Beatrice 'Tilly' Shilling by guest blogger John Faulkner

This year is the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and a hero who helped us to win it was engineer Beatrice 'Tilly' Shilling. Tilly Shilling always wanted to be an engineer. She bought a motorcycle at the age of 14, completely rebuilding it, later racing them in competition. In 1929, with encouragement from her employer, she became the one of only two women to study for an electrical engineering degree at the University of Manchester. Following this she obtained an MSc in mechanical engineering and in 1936 secured a Scientific Officer position at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough.

On the outbreak of the second world war the Luftwaffe discovered that Spitfire and Hurricane fighters had an engine vulnerability. Designed to use carburettors, on diving, the fighter's Rolls Royce Merlin engine would starve of fuel triggering a cut-out. A catastrophic and potentially fatal problem during a dog fight. The enemy with their less powerful but fuel injected engines had a big advantage. An urgent solution was needed and it was Tilly's simple modification that saved the day. Installing her specially designed disc, into the engine's carburettor fuel inlet, the cut-outs could be  overcome. Leading a team of technicians out to frontline RAF airfields she rapidly modified every Spitfire and Hurricane engine. RAF fighter pilots could be now confident with engine power in battle and by March 1941 she completed the work.

After the war Tilly moved on to motor racing and work on Britain's Blue Streak rocket. She was awarded an OBE and a Phd in engineering from the University of Surrey. If you visit Farnborough you may see a pub named the Tilly Shilling in fond memory of her work. Some of her racing memorabilia, acquired in 2015, is at Brooklands Museum. On the track at Brooklands in the 1930's she won a famous Gold Star for lapping at an average of over 100 mph by motorcycle, being the first woman to achieve the challenge.

- John Faulkner, SATRO Volunteer

ADA LOVELACE DAY

The 13^th October is Ada Lovelace Day which is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).  She was a Guildford resident and is credited with creating the first computer programmer and this year it is 200 years since she was born.

History of Ada Lovelace

She was born Ada Gordon in 1815, sole child of the brief and tempestuous marriage of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, and his mathematics-loving wife Annabella Milbanke.  Fearing that Ada would inherit her father’s volatile ‘poetic’ temperament, her mother raised her under a strict regimen of science, logic, and mathematics. Ada herself from childhood had a fascination with machines– designing fanciful boats and steam flying machines, and pouring over the diagrams of the new inventions of the Industrial Revolution that filled the scientific magazines of the time.  She spent her childhood at what is now Horsley Towers, Horsley, Surrey.

At the age of 19 she was married to an aristocrat, William King; when King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838 his wife became Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.  She had three children.  In 1833, Lovelace’s mentor, the scientist and polymath Mary Sommerville, introduced her to Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics who had already attained considerable celebrity for his visionary and perpetually unfinished plans for gigantic clockwork calculating machines. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace both had somewhat unconventional personalities and became close and lifelong friends. Babbage described her as “that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it,” or an another occasion, as “The Enchantress of Numbers”.

Lovelace was deeply intrigued by Babbage’s plans for a tremendously complicated device he called the ‘Analytical Engine’, which was to combine the array of adding gears of his earlier Difference Engine with an elaborate punchcard operating system. It was never built, but the design had all the essential elements of a modern computer.

In 1842 Lovelace translated a short article describing the Analytical Engine by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, for publication in England. Babbage asked her to expand the article, “as she understood the machine so well”. The final article is over three times the length of the original and contains several early ‘computer programs,’ as well as striking observations on the potential uses of the machine, including the manipulation of symbols and creation of music. Although Babbage and his assistants had sketched out programs for his engine before, Lovelace’s are the most elaborate and complete, and the first to be published; so she is often referred to as “the first computer programmer”. 

The Analytical Engine remained a vision,  until Lovelace’s notes became one of the most critical documents to inspire Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.

SCIENCE CAREERS: ARCHAEOLOGIST

Have you ever considered archaeology as a career? Here are some interesting facts about archaeology that could make up your mind!

- Archaeologists study human civilisations that lived in the past through the discovery and analysis of the things they left behind, this includes artifacts from millions of years ago right up to things that have been developed in very recent times.

- Archaeology is so important because there are in fact no written records for 99% of human history, archaeology can help to reduce this percentage.

- Archaeology has helped and still does help us to understand how humans have evolved and also how different cultures have developed. An archaeologist would survey, excavate and analyse data to help us understand these aspects of the past (as well as many others).

- Archaeology is a varied discipline that can involve aspects of art history, classics, physics, chemistry and geography amongst other fields. If these aspects appeal to you - archaeology could may well be a suitable career for you.

- If you want to become an archaeologist, it would be a good idea to study subjects such as statistics, geography and geology or history.