Miss Shilling

[groily]

Inventor of the "Shilling Orifice" (not making it up!) for Merlin engine fuel systems in characteristic amateur racing pose. Interesting lady  . . .

[Greybeard]

Great image. Proper eyebrows.

[Bsareg]

I've also heard it refered to as "Miss Shilling's ha'penny".🤔

[RDfella]

Miss Shilling's Orifice - without which we probably wouldn't have won WW2. Great engineer.

Corrected thanks to Groily

[groily]

If she'd had the 'c' in her shilling the orifice might have been a half-pfennig on a Focke-Wolf 190 or a Messerschmidt 109 and we'd likely have lost RD! Great lady, our Beatrice, as you say.

[mikeb]

a great story. i'd never heard of it, so found this - well worth a read:
https://www.damninteresting.com/how-miss-shillings-orifice-helped-win-the-war/

[groily]

Wouldn't actually have mattered if she'd batted for the other team RD 'cos German aircraft didn't have a fuel problem to solve (funny that - wonder why I have German cars?) - I was just winding you up!

But she was a one-in-a-zillion person, decades ahead of her time - at least they gave her a gong and she got promoted to 'pretty high up' after the war despite being, omigod, a female. Hard even for those of us of a certain age to think how mysogynist things were back then, despite all the achievements of women in the workforce in the Great War. (I have a friend whose daughter is a Tornado pilot - so there's some evidence that things have changed for the better.)

Thanks for the damninteresting link mikeb - very good, and amusing as well.