December i, 1923] 



NATURE 



801 



would seem to have been derived from the mother's 

 side. 



At about the age of fifteen, Sarah Marks became 

 acquainted with Madame Bodichon, a well-to-do lady, 

 strong on the women's rights question, who sent her 

 young friend to Girton College, Cambridge. Appar- 

 ently, she then changed her name to Hertha. She 

 took honours in mathematics. She is credited with 

 the invention, during the period, of a sphygmograph 

 and also of an instrument for rapidly dividing up a 

 line into a number of equal parts. Through Madame 

 Bodichon, she became acquainted with George Eliot 

 and several other people of distinction. In 1884 she 

 entered the Finsbury Technical College. I remember 

 her coming. She not only came but was seen and soon 

 conquered — Ayrton ; and they married. As sole issue 

 they had a daughter, who has her father's gift of 

 tongue ; she married a Christian, whilst his daughter 

 by his first wife married a Jew. I often told him that 

 he and his wife were an ill-assorted couple : being both 

 enthusiastic and having cognate interests, they con- 

 stantly worried each other about the work they were 

 doing. He should have had a humdrum wife, " an 

 active, useful sort of person," such as Lady Catherine 

 recommended Mr. Collins to marry, who would have 

 put him into carpet-slippers when he came home, fed 

 him well and led him not to worry either himself or 

 other people, especially other people ; then he would 

 have lived a longer and a happier life and done far 

 more effective work, I believe. 



Under her husband's inspiration, Mrs. Ayrton soon 

 entered upon the study of the electric arc. Her work 

 is recorded in the book on the subject which she 

 published in 1902, in part a reprint of papers sub- 

 mitted to the Royal and other Societies. She was 

 an indefatigable and skilful worker. Whatever the 

 absolute value of her observations, her husband and 

 his good friend Perry were the last not to make the 

 most of her achievement, so probably the scientific 

 halo with which they and others who fancied that 

 women could be as men surrounded her was over- 

 painted. Most of us thought, at the time, that they 

 were ill advised in preferring her claim to the Royal 

 Society ; the nomination came to nothing on legal 

 grounds. She was, however, elected into the Institu- 

 tion of Electrical Engineers and at her death was its 

 only lady member. She also engaged in an inquiry 

 into the formation of sand ripples and this led her, 

 early in the War, when chlorine was first used as poison 

 gas, to develop a fan-device for waving back the fumes. 

 There is little doubt that she took too high a view 

 of the practical value of the invention and was un- 

 warrantably aggrieved at its rejection by the military 

 authorities. She was awarded the Hughes Medal by 

 the Royal Society in 1906. 



Mrs. Ayrton was a very striking woman in appear- 

 ance and of considerable personal charm, full of 

 common sense ; this kept her from being a militant 

 suffragist, though she promoted the cause in every 

 possible way. 1 never saw reason to believe that she 

 was original in any special degree ; indeed, I always 

 thought that she was far more subject to her husband's 

 lead than either he or she imagined. Probably she 

 never had a thorough scientific equipment ; though a 

 capable worker, she was a complete specialist and had 



NO. 2822, VOL. I 12] 



neither the extent nor depth of knowledge, the penetra- 

 tive faculty, required to give her entire grasp of her 

 subject. Ayrton himself, though a genius, was in no 

 slight measure partial in his interests : by heredity 

 literary and artistic, educated intensively in the 

 classical school, a born actor and therefore a good 

 lecturer and public speaker, impelled into science 

 through contact with Sir William Thomson, he was a 

 worker chiefly at its technical and commercial fringe 

 rather than in its depths : so he was not a good 

 judge of his wife's scientific ability. His partner 

 Perry was the solid member of the firm. In fine, my 

 conclusion is, that das ewig Weibliche was in no way 

 overcome in Mrs. Ayrton : nor could we wish that 

 a thing so infinitely precious should be : she was 

 a good woman, despite of her being tinged with the 

 scientific afflatus. Henry E. Armstrong. 



Dr. J. E. Stead, F.R.S. 



By the death of Dr. John Edward Stead, on October 

 31, at the age of seventy-two. Great Britain has lost 

 one of its most famous metallurgists, a man who 

 played a very honourable and a leading part in the 

 development of scientific metallurgy, and is not un- 

 worthy to be ranked with the great names of John 

 Percy, Lowthian Bell, and Roberts- Austen. 



Dr. Stead was born in 185 1 and was a younger 

 brother of the late W. T. Stead. After the usual 

 period spent at school, he was for a time an evening 

 student at the Owens College, Manchester, in the early 

 days at Quay Street. From there he passed to a 

 steel works in the Middlesbrough district, where he 

 served his apprenticeship on the practical side of 

 iron and steel smelting, but he was only nineteen 

 when he entered the laboratories of Pattinson, a con- 

 sulting chemist and metallurgist in the district. Later 

 the two men entered into partnership under the title 

 of Pattinson and Stead, and he remained identified 

 with the firm for the remainder of his life, a period 

 of about fifty-two years in all. He became one of 

 the best -known analysts in the north of England, 

 and one can only conjecture how many large contracts 

 were signed on the basis of Stead's analyses. 



An incident related to the writer some twenty years 

 ago by Dr. Stead will give some idea of how this man, 

 with a very slight amount of what would be termed 

 academic training, rose to a position of great power 

 and trust, not merely in the Cleveland district where 

 he lived, but also in the iron and steel industry of the 

 whole country. He found on one occasion, in the 

 early days of his association with Pattinson, that he 

 had sent an incorrect analysis to one of the firm's 

 clients. Without hesitation he wrote to explain that 

 he had made a mistake and substituted the correct 

 figures. The client in question was exceedingly angry, 

 not because he had received an incorrect analysis, 

 but because Stead had admitted that he had made a 

 mistake. Apparently this is a serious matter where 

 business is concerned. Stead retorted, " If I was un- 

 willing to admit that I made mistakes, you would 

 never know whether a result I sent you was correct 

 or not." This was a new point of view, and the client 

 was so much impressed by it, that he sent all his 



