What do you think?

Mhm.

Yeah, 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 hips, noticing that when the ark buzzes, the light dims, she knows those lights threw 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 for her?

To Mark Certain 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 Certain 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 Certain 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 speak mama, nanometer.

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 he 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 her to Mark said, and 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 had to hold the ark steady by hand for four or five hours to get consistent results.

And Mark that and deduced the electric arc hissed when oxygen was present in small craters in the carbon surface.

The hiss was the sound of the carbon oxidizing.

To stop this happening her to Mark Certain invented and patented a new kind of carbon rod coated with a copper film to stop oxygen reaching the sides of the electrodes as she predicted this gave a steadier arc a more dependable light.

Her to Mark Certain 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, three D printing and maybe one day rocket launchers for space travel her to mark certain tamed lightning.

The ark that burned so brightly between the electrodes of those early lights was uncontrollable.

A wisp of lightning if you like, Mark Seaton got that lightning under her control and gave it to the world.

Yeah, Yeah.

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