An account of the history of the Ayrton fan by A. P. Trotter, past President of The Institution of Electrical Engineers. Courtesy of the IEE Archive. Those who saw her experiments at home or the results at the front cannot forget them, but few of the younger generation have heard of them, and that is why, admiring her work as I do, I will put my recollections on record. Early in 1915 the Germans with fiendish brutality began to use poison gas. She thought that eddies of air might be used to repel gas attacks.
Air is a very different fluid from water.
To anyone else the idea was so wild as to be absurd. But she was so thoroughly acquainted with her subject, and had such a sound knowledge of physics, that she saw that in dealing with fluids the question of scale was of little importance. Cooling chambers and pipes were devised and made, and smoke poured out and rolled along the floor. A few flaps with a card on a matchbox serving as the parapet of a trench drove it back. These could be cleared of smoke with a few flaps of a tiny square paddle or fan.