William Edward Ayrton , F.R.S. F.R.S.

William Edward Ayrton

1901 Census:

High Mead, Woodham Walter (Parish of St Michael), Essex [RG13 Piece 1690 Folio 84 Page 8]:

Phoebe S Ayrton Wife Mar 46 Electrician Born Hants, Portsea
Edith C Ayrton Dau S 26 Private means Born Japan (British subject)
Barbara B Ayrton Dau S 14 Private means Born London
Israel Zangwill Visitor S 37 Man of letters Own account Born London
Amelia Hollmann Servant S 34 Domestic Born London
Winifred Bowron Servant S 17 Domestic Born London


The Atheneum Nr 4429, 14 November 1908.

PROF W.E. AYRTON, F.R.S.

We regret to record the death of well-known engineer, Professor William Edward Ayrton, F. R. S., Dean of the Central Technical College, South Kensington, which occurred on Sunday last at his house in Norfolk Square [Nr 41]. He was born in 1847, and was educated at University College School and at University College, London. At the age of 20, he entered the Indian Government Telegraph service, where he is so distinguished himself that five years later, after having returned to England to superintend the making of the Great Western Telegraph Cable, he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy and Telegraphy at the Imperial College of Engineering at Tokyo. Here he remained until his second return to England, six years later, when he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City & Guilds of London Technical Institute in Finsbury. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1881. In 1887 Ayrton published his "Practical Electricity," which he described as a "Laboratory and Lecture Course for First-Year Students of Electrical Engineering," and which was perhaps the first work impressing upon beginners in electricity the necessity of a rational method of electrical measurement. The success of the book was such as to astonished the author, and it has since been through 10 editions, and has been more than once rewritten. He became President of The Physical Society in 1891, and of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1892; presided over the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association in 1888, and delivered lectures for the same body on the visit to Johannesburg in 1905. He was transferred to the Central Technical College on its opening at South Kensington in 1884, was elected its Dean in 1904, and remained in that position to his death. He leaves a widow, Mrs Hertha Ayrton whom he married soon after his first appointment to the Chair of Electrical Engineering and who assisted him in many of his experiments, being herself the author of a book on "The Electrical Arc" and many papers on scientific subjects; while his daughter Edith married in 1903 Mr Israel Zangwill, the novelist.

Professor Ayrton was throughout his life a resolute and ardent experimenter, and his improvements in scientific instruments have been very successful, the most famous of them being, perhaps, the galvanometers which he invented in conjunction with Professor Perry and Mr Thomas Mather, F. R. S.. He was also an eloquent and occasionally humorous lecturer, and an excellent teacher of electrical engineering, many of those who have since risen to eminence in that essentially modern profession having studied under him. His health, which was always delicate, and had been declining for some time before his death, was doubtless the reason why he did not develop a greater literary output.


Press cutting, un-named and undated but perhaps from the Times Engineering Supplement:

Death of Professor Ayrton

"The Times" of this morning says: -- We regret to announce that Professor Ayrton, the well-known physicist and electrician, died at his residence in Norfolk Square on Saturday morning. William Edward Ayrton was the son of a barrister, and was born in London on September 14, 1847. He was educated at University College School and University College, and after a brilliant career at the latter institution obtained the first place in 1867 in the examination for the Indian Government Telegraph Service. For a short time he studied electrical engineering under Lord Kelvin, and in 1868 went out to Bengal as Assistant Electrical Superintendent of the Telegraph Department, being promoted to the position of Superintendent in 1871. During his term of service he took part in introducing over the whole Telegraph system in British India a method of locating a fault in a telegraph line by means of tests at one end. In 1872 he was sent to England on a special mission to superintend manufacture of the Great Western Telegraph cable under its engineers, Lord Kelvin and Professor Jenkins, and in 1873 he returned to the East, not to India, but as Professor of Physics and Telegraphy at the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. There he remained for six years, but in 1879 he came back to England and took up the post of Professor of Applied Physics at the Sainsbury College of the City & Guilds of London Technical Institute. Finally in 1884 he was transferred to the Central College in Exhibition Road as Professor of Electrical Engineering, a position which he retained up to the present time.

In scientific literature Ayrton's name is closely associated with that of Professor Perry. This association dated from 1875, when Professor Perry went out to Tokyo to fill the Chair of Engineering at the College. The collaboration of the two men began almost immediately, and indeed such was the activity of the combination that Clerk Maxwell is said to have jestingly remarked that the electrical centre of gravity had been shifted to Japan. Their joint investigations gave rise to numerous papers on various branches of electrical science, and were fruitful not merely on the theoretical side. What they achieved in the development of the practical application of electricity was perhaps even more remarkable. Visitors to the Science Hall at the Franco-British Exhibition had the opportunity of examining the evolution of the wonderful series of instruments dating from 1881 to 1889, by which they gave the electrical engineer the means of measuring almost every electrical quantity he has to deal with, and which were the only electrical meters that were awarded prizes at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Then they acted as joint engineers to the Faure Accumulator Company almost from its inception, and in that capacity they lighted the Grand Hotel at Charing Cross with electricity in 1883.

Strong believers in the future of electric traction, they demonstrated the application of electrical power to tramway's, devising among other things a surface contact or "stud" system, and they shared with Fleeming Jenkin the credit of perfecting his sister of telpherage which was put into operation at Glynde in Sussex. Their work in these directions resulted in taking out of a large array of patents and the publication of numerous scientific and technical papers. Ayrton's name in many cases alone, in others joined with that of other investigators, figures on probably 150 memoirs or more. The Royal Society, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1881, recognised his services to electrical science by awarding him a Royal medal in 1901, and among other honours he served as President of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association in 1888, of the Physical Society in 1890 -- 91, and of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1892. His book on "Practical Electricity" has come through many editions, and been invaluable to thousands of learners, while his personal example and instruction has inspired many pupils to serious and productive research. He was a frequent contributor to "The Times" Engineering Supplement. Professor Ayrton married in 1883 Hertha, daughter of Levi and Alice Marks, who is well-known for her researches on the electric are, and has the distinction of being the first and only lady member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. Their daughter married Mr Israel Zangwill, the novelist, in 1903.


Letter to The Times of Wednesday 11 November 1908 by Israel Zangwill:

Sir,

Allow me to correct a slight inaccuracy in the concluding sentence of your obituary notice of Professor Ayrton. Mrs Zangwill was his daughter by his first marriage with Matilda Charlotte Chaplin, M.D., B.Sc. Mrs Chaplin was his cousin, and they had several distinguished uncles, including the Right Hon. Acton Smee Ayrton, the well-known member of Gladstone's Cabinet.

Indeed, the long succession of Ayrton celebrities through more than two centuries might well supply Galton with a valuable chain of evidence. Miss Chaplin, whose brilliant career is dealt with at length in the "Dictionary of National Biography" was a pioneer of medical education and practice for women, indeed a martyr to the cause, for so fiercely and unchivalrously was the war against women carried on that she died on the battlefield in the flower of her life.

It is characterestic of Professor Ayrton that in both his marriages he was guided by the same affinity for intellectual womanhood, and although the present Mrs Ayrton was in the same line of work as himself he did not, like some men of science, absorb her life and her results into his own. On the contrary he exerted himself to have her care.er recognized as separate and individual. This was his real contribution to the cause of woman suffrage.

May I add that there was one other particular in which Professor Ayrton set an example to men of science. He was scrupulously careful not to lend the weight of his reputation to any doubtful scientific projects of a commercial order; indeed, he went out of his way to draw attention to what he considered the dubiousness of certain schemes, and in his very last days he was occupied with the thought of saving the small investor from the pseudo-scientific shark. Quite recently strong temptations were held out to him to bless a grandiose colonial enterprise, but to the disappointment of the promoters he cursed instead.

Finally, I should like to say that your admirable summary of his scientific achievements by no means exhausts the man. He wrote - as your own columns have borne witness - a nervous English of a lucidity and sparkle rare even among men of letters. His lectures, enhanced by his rare personal beauty, were fascinating in form and delivery, and his marvellous memory could dispense upon occasion with even the briefest note. In private life he overflowed with wit, humour and geniality; he was an excellent amateur actor, and even conjurer, and he was vastly exercised to unveil the methods of so-called thought-readers. He was also exceedingly fond of music, and although no form of current religion appealed to his intellect, he found in oratorio satisfaction for his emotions. Extremely economical by dint of his early strugles, he yet allowed himself the extravagance of blank cheques to friends in distress. The energy of America and Americans was one of his greatest admirations - alas! - a more than American energy was the cause of his premature breakdown. But few men have crowded more into sixty years than this literally restless worker, who, apart from his individual inventions, practically created the whole idea and system of electrical technical training, and has left a school of disciples to carry all over the world the fruits of his labours and the inspiration of his devotion to science, truth, purity, and honour.

Yours obediently, ISRAEL ZANGWILL Far End, East Preston, Worthing, Nov 10.


Funerals: From The Times(?) of unknown date:

The funeral of Professor Ayrton took place yesterday at Brompton Cemetery. There was no service in the ordinary sense of the word. Several hundreds of persons including many well-known scientific men, stood with heads uncovered in the enclosure, which was roped off.................. Following the coffin were Mr. and Mrs. Israel Zangwill, Miss Margaret Ayrton, Mrs. Charles, Mr. and Mrs. Holroyd Chaplin, and several nephews and nieces..... There were also present Sir James Dewar, Dr, Ewing, Director of Naval Instruction; Dr. Bovey, rector of the Imperial College [followed by many others in the scientific world].

Professor Perry delivered a funeral oration. He said it was against Professor Ayrton's wishes to have any religious ceremony ....... because he hought we had no right to try to express, through any simple formula, the awful and unknown conditions of death and life. Ayrton was a scientific man, and, if there was one principle which more than another was fostered by scientific pursuits it was that the most important work could only be done when there was no expectation of much reward. There were some people who owed all their happiness and distinction to Ayrton's large generosity with his money ...............

Mr. Israel Zangwill said that they were thinking that day less of the work than of the man .................. Their friend's passion for justice, combined with his feeling of many incidents of painful injustice which they saw upon this planet, kept him from adopting any religious formula. It might be too that his early work in Kapan, by revealing to him the soul of agreat self-sacrificing people, whose ideas of religious feeling were so urrerly alien to our own, made it impossible for him to find expression in any one code or creed. Mainly he was of a religious temperament - witness his love of religious music such as they had brought to his graveside because they knew it would please him. His life was full of those virtues which are usually classed as religious. His honesty was such that it rode triumphant over all those temptations which were dangled before the scientific expert by the too expert man of business. His passion for justice caused him to maintain strongly that women workeres were entitled to academic rewards; that science was of no sex and chivalry did not mean the opening to ladies of drawing-room doors while they closed to them the doors of scientific society ............

The opening meeting of the 38th session of the Institution of Electrical Engineers was last night adjourned ..... owing to the death of Professor Ayrton. Mr W.M.Morley, the new president, spoke of the late professor's achievments in electrical science. He had been connected with the Institute almost from its inception....... Professor Perry said that Professor Ayrton's methods had been adopted in every college in this country, not only in connection with electricity but also with mechanics. His numerous investigations added power to electrical science, and they belonged to its history. He was strong mentally until the end, and that memoir of Lord Kelvin which he wrote, and which was published in The Times Engineering Supplement soon after Lord Kelvin's death, was alone worthy of Goldsmith or Lamb.............

From The Athenaeum No. 429, 14 November 1908

We regret to record the death of well-known engineer, Prof William Edward Ayrton, F. R. S., Dean of the Central Technical College, South Kensington, which occurred on Sunday last at his house in Norfolk Square. He was born in 1847, and was educated at University College School and at University College, London. At the age of 20, he entered the Indian Government telegraph service, where he so distinguished himself that five years later, after having returned to England to superintend the making of the Great Western Telegraph Cable, he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy and Telegraphy at the Imperial College of Engineering at Tokyo. Here he remained until his second return to England, six years later, when he was appointed Prof of Electrical Engineering at the City & Guilds of London Technical Inst in Finsbury. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1881.
In 1887 Ayrton publish his "Practical Electricity," which he described as a "Laboratory and Lecture Course for First-Year Students of Electrical Engineering," and which was perhaps the first work impressing upon beginners in electricity the necessity of a rational method of electrical measurement. The success of the book was such as to astonish the author, and it has since being through ten editions, and has been more than once rewritten. He became President of the Physical Society in 1881, and of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1892; presided over the Mathematical and Fiscal Section of the British Association in 1888, and delivered lectures for the same body on the visit to Johannesburg in 1905. He was transferred to the Central Technical College on its opening at South Kensington in 1884, was elected its Dean in 1904, and remained in that position to his death.

He leaves a widow, Mrs Hertha Ayrton, whom he married soon after his first appointment to the Chair of Electrical Engineering and who assisted him in many of his experiments, being herself the author of a book of "The Electric Arc" and many papers and scientific subjects; while his daughter Edith married in 1903 Mr Israel Zangwill, the novelist. Prof Ayrton was throughout his life a resolute and ardent experimenter, and his improvements in scientific instruments have being very successful, the most famous of them being, perhaps, the galvanometers which he invented in conjunction with Prof Perry and Mr Thomas Mather F. R. S.. He was also an eloquent and occasionally humorous lecturer, and an excellent teacher of electrical engineering, many of those who have since risen to eminence in that essentially modern profession having studied under him. His health, which was always delicate, and had been declining for some time before his death, was doubtless the reason why he did not develop a greater literary output.


Philip Ray-Jones writes:

My grandmother (Irene Kate Pearce) told me that she was whipped at school for telling lies, because she said (quite correctly) that the light could be turned on in her cousin's (Prof Ayrton's) house by using a switch.

From "Hertha Ayrton: A Memoir" by Evelyn Sharp, publ Edward Arnold, London, 1926:

p.115: "Mrs Ayrton Chaplin, [Edith Elizabeth Pyne], a cousin by marriage of Professor Ayrton and sister-in-law of his first wife, mentions ... in some notes she gave the present writer on Miss [Hertha] Marks, whose intimate friend she became "Hertha's love of beauty..... must have been much satisfied by the unusual beauty of her husband as a young man in his prime....... She also enjoyed the beauty of her step-daughter, and though she was glad of the same gift for her own daughter she never, so far as I know, thought of comparing the two half-sisters......"......... Another mutual acquaintance...... has told me of Hertha's arresting personality and interesting conversation, adding with reference to Professor Ayrton: "I always liked being taken to dinner by him; he had such courtly manners, and you could not feel shy with him. If you were shy, he did all the talking and put you at your ease." [But] It is possible that some of his pupils did not find...... themselves at ease with him; for, as one of them has told me, "The trouble with the Professor was that he never realized how clever he was, and so he expected far too much from ordinary people........... when absorbed in an experiment [he] would not leave it for meals.... his wife was the only person who could make him remember [that] he required food and sleep."

p.117: "He knew well enough how readily any success that [Hertha] achieved would be attributed to [him].

pp.160-165: November 1901: Hertha wrote to Edie: "Isn't it delightful about the gold medal for Father? Mr Swan was putting him forward, and Professor Perry was backing him up, so to say; and we heard he had little chance, as the Council wanted to give it to some younger man. So late as yesterday, Professor Perry evidently feared Father was not going to get it, because he wrote him a most charming letter which arrived this morning, saying that Father's work deserved, not one medal only, but many medals. However, last night, a telegram came, signed Swan and Perry, congratulating him on having got it, so that's all right. Father won't show that he is pleased; but he is - very. More pleased at Professor Perry's letter than at the medal, I think!"

At about the same time Hertha failed to be admitted to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, because Counsel's opinion was that it was doubtful if the Charters (dated 1662, 1663, and 1669) covered women at all, and certainly not married women. The Royal Society could have applied for a Supplemental Charter to get over the difficulty, but didn't do so. So it was curious, when the matter was raised again in1922, following the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act concerned with the enfranchisement of women, that the Royal Society again took Counsel's opinion, and were eventually informed that women were, as they had thought, eligible for election under the existing Charters!

p.206: On his death in November 1908 the official organ of the Women's Social and Political Union (Votes for Women) wrote of him: "His appreciation of and practical sympathy with the work for woman suffrage was at all times freely demonstrated, and the loyal support and hearty encouragement which was his unfailing attitude towards the leaders of the WSPU, whose personal friend he was, will be sadly missed by them. The world will be the poorer, the cause of humanity, with which the women's movement is indissolubly bound up, immeasurably the loser, by he death of the great and good man whose loss we deplore so sincerely and truly today."

Alan Ray-Jones writes:

My mother Effie Ray-Jones (nee Pearce) said that he was the illegitimate son of Frederick Ayrton and a Cornish fisherman's daughter. But she surely meant his brother Edward Nugent, not Frederick? William Ayrton was born in London - where? I have been unable to find any record of his birth, though the date is known, but I can obtain his marriage certificates, which should give his parents' names but may not, since illegitimacy was such a stigma. Matilda Adriana Chaplin's diary entry for 4 December 1873 reads: "Wrote to Will to tell him of his dear Father's death". Edward had died on 28 November (Frederick also died in 1873, but in June). There are several references in the diary connecting William to Edward, and none connecting him to Frederick. My mother said that, despite his fame and success in life, Professor Ayrton was not included in Nugent Chaplin's book on the family because he was illegitimate. From Raymond Airton, Chartered Electrical Engineer undertaking a One Name study of the Ayrtons/Airtons

"As a student I was aware of the work done by William Edward Ayrton and his colleague John Perry in London, in proposing Power Transmission by High Voltage Alternating Current.It was left to one of his contempories Sebastian Z. Ferranti in Manchester to exploit the
commercial applications." Research so far - See also Chaplin and Ayrton entries


Various sources:

Palmers index to the Times at the Soc of Genealogists, CD Rom computer 1,Sept 2001:

Book a time to use it, print out references. Search on Ayrton, Chaplin, Skinner, but many refs. Try searching on surname plus subject, take laptop.

Times BMD (Births Marriages Deaths) 1816-1920 at Soc of Genealogists:

Each search means consulting two microfilms, very slow, unless queries first organised by surname within year. Try a few to see what information is provided other than date eg location, guests.

Census surname indexes at Soc of Genealogists:

Good collection of surname indexes, may be better than FRC in that respect but may have to go to FRC to see the films, so organise batches of queries.

Deaths indexes on microfiches at Soc of Genealogists:

Much quicker to look through than at the FRC, Ditto for Births and Marriages.


Birth indexes, Family Records Centre

Ordered certificate:
Dec 1847 William Edward Ayrton Skipton XXIII p.572
This was the wrong person. William Edward Ayrton was born in London according to an obituary, but in which parish is unknown. No entry for him appears in the birth indexes at the Family Records Centre, but according to the people at the Society of Genealogists the local registrars often failed to send on their records. Also, the Soc of Gen now hold (in 2001) a complete set of surname indexes for the 1851 census in London. But there is no overall index – each parish has to be searched separately.

Marriage indexes, Family Records Centre

Ayrton, Edward Nugent and Emma N Althof:
Found no record of their marriage, searched records from September 1837 (when records began) to March 1841, but found nothing. Why did I try those dates? William Edward Ayrton was born in September 1847 and Julia in 1867. Supposing ENA had two wives? Edward and Emma might then have married circa 1866. The IGI has no entries corresponding to marriages between Edward and Emma either in Germany or Britain.


Death indexes, Family Records Centre


William Edward Ayrton

Professor William Edward Ayrton can be found on the internet. He was born in 1847 in London, and the date of his birth is the only thing I know about it so far, for he was illegitimate – a bastard (as we used to say) when that was considered a very bad start in life. He was the son of Edward Nugent Ayrton, a barrister, and (allegedly) the daughter of a Cornish fisherman, whose name is not known. He was born somewhere in London, but there is no birth certificate, nor do I know who brought him up, though I suspect his grandmother Matilda Adriana, whose husband John Clarke Chaplin died in 1856 in Tonbridge, brought up her brother’s child. She moved to London after John died.

William was educated at University College School, London, from 1859. He didn’t go to university but became an engineer in India in 1867 when he was 20, then becoming first the Professor of Physics and Telegraphy at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo, Japan in 1873; and in 1879 Professor of Electrical Engineering in London - pioneering the use of electricity in the United Kingdom.

He married two remarkable women:

1. Matilda Chaplin, the youngest daughter of his father’s sister Matilda Adriana Chaplin (so his first cousin) in 1871. She went to Japan with him and wrote about it, and became after a long struggle against male obstruction, one of the first women doctors after Elizabeth Garett Anderson. She had been born in France and eventually qualified in 1879 by getting her MD in Paris and a licence to practice in England by obtaining the Licentiate of the King and Queen's College of Physicians, Ireland. Sadly she died in 1883.

2. In 1885, Phoebe Sarah (Hertha) Marks, the granddaughter of a Jewish refugee from Poland, who became the first woman to be admitted to the Institution of Electrical Engineers. She was, he said, a genius, and her name too can be found on the internet.

He had one child by each of them:
By Matilda, Edith Chaplin Ayrton, born in 1874, who married Israel Zangwill, well known author, philanthropist and early Zionist, the son of a refugee escaping the pogroms in Russia.
By Hertha, Barbara Bodichon Ayrton, who married the author Gerald Gould and became Labour Party Chairman in 1939-40. Their son Michael Ayrton was a well known artist and writer.

Alan Ray-Jones
Have you seen this? Not bad for a visionary in 1907

There is no doubt that the day will come, maybe when you and I are forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha coverings, and iron sheathings will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities. Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else. He will call "Where are you?" and the reply will come, "I am at the bottom of the coal-mine" or "Crossing the Andes" or "In the middle of the Pacific"; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead.

— Professor W. E. Ayrton, lecture at the Imperial Institute, 1897