Laura Carter

Mary Earps has today announced her decision to retire from international football with immediate effect. The decision marks the end of a memorable eight-year international career. ❤️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Manchester United’s women’s team will be moved into portable buildings at the club’s Carrington training complex this season to allow the men’s squad to use the women’s building while the men’s building is being revamped. Excl. story for @guardian_sport theguardian.com/football/art…

A fantastic journey comes to an end. Congratulations on an amazing career, @stephhoughton2 ❤️

The most satisfying schedule release video? That belongs to the @Chiefs ⚙️

Woman of the Day engineer, mathematician, inventor and suffragette Hertha Ayrton born OTD 1854 in Portsmouth, the first woman elected to the Institution of Electrical Engineers. She invented the Ayrton gas fan, carried by 100,000 soldiers in the trenches in WW1 to dispel poison and foul gas. It folded easily and weighed less than a pound so it could be carried in the braces behind a soldier's main pack. Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, Hertha became an agnostic in her teen years and took her name from a poem criticising organised religion. Family responsibilities were placed on her young shoulders at age seven; her newly widowed mother, pregnant with her eighth child, needed her to care for some of her younger siblings. At age nine, Hertha was introduced to the wonders of science and maths when she went to live with her cousins in London. She studied mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge - her application supported by the author George Eliot - and while there, she constructed a sphygmomanometer, founded the College fire brigade and started a mathematical club. In 1880, Hertha passed the Mathematical Tripos, a notoriously difficult challenge, but was not awarded a degree despite her achievement. Cambridge just wouldn’t award degrees to women then. The University of London awarded her the BSc instead. Post-graduation, Hertha earned money by teaching and doing embroidery but her real interest lay in solving mathematical problems and inventing instruments. Her first patent was for a line divider, an engineering drawing instrument used to divide a line into any number of equal parts and for enlarging and reducing figures. It was of great use to artists but also to architects and engineers. By this time, electric arc lighting was widely used for public lighting but the tendency of electric arcs to flicker and hiss was a major problem. Hertha knew why; it was the consequence of oxygen coming into contact with the carbon rods used to create the arc. She wrote a series of articles with the result that in 1899, she was the first woman elected to the Institution of Electrical Engineers. None of that counted with the Royal Society. It wouldn’t let Hertha present her own research paper "The Mechanism of the Electric Arc". A woman? Heaven forfend! John Perry had to present it instead. The following year, he proposed she be accepted as a Fellow but this time, the Royal Society declined because she was a married woman. Those moving goalposts… Hertha made her name internationally instead. She spoke at prestigious conferences in London and Paris and the Royal Society relented. In 1904 she was actually allowed to present her own paper "The Origin and Growth of Ripple Marks", the first woman permitted to do so, and in 1906, she was awarded the prestigious Hughes Medal "for her experimental investigations on the electric arc, and also on sand ripples”, the first woman so honoured. Hertha registered 26 patents in all: five on mathematical dividers, 13 on arc lamps and electrodes, the rest on the propulsion of air. Barbara Bodichon, co-founder of Girton, supported her patent applications financially. “The idea of ‘women and science’ is entirely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not…her work should be studied from the scientific, not the sex, point of view.” Hertha joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1907 and was actively involved in fundraising. She sheltered suffragettes recovering from the effects of force feeding and helped Christabel Pankhurst by permitting her bank account to be used to evade the confiscation of funds. Christabel was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act outside Hertha’s home on her way to Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral. She even persuaded her close friend Marie Curie - Hertha gave maths lessons to Marie’s daughter, Irène - to sign a petition protesting against the imprisonment of suffragettes. Hertha died in 1923 of blood poisoning from an insect bite, aged 69. “Errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”

Welcome home @TKJaayy 💙

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