You're standing in a street, in a British town, in the late Victorian era. The old Queen's still on the throne. It's a time between the old world and the new. It's a winter's night, cold and moonless.
You should also imagine one more thing. There's electric streetlight. High off the ground, the lamp is flickering and...
hissing. Underneath the streetlight stands a woman. She has an intelligent, determined face and curly hair pinned in a mound on top of her head.
She's staring up at the electric light. It's an arc lamp, a wisp of lightning crackling between two electrodes. She's listening to the hiss, noticing that when the arc buzzes, the light dims. She knows those lights throw off sparks, they can start fires. She's imagining a future where electric...
light could be bright, even and safe. She's thinking, how can I make that happen? Her to Mark Zetton had always had to be ingenious. Born into a Jewish family in Portsmouth in 1854, her father was dead by the time she was seven, leaving the family with little more than a pile of debt. But her to Mark Zayton was what you might call a bright spark, and always inventive.
She was stubborn, tomboyish and outspoken. Every evening for a year, after a full day of work, Mark Zayton studied for the Cambridge University entrance exam. She passed.
in 1874 with honours in mathematics and English. She was an astonishingly hard worker and made her first recorded invention, a sphygmomanometer, that would draw a graph of a person's pulse. After graduating, she carried on teaching and inventing. In 1888, she delivered a series of six hugely popular public lectures on electricity.
in which she held out to her audience a compelling vision of an electrified future. Electric arc lights were used in street lamps. They provided incredibly bright lightning in a bottle.
But they were volatile and poorly understood. To make them safe and reliable, someone needed to invent a way to precisely control their dangerous temperamental power. So Hurt and Mark Zayton asked herself, why did arc lights flicker?
And how could she stop them doing it? She put together an intricate and comprehensive set of experiments to test out every possibility. She often used the light to test out the dark. often had to hold the arc steady by hand for four or five hours to get consistent results. And Mark Zayton deduced the electric arc hissed when oxygen was present in small craters in the carbon surface.
The hiss was the sound of the carbon oxidising. To stop this happening, Hurt and Mark Zayton invented and patented a new kind of carbon rod, coated with a copper film to stop the hiss. stop oxygen reaching the sides of the electrodes. As she predicted, this gave a steadier arc, a more dependable light.
Herter Mark Zayton wanted to make streetlights safer, and she did. The arc light helped create a new after-dark world of working, playing, shopping and exploring. She ended up sparking life into detonators, 3D printing and maybe one day rocket launchers for space.
space travel. Her to Mark Zayton tamed lightning. The arc that burned so brightly between the electrodes of those early lights was uncontrollable.
A wisp of lightning, if you like. Mark Zayton got that lightning under her control and gave it to the world. Thanks for watching.
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