When SWMBO Has a Brain Wave

[Lappa]

A guy once said to me “it’s not necessity that is the mother of invention, it’s laziness”

[Chris Parks]

I don't know about laziness but working smarter and often making mundane process tasks easier is a worthy goal. Robots always do a way better job in production and repetitive tasks than any human for obvious reasons such as welding.

[onetrack]

There are quite a number of women who have proved themselves an asset in engineering and design and inventiveness. It might be something to do with them using the other hemisphere of the brain to us blokes.

Miss Beatrice Shilling is a name of renown in aircraft engineering. She was solely responsible for fixing the stalling of the early Merlins, particularly in the Spitfires, when in action, during WW2.
She thought up a device that came to be nicknamed and known as Miss Shillings Orifice!

The early Spitfires (and Merlins in other aircraft as well) had a nasty habit of starving for fuel in steep dives, when negative G's forced the fuel to the top of the carby, away from the supply jets. This led to a rapid and immediate loss of power.

If the negative G's continued, all the fuel went to the top of the carby, forcing the float to the bottom of the float chamber, thus opening the carburettor needle valve to the maximum, and flooding the engine with a super-rich mixture, causing it to stop completely.
An engine stoppage is disconcerting at the best of times in an aircraft - let alone when there's a heavily-armed Messerschmitt on your tail, intent on taking you out.

No other male British engineer could find a solution to the Merlin engine, loss-of-power/stoppage problem - but Miss Schilling invented a simple thimble-shaped brass fuel flow restrictor that was inserted into the SU carby, which limited the fuel flow to the precise level of the Merlins needs. It wasn't a long-term solution, but it worked admirably when the situation was desperate.

The WW2 German fighters were fuel injected and didn't suffer the same problem as the early Merlins - and the Germans knew of the problem, and took advantage of the Merlins problems in the early Spitfires.

The Bendix, and later, the RR pressure carburettors, solved the Merlin fuel-flow problem for good - but who knows how many lives were saved by Miss Shillings invention?