by Jenny Meader
Hertha Ayrton was born Phoebe Sarah Marks in Portsea,
Hampshire, England, on 28 April 1854. She is usually known by the name Hertha
Ayrton, so for the purposes of this talk I will use this name. She was the
third child of a Polish Jewish watchmaker named Levi Marks, an immigrant from
Tsarist Poland; and Alice Theresa Moss, a seamstress. After Levi Marks’s death
in 1861, his widow Alice, who was then pregnant with their eighth child,
supported the entire family by her needlework, until they were old enough to go
out to work. Hertha then took up some of the responsibility for caring for the
younger children.
