If you’re going to power an airplane with an internal combustion engine, you’re going to have some obstacles to overcome. This is particularly true when the airplane is designed to do aerobatic moves rather than just fly straight and level. In some maneuvers the airplane will experience “negative-g” — that is, it will be effectively (and sometimes literally) upside-down. Back in the days before fuel injection, that meant that you had to figure out some way for the fuel/air mixture to keep flowing.
That was a problem faced by the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine fitted to World War II RAF planes like the Spitfire and the Hurricane. Their German foes already had fuel injection, so the German planes could outperform the British ones in a dogfight. Until, that is, an aeronautical engineer working in the Royal Aircraft Establishment invented the RAE Restrictor, which solved the problem. The engineer was Beatrice Shilling, who was born March 8, 1909 in England.
She was determined to become an engineer at a very early age. As a child she spent her pocket money on tools, and won a national prize in a mechanical construction contest. When she was 14 she bought her first motorcycle and learned how to take it completely apart and reassemble it. She went on to modify motorcycles and race them. She was pretty successful, but in spite of that an interviewer once told her “I suppose the men let you win.” Not at all — in 1934 Shilling went out and lapped the Brooklands race track at over 100 mph. She was only the second woman to do that, a feat that most of the male riders never managed. She received the British Motorcycle Racing Club’s Gold Star award in recognition.
Shilling held a Masters degree in mechanical engineering, but when she got her first job in the Royal Aircraft Establishment they wouldn’t let her work on engines. She began as a technical writer. But before long she was able to transfer, and became a principle technical officer. She became well known internally for her hands-on skills; unlike a lot of the engineers she could weld, braze, and fabricate parts as well as anybody. When she invented the RAE Restrictor, she rode her racing motorcycle around the country to personally install it in RAF fighter planes.
After the war ended, Shilling stayed with the RAE and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1949. You’d think that would have propelled her to the top ranks of the organization, but no, at the time they only promoted men to those positions. Regardless, Shilling designed the Blue Streak missile and designed and built the bobsled used by the British Olympic team.
She got married in the 1930s, and after WWII she and her husband returned to racing, but cars instead of motorcycles. They built their own racing cars in a home workshop, and competed in amateur events, placing highly and even winning. In 1961 they upgraded to a single-seat Formula Junior car, but after an accident damaged it severely, they converted it to a sports car. Shilling was then hired to help a US Formula 1 team solve performance and mechanical problems with their racing car.
Shilling encountered discrimination during her whole career. There was actually a law banning women from working at night in England, and for a long time she wasn’t allowed to enter the RAE dining hall — they only admitted men. She was even described as looking “like a frumpy old British housewife.”
Shilling is the namesake of the Tilly Shilling pub in Farnborough. Her racing badges and trophies are on display in the Brooklands Museum. At the Royal Holloway University, you can see the Beatrice Shilling Building, which houses the Electrical Engineering department. Coventry University also has a Beatrice Shilling Building. And you can read more about her in the 2003 biography Negative Gravity, the Life of Beatrice Shilling.
