Today’s Google Doodle Highlights An Awesome Female Engineer

It took 162 years, but the late Hertha Marks Ayrton is finally getting some well-deserved recognition. On Thursday, Google honored the British inventor and engineer with a Google Doodle. Ayrton, who was born in 1854 and died in 1923, dedicated herself to studying sand and water ripples as well as electric arcs, The Mirror explains. She won the Royal Society's Hughes Medal in 1906 for her work. The illustration emphasizes Ayrton's wave studies; it features illustrative waves, two of which handily serve as the "O"s in "Google." The doodle is the latest in a string of Google illustrations that feature women in tech, science, and engineering. For those of us who aren't in these industries (and even those who are), we might not have heard of these ladies before. So let this serve as a great opportunity to learn more about awesome women throughout history. As Time notes, Ayrton is a particularly noteworthy woman to feature on the Google homepage. Before she was married, the Royal Society didn't let her become a scientific fellow — because she was female. But Ayrton didn't stay silent about gender discrimination. When one of Marie Curie's discoveries was attributed to Curie's husband, Ayrton apparently said that "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."