 
> Ayrton and Perry also undertook much work in developing electric motors and new forms of traction. In November 1882 Ayrton startled London traffic by driving the first ever electric tricycle at the illegal speed of 9 miles an hour through the City, thereby demonstrating the virtues of batteries made by the Faure Accumulator Company (founded by Sir William Thomson and others) to which he and Perry were consultant engineers in 1882-3. Otherwise more sensitive to safety issues, the pair invented the block contact switching system in 1884 that automatically prevented two electric trains from travelling on the same stretch of track; on the grounds of safety and economy they also successfully campaigned for the introduction of insulated returns on electric railways. Ayrton and Perry assisted at trials of Fleeming Jenkin's telepherage system of telegraphing goods, later used in ski-lift (teleferique) systems round the world. Of their remarkably fruitful creative partnership at Finsbury, Perry later wrote: 'in that pioneering time, mere living was delightful'  (Perry, The Electrician, 188).
> 
> Domestic life for Ayrton in London was rarely joyful, however, since Matilda's health steadily deteriorated from 1879; despite wintering in the Alps with Edith, she died from tuberculosis in July 1883. He had by then already met Phoebe Sarah (Hertha) Marks (1854-1923) [see Ayrton,  (Phoebe) Sarah], a Cambridge-educated mathematician, at a party when taking an uncommon break from laboratory work in October 1882. She was the daughter of a jeweller, Levi Marks. About a year after Matilda's death, Hertha and 'Will' pursued their common interest in mathematics and electrical science, and she enrolled to study with him at Finsbury in October 1884. After a courtship that revolved around her critical proof-reading of his Practical Electricity: a Laboratory and Lecture Course (1887), the couple were married on 6 May 1885, Hertha having reconciled her orthodox Jewish mother to the union. Thereafter, the scientific careers of William and Hertha Ayrton were closely entwined yet complementary; he encouraged her scientific lecturing and research, while taking great care to establish the independence of her achievements. Their daughter, Barbara Bodichon Ayrton, was born on 3 April 1886; she married Gerald Gould in 1910, and as Barbara Gould became a Labour MP in 1945.
> 
> In the autumn of 1885 Ayrton began teaching in the imposing City and Guilds Central Institution at South Kensington, on the design of which he had been consulted by the architect, Alfred Waterhouse, four years previously. Initially Ayrton was reluctant to take up the professorship of physics (later electrical engineering) at the Central since the terms of appointment prohibited commercial consultancy; he accepted the position in the spring of 1884 only after Oliver Lodge had declined it. Finding the Central building still incomplete in October, for the 1884-5 session Ayrton taught a handful of Central students, along with Hertha, alongside their juniors at Finsbury. Undeterred by accusations of failure at the small number of students initially enrolling at his and colleagues' courses in South Kensington in 1885, Ayrton implemented a wide-ranging scheme of advanced training in the theory and practice of applied physics, illustrated sympathetically by Engineering in November and December 1888. So dedicated did Ayrton's steadily growing small band of students become to the pursuit of high precision in physical experiments that it was not unusual to find them working with him in the laboratory at night to avoid disturbance from passing traffic.
> 
> Just as he had in Japan, Ayrton invited his third-year students to participate with him and his assistant, Thomas Mather, in collective research projects. Many of these involved developing and applying new techniques of electrical measurement, notably the secohmmeter for measuring self-induction (1886-7), alternating current frequency measurers (1889), and shunt devices (1894); the proposal made by Ayrton and his student, H. C. Haycraft, that ammeters and voltmeters be used to expedite laboratory measurements caused great controversy, however, among physicists in 1894. After Perry broke off his partnership about 1890, finding Ayrton too far away and undertaking the lion's share of the work anyway, Mather became Ayrton's chief research collaborator. Remote from the industrial districts of London, and barred from much commercial consultancy, Ayrton's activities with Mather generally concerned instruments for the physics laboratory, most notably the enduringly popular Ayrton-Mather galvanometer. Cognate with this move, Ayrton invited Hertha to take over his researches on the resistance of the electric arc light after she ascertained errors in the results he had intended to announce at the Chicago International Exhibition of 1893. Following his earlier work for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) electrical standards committee (whose reassembly he had instigated in 1880), from 1896 Ayrton also collaborated with John Viriamu Jones on resistance standards and a high-precision form of Kelvin current balance in preparation for the opening of the National Physical Laboratory in 1902. Ayrton's individual contributions to research in physics and engineering were recognized in the award of royal medal by the Royal Society in 1901.
> 
> Thriving on disputation and possessing his father's analytical powers and legal acumen, Ayrton was long sought after as an expert witness, especially for patent work, although he accepted engagement only for cases that he considered just. Several times during the 1890s Ayrton used such skills to fend off plans to run an electric underground railway beneath Exhibition Road, collaborating with Arthur Rucker at the neighbouring Royal College of Science in 1890-91 to prove the magnitude of the electromagnetic threat thereby posed to their delicate laboratory researches. Ayrton prepared his many public speeches with the same rigour and meticulous accuracy as he conducted his laboratory work, and delivered them with considerable authority and panache. So popular, for example, was his lecture on 'The electric transmission of power' at the BAAS meeting at Bath in 1888, that by popular request he repeated it the following day. Similarly memorable was Ayrton's address as president of section A of the BAAS in 1898, his venture into the little charted territory of the physics of smell being inspired by the unusual olfactory sensitivities of the female Ayrtons.
> 
> Society activities
> 
> Ayrton was highly active in London's science and engineering societies, attending nearly all meetings of the Physical Society of London (a forebear of the Institute of Physics), and was its president in 1890-92. Often in attendance when electrical papers were presented to the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), it was none the less the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE-as the STE was retitled in 1888), that was the mirror of Ayrton's life. He contributed to thirty-two papers read before its meetings in the ICE's rooms, and spoke in well over a hundred discussions, thereby publicizing the stream of novel techniques and devices emanating from his Finsbury and South Kensington laboratories. So devoted was Ayrton to advancing the interests of the IEE that, after his return from Japan, he served on its council continuously (in a variety of capacities) for the rest of his life, acting as president in 1892-3. Especially concerned to improve the IEE's often precarious finances, as honorary treasurer from 1897 to 1902 he presided over a £10,000 increase in the institution's fund to build its own premises.
> 
> In 1899 Ayrton helped Hertha secure an opportunity to be the first woman to read a paper to the IEE, although it was solely on the merits of her researches on the hissing of the electric arc that she was elected its first female member that year. After publishing The Electric Arc in 1902, she deferred further research to tend to Will after his health collapsed; he was suffering from high blood pressure and insomnia brought on by overwork. Returning to the Central again in 1903, he was commissioned by the Admiralty to solve the problems of roaring and wandering in its arc lit searchlights; these were solved only after Hertha Ayrton showed that these adverse phenomena were analogous to the hissing of smaller arc lights. Frustrated that the Admiralty overlooked her major contribution to the reports, and supportive of work by their friends the Pankhursts against cognate injustices, both became members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1906. Strongly sympathetic to the militance of the suffragettes' campaign for women's enfranchisement, one of Ayrton's last public acts was to ride at the head of the WSPU's historic parade through Hyde Park in June 1908.
> 
> Despite recurrent ill health, Ayrton acted as dean of the City and Guilds College from 1904, overseeing its amalgamation into Imperial College in 1907, and somehow combined his college duties with several major trips abroad. In 1903 he participated in the Moseley commission to study education in the USA, and he went to southern Africa for the BAAS meeting in 1905, at which he was very critical of plans to install a hydroelectric plant at Victoria Falls to distribute power across the Cape. Such relentless activity further weakened his arterial system, however, and he died at home at 41 Norfolk Square, Hyde Park, London, on 8 November 1908. He was buried four days later at Brompton cemetery without religious rites, but with a choral service of sacred music, addresses being read by his son-in-law, Israel Zangwill, who had married his daughter Edith, and John Perry. A phenomenally energetic character, and often fearlessly critical-a quality some regarded rather as prickliness-the bearded and dashingly handsome Ayrton played a central role in the early history of electrical engineering, the development of the IEE, and in the promotion of women's rights. That he was far too busy-or latterly too ill-ever to write an autobiography might explain why so many of Ayrton's accomplishments that were recognized by his contemporaries have long been left undervalued by historians.
> 
> Graeme J. N. Gooday 
> 
> Sources  M. Soloman and T. Mather, 'William Edward Ayrton', The Central [City and Guilds College], 7 (1910), 65-91 + P. J. Hartog, 'Professor W. E. Ayrton: a biographical sketch', Cassier's Magazine, 22 (1902), 541-4 + The Electrician (5 Feb 1892), 346-7 + E. Sharp, Hertha Ayrton, 1854-1923: a memoir (1926) + J. P. [J. Perry], PRS, 85A (1911), i-viii + W. Mordey and J. Perry, '[Death of Professor W. E. Ayrton]', Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 42 (1908-9), 1-6 + J. Perry, 'Prof. William Edward Ayrton', Nature, 79 (1908-9), 74-5 + J. Perry, The Electrician (13 Nov 1908), 187-8 + W. E. Ayrton, 'Kelvin in the sixties', Popular Science Monthly, 27 (1908), 259-68 + 'A visit to Professor Ayrton's laboratory', Japan Weekly Mail (26 Oct 1878) + M. Ayrton, Fabrications (1972) + H. E. Armstrong, 'Prof. John Perry', Nature, 105 (1920), 751-2 + G. Gooday, 'The morals of energy metering', The values of precision, ed. M. N. Wise (1995), 239-82 + G. Gooday, 'Teaching telegraphy and electrotechnics in the physics laboratory', History of Technology, 13 (1991), 73-111 + Y. Takahashi, 'William Edward Ayrton at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo', IEEE Transactions on Education, 33 (1990), 198-205 + E. S. Pankhurst, The suffragette movement: an intimate account of persons and ideals (1931) + W. H. Brock, 'The Japanese connexion', British Journal for the History of Science, 14 (1981), 227-43 + private information (2004) + d. cert. + DNB + priv. coll.
> Archives Inst. ET, MS lectures | ICL, letters to S. P. Thompson + UCL, letters to Sir Francis Galton
> Likenesses  photograph, c.1867, repro. in Sharp, Hertha Ayrton, facing p. 114 · engraving, c.1892, repro. in The Electrician, facing p. 346 · W. & D. Downey, woodburytype photograph, NPG; repro. in W. Downey and D. Downey, The cabinet portrait gallery, 4 (1893) [see illus.] · photographs (with students), ICL
> Wealth at death  £43,590 2s. 2d.: probate, 5 Jan 1909, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
> 
> 
> 
> ========================================================================
> ©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
> http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/
> 
> We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
> receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
> LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with
> 
> signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L
> 
> in the body (not the subject line) of the message
> 
> OR
> 
> send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
> these messages.