Imagine sending your best men into a fight, knowing their equipment will fail them at the worst possible moment. That was the reality for the Royal Air Force in nineteen forty-one. Their engines were quitting mid-dive until a thirty-three-year-old engineer named Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Schilling risked her entire career on a fix she made herself. A fix that cost less than fifty cents. In the dark early days of the Second World War.

The skies over the English Channel were a brutal proving ground. Britain stood alone, and its very survival depended on a handful of young men flying the most advanced fighting machines the world had ever seen. The Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane. These planes were the pride of the nation.

When you heard the sound of that Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, that deep, unmistakable growl. It was the sound of defiance. It was the sound of freedom. But for the pilots flying them, these magnificent planes held a dark, terrifying secret. A British pilot.

Let’s call him Squadron Leader Davies might spend twenty minutes climbing to fifteen thousand feet. His eyes scanning the empty sky. Then a flash of sun on metal. A Messerschmitt Bf-one-oh-nine. He’s got the advantage. He’s above the German. The perfect position. He banks his Spitfire, aims his nose down and pushes the stick forward into a dive to attack. And in that instant, the Merlin engine, his thirteen-hundred-horsepower heart, coughs, sputters and goes silent for one, one and a half, two agonizing seconds.

He is no longer a hunter. He is a rock, a helpless floating target with nothing but the whistle of the wind. As the German pilot he was just hunting now loops back, his cannons winking. As Davies fights desperately to restart his stalled engine. This wasn’t a rare event. It was a fatal pattern and it was killing Britain’s best pilots.

How could this be? How could the Spitfire, the plane that had just won the Battle of Britain, have a flaw so simple, so amateur? The problem wasn’t the engine itself. The Merlin was a masterpiece. No, the problem was something much simpler. Something you have in your own home. The problem was the carburetor. To understand what was happening, you have to understand what pilots call negative G.

It’s that feeling you get in your stomach when you go over a steep hill in your car. Just a bit too fast. That lurch where you feel like you’re being lifted right out of your seat. For a pilot, pushing the stick forward to dive creates that same negative G force. Now, inside the Merlin’s carburetor, there was a device called a float chamber. It worked quite simply.

Just like the float in the tank of your toilet. A little float would bob on the surface of the fuel, opening and closing a valve to keep the gasoline at the perfect level for the engine. It was a simple, proven design, but it had one catastrophic weakness. When that pilot nosed over into a dive, the negative G force threw all the fuel up to the top of that chamber. The float, now submerged, sank.

The valve flew wide open, and a massive choking surge of raw fuel flooded the engine. The engine would die instantly. It was a problem of simple physics, but it had brutal consequences. And the Germans, they didn’t have this problem. Their Messerschmitt Bf-one-oh-nine, the Spitfire’s mortal enemy, was powered by the formidable Daimler-Benz DB six-oh-one engine. And the German engineers had been smart.

They didn’t use a float carburetor. They used a sophisticated cutting-edge system called direct fuel injection. This meant their fuel was pumped under pressure straight into the engine cylinders. A German pilot could flip his plane, roll it, or slam it into a dive, and his engine would never miss a single beat.

This wasn’t just a technical detail, it was a deadly tactical advantage. And the German pilots knew about it. They exploited it. They were deliberately baiting a Spitfire. And the second, the British pilot, was on his tail. The German would simply push his stick forward and dive away.

He knew with absolute certainty that the British pilot could not follow without his engine stalling in the blink of an eye. The hunter became the hunted for the men in the sky. This was a waking nightmare. We aren’t just talking about machines and tactics. We’re talking about boys.

Nineteen, twenty years old, sent up in the best plane their country could build, only to find it had a crippling, predictable flaw. Squadron Leader Davies, a real pilot with forty-one combat missions, reported this exact failure. Twice in one month. Both times, he survived by what he called pure luck. Many of his friends didn’t. The Royal Air Force was bleeding its most precious resource. Experienced pilots.

They were dying not just from enemy bullets, but from a flaw in their own machines. The high command was in a panic. They went to Rolls-Royce, and the engineers there had a solution. Of course, they said. We’ll design a new pressure carburetor. A proper modern fuel system. There was just one problem. The new design wouldn’t be ready until nineteen forty-three. Maybe nineteen forty-four.

The pilots couldn’t wait two years. They couldn’t wait two weeks. They needed a fix, and they needed it now. It’s these personal stories. The accounts from the men on the front line that truly show what was at stake. If you believe these firsthand accounts are the most important part of history, let us know in the comments below.

It truly helps us understand what kind of stories you want us to find. Every single morning, another young man would climb into his Spitfire, knowing his own engine might kill him before the Germans ever got the chance. They were fighting a war on two fronts, one against the enemy and one against their own carburetors.

Down on the ground, at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough— Britain’s top-secret hub of aviation science— the brightest minds in the country were tearing their hair out over this. These were the top-level engineers, the scientists, the academics, and they were all stuck. They were stuck because they were all trying to find the proper solution, the textbook fix.

They were busy writing papers on the complex physics of fuel dynamics and designing all-new systems that were, as we said, years away from production. They were looking for a perfect solution, but the pilots just needed a good one. They needed something that could be done in the field, on a muddy airfield, by a tired mechanic with a simple toolkit, but no one could see it. They were all too smart, too academic.

And that’s when the problem landed on the desk of a thirty-two-year-old junior engineer. Her name was Beatrice. Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Schilling. And in the male-dominated, tweed-jacket-and-pipe world of nineteen-forties British engineering, she was a profound anomaly. She was one of only two women in the entire engine department at Farnborough. The other, as the records show, was a secretary.

Most of the men she worked with, men who had come from Oxford and Cambridge, had never taken a technical order from a woman. Some of them, if we’re being honest, didn’t believe women belonged in engineering at all. They thought she was a bluestocking, a novelty. So you see, Tilly Schilling wasn’t just fighting a physics problem. She was fighting a culture that was designed, from the ground up, to overlook her. But Beatrice Schilling had a secret weapon.

She wasn’t just a brilliant, largely self-taught engineer. She was, to put it plainly, a daredevil. While the men in her department spent their weekends at the golf club, Tilly Schilling spent hers on a motorcycle. She had bought her first Norton when she was just fourteen years old, with her own money.

She immediately took it apart piece by piece and rebuilt it herself. This was not some gentle hobby. She raced them. There was a famous high- banked racetrack at the time called Brooklands. It was a terrifying concrete bowl of a track, and Tilly would be out there in her leather helmet, thundering around that oval at over one hundred miles per hour.

She was so fast. She became one of only three women in history to earn the Gold Star award, a pin given to anyone brave or crazy enough to lap the circuit at that speed. And that was the key. Tilly Schilling didn’t just understand engines from a textbook or a blueprint. She understood them with her hands.

And from the seat of her pants, she knew intimately what happens to an engine under extreme stress. She knew what high-G turns and sudden acceleration felt like. She had probably felt her own motorcycle engine sputter and starve on a hard lean, and she knew instinctively what the problem was. So while the academics at Farnborough were staring at their slide rules and their complex fluid-dynamic models, Tilly was remembering the feeling of her Norton on the track. She was thinking like a racer, like a mechanic.

And that’s when it hit her. The problem wasn’t just that the engine was starving for fuel as some thought. The problem was that it was flooding. It was getting too much fuel in that one-and-a-half-second lurch. The other engineers were trying to invent a complex new pump to force fuel in. Tilly had a different idea, a simpler idea, an idea born not in a library, but on a racetrack.

What if the problem wasn’t starvation? What if the problem was flooding? What if you just restricted the flow? This was the moment of genius. It was a complete inversion of the problem. While the finest, most-educated minds in Britain were trying to add more complexity— new pumps, new pressure systems— Tilly Schilling was thinking about that racetrack. She was thinking about that raw, physical feeling of an engine under stress.

She realized with a clarity that must have felt like a lightning bolt, that the academics had misdiagnosed the problem. The engine wasn’t just starving for fuel, as some thought. It was flooding. It was getting too much fuel all at once in that one-and-a-half-second lurch. So her solution wasn’t some complex new pump to force fuel in.

It was the exact opposite. She asked a question that was so simple no one else had thought to ask it. What if we just restrict the flow? She didn’t go to a design table. She didn’t write a white paper. She went to the workshop with her own hands. She machined a small brass thimble, a little cap. But she realized even that was too complex.

It would be too hard to mass-produce, too difficult to install on a cold, wet airfield. So she simplified it again and again, until she was left with something that looked for all the world like a simple flat washer, a piece of metal you could find in any hardware store. A part that, when mass-produced, would cost pennies. Less than fifty cents by today’s standards.

But this was no ordinary washer. It was the product of genius and relentless hands-on testing. This simple brass disc had a single, tiny and precisely calculated hole drilled through its center. Tilly tested it. She tested seventeen different sizes for that hole. Too big, and the engine would still flood.

Too small, and the engine would starve of fuel when the pilot needed full power in a steep climb. She finally landed on the perfect diameter: zero point zero four inches. About the width of a heavy-duty staple. The genius of this little washer was its brutal simplicity. When the pilot was flying normally, climbing or in a gentle turn, the hole was just big enough to let the perfect steady flow of fuel through to the Merlin.

The engine ran beautifully, but—and this is the crucial part— when that pilot pushed into a dive and that violent negative-G surge of fuel slammed against it, the hole was too small to let the catastrophic engine-choking flood of fuel get through. It would only let a small controlled trickle in. The engine wouldn’t flood. It wouldn’t die. It wasn’t a perfect fix.

We should be clear about that. It actually limited the engine’s absolute top-end power by a tiny fraction. But who cares? It solved the deadly problem. It stopped the stall. It gave the pilot those one-and-a-half seconds of life. Tilly, thrilled, took her bench tests, her calculations, and her little brass washer to her superiors.

And they were horrified. The response was an ice-cold absolutely not. You have to understand the military mind, the bureaucratic mind. Install an unauthorized, untested, homemade part into the most important, most expensive engine in the Royal Air Force, a part made by a by a junior engineer, a woman who violated dozens of regulations.

It was unthinkable. Worse, they told her, what if it failed? What if that little washer under the intense vibration of a thirteen-hundred-horsepower engine in a four-hundred-mile-per-hour dive broke loose? What if it flowed down the fuel line and blocked the carburetor completely? If that happened, the engine wouldn’t just sputter. It would die permanently.

The pilot would be helpless. He would fall out of the sky. And it wouldn’t be the Germans who had killed him. It would be her. She would be court-martialed. She would be imprisoned. Her career, her life would be over. The bureaucracy had spoken. The answer was no. So on the morning of January nineteen forty-one, Beatrice Schilling made a decision.

She decided that it was, as they say, better to ask for forgiveness than permission. She put six of her little brass washers into her leather satchel. She got on her own Norton motorcycle, the same one she’d raced, and rode to the frontline airbase at RAF Kenley. She bypassed the commanding officers. She bypassed the entire chain of command.

She walked out onto the tarmac and found a man she knew she could trust. A flight sergeant named William Cooper. Sergeant Cooper was a ground-crew chief. He was a man who worked with his hands. He was also a man who had seen nineteen of his own pilots, his boys, die from this exact engine failure. He had personally written nineteen letters home to nineteen grieving mothers.

He knew the cost. Schilling, a thirty-two-year-old woman in a sensible skirt, walked up to this hardened sergeant and showed him the small brass washer. She explained quickly what it did. Sergeant Cooper looked at the washer. He looked at her. He looked at the Hurricane on the tarmac, its pilot already climbing into the cockpit. He didn’t ask about paperwork.

He didn’t ask for an authorization form. He just nodded and reached for his toolkit. They had twenty minutes until takeoff. Squadron Leader Davies, the pilot, was in the cockpit running his pre-flight checks. He had no idea what was happening to his engine, just a few feet in front of him. Cooper worked fast. He uncoupled the fuel line.

Schilling handed him the washer. He slid it into place. He welded it. A quick professional seal. He reconnected the line. The entire modification took sixty seconds and it was completely invisible. If Davies died, there would be no paper trail, no authorization.

Just a dead pilot and a small brass washer that should never have been there. The Merlin engine roared to life. Davies ran his checks. Oil pressure good. Coolant temp good. He released the brakes and the Hurricane thundered down the runway and lifted into the sky. Schilling stood on the tarmac next to Cooper. Neither of them spoke.

She watched the plane climb, one thousand feet, two thousand feet until it was just a dark cross against the gray morning sky, heading south toward the Channel, toward the enemy. She waited. The normal sounds of an airbase at war continued around her. Fuel trucks rumbled past. Mechanics shouted orders. Another squadron of Spitfires took off. But Schilling heard none of it. She was just calculating fuel-flow rates in her head.

Zero point zero four inches. Negative G duration, one and a half seconds. The math worked, but as she knew, math wasn’t combat. Forty minutes passed, then an hour. The radio in the control tower was silent. This could mean anything. It could mean no contact, a quiet patrol. It could mean contact so intense, so violent that there was no time to talk. Or it could mean Davies was dead.

His plane a smoking hole in a field in France, his engine choked by her invention. Then, at nine thirty-seven A.M., the radio in the control tower crackled to life. Kenley tower, this is Red Section. Three Hurricanes inbound, two minutes out. Schilling raised her binoculars. Her hands were shaking.

She saw them three dark shapes against the clouds, not two. Three. All aircraft were safe. Davies’s Hurricane landed first. He taxied to his dispersal spot, cut the engine and the sudden silence was deafening. He climbed out of the cockpit and he was smiling. The pilots didn’t smile after combat patrols. They looked exhausted. They looked haunted. Aged years in a single hour. But Davies looked excited.

Sergeant Cooper, bless him, walked up, keeping his voice casual. Any problems with the engine, sir? Davies looked at Cooper, then at this strange woman standing next to him, then back at Cooper. Problems, he said. Cooper, that’s the best the Merlin has ever run. He was beaming. He explained. They’d spotted two Messerschmitts over Dungeness.

He’d positioned his section above them and pushed into a four-hundred-mile-per-hour dive. The dive that should have killed his engine. But the Merlin, he said, never missed a beat. It roared at full power the entire way down. He closed to two hundred yards, fired a three-second burst and saw his bullets tear into the German’s wing. The German fighter broke hard and fled.

It was the first time in eleven months, he said, that he had successfully pressed a diving attack without his engine quitting. He wanted to know what on earth Cooper had done to his plane. So Schilling stepped forward and told him. She explained the washer, the physics, the fuel restriction. Davies stared at her for a long, silent five seconds. Then he turned back to Sergeant Cooper.

Put that thing, he said, in every Hurricane on this station today. Schilling, still shaking, tried to explain. Sir, it’s not authorized. We don’t have permission. Davies cut her off. He didn’t care about authorization. He cared about surviving. Every pilot at Kenley had lost friends to this flaw. If the brass wants to court-martial me, he said they can do it after the war. Right now, I need working engines.

That kind of practical courage— risking your own neck to do the right thing—is a story we feel honored to tell. We’re building a community around this kind of real-world heroism. And if you haven’t yet, we would be proud if you’d hit that subscribe button and join us for more stories just like this one. The dam of bureaucracy had been broken.

It wasn’t broken by a committee or a royal decree, but by the undeniable, beaming face of a pilot who had just survived a four-hundred-mile-per-hour dive that should have killed him. Squadron Leader Davies is the man. Put that thing in every Hurricane on this station today was more powerful than any regulation. But this incredible success created an entirely new and immediate problem. Word didn’t just spread.

It ignited in the tight-knit world of fighter pilots, where survival tips were passed along as urgently as ammunition. The news from Kenley was revolutionary. Suddenly, Tilly Schilling’s phone at Farnborough was ringing off the hook. It wasn’t her superiors. It was squadron commanders. Men from Biggin Hill, from Hornchurch, from Tangmere. They had all heard the rumor through the grapevine.

Davies’s squadron isn’t stalling anymore. They didn’t know how. They just knew it was true. And they all wanted what Kenley had. Schilling was in a difficult, The modification was fast-tracked for approval in just four days. They weren’t just approving a part. They were approving a miracle. They called it in their official reports, a war-winning modification.

The contract for mass production was given to the only place that could handle it. Rolls-Royce itself, the very company whose proper fix was still years away, was now ordered by the government to mass-produce Tilly’s fifty-cent stop-gap. Rolls-Royce, to their credit, jumped at it.

They estimated they could manufacture five hundred restrictors per week, but this led to the next problem. You can’t just mail thousands of precision parts to airfields and hope for the best. This wasn’t a spark plug. The installation was simple, but it was critical. That sixty-second weld Sergeant Cooper had performed. It had to be perfect. A faulty weld, one that cracked under the Merlin’s intense vibration at twenty thousand feet, could break the fuel line completely.

It would starve the engine and the pilot would fall from the sky. A fix that failed was worse than no fix at all. So, Beatrix Schilling became a one-woman army, a technical evangelist. She assembled a small, hand-picked team of three engineers and two civilian mechanics. She loaded up her own Norton motorcycle with tools and the first precious batches of restrictors.

And she began to ride. We have to pause and just appreciate this image. In a war run by generals in staff cars and pilots in Spitfires. The single most important engineering fix in Britain was being delivered by a thirty-two-year-old woman on a motorcycle. Thundering down the muddy country roads of England.

Her leather satchel full of brass washers. She would arrive at a base like Biggin Hill, a station that had been bled white, having lost seven pilots to engine failures in just two months. The ground crews would work in twelve-hour shifts four aircraft at a time, under the dim lights of the hangars. Each installation took twelve minutes. Disconnect the fuel line, weld the restrictor in place.

Reconnect the line. Test for leaks, and Tilly Schilling, this junior engineer, supervised every single one. She’d put on overalls, got her hands dirty, check every weld herself. Test every connection, and reject any part that didn’t meet her exact specifications.

The pilots, the men whose lives depended on this, would watch her with a kind of awe. One of them, a flight lieutenant named James Lacey— an engineering graduate from Cambridge himself— asked her to explain the physics. She did. She explained float chamber dynamics, negative-G effects, and her flow-rate calculations. Lacey listened, understood immediately, and just called it ‘brilliant simplicity.

‘ He got it. This wasn’t a bureaucratic bodge. It was a stroke of genius. At every base, the story was the same. Hornchurch, North Weald, Tangmere. Ground crews working around the clock, pilots flying combat patrols with the newly modified engines and the reports that came back were unanimous— zero failures.

The pilots and mechanics, with that particular brand of crude, frontline British humor, gave the little brass washer a nickname. It was actually coined by Sir Stanley Hooker, the chief engineer at Rolls-Royce, and it stuck instantly. They called it ‘Miss Shilling’s Orifice.’ It was, of course, slightly inappropriate, but Tilly Schilling didn’t mind. She’d spent years working with R.A.F. personnel.

She understood that for these men who lived with death every single day, crude humor was a shield. It was a way of coping. And frankly, it was a sign of deep, deep respect. If that’s what it took for them to remember the modification and trust it, she would accept any name they wanted to use. The nickname spread faster than the restrictor itself.

By April, just one month after her secret test, every pilot in Fighter Command knew about it. They requested it by name. In fact, some pilots, hearing what it could do, began to refuse to fly combat missions until their aircraft had the modification. And their commanders, who had written too many letters home to grieving mothers, backed them up. The change was so sudden and so total that the results were not just anecdotal.

They were written in cold, hard data. Fighter Command tracked its statistics meticulously. Every engagement, every loss, the numbers tell the whole story. In March of nineteen forty-one, before the restrictor, R.A.F. fighters reported engine failures in a staggering thirty-eight percent of all diving attacks. Think about that.

More than one-third of the time they tried to attack, their own planes failed them. Now look at April, after ‘Miss Schilling’s Orifice’ was installed across the fleet, that failure rate dropped from thirty-eight percent to zero point four percent. It wasn’t just reduced. It was eliminated. And the kill-to-loss ratio— the only number that truly matters in war— it flipped on its head.

In March, Fighter Command had lost forty-seven fighters, shooting down sixty-one German planes. A ratio of one point three-to-one. They were barely breaking even. In April, with the restrictors installed, they lost only twenty-nine fighters and destroyed ninety-four German aircraft. A ratio of three point two-to-one. It wasn’t just a fix. It was a game-changer. The R.A.F.

was now, without question, dominating the sky. That kind of practical courage— risking your own neck to do the right thing— is a story we feel honored to tell. We are building a community around this kind of real-world heroism, and if you haven’t yet, we would be proud if you’d hit that subscribe button and join us for more stories just like this one.

But perhaps the most telling proof of all didn’t come from the R.A.F. It came from the enemy. German intelligence reports from that same month—reports we can read today— suddenly noted a strange and troubling change. Their pilots were reporting, with confusion, that Spitfires and Hurricanes could now follow them into dives.

Their greatest tactical advantage—their ‘get out of jail free’ card— the move that had saved them time and time again— had vanished. Overnight. They had no idea why. They had no idea that their ace pilots were being out-flown and shot down, all because of one woman, her motorcycle, and a piece of brass that cost less than fifty cents.

The restrictor was so good, so simple, and so trusted that it remained in service for years. Rolls-Royce did, eventually, produce their ‘proper’ pressure carburetor in nineteen forty-three. It was, by all accounts, a superior piece of engineering that solved the negative-G problem completely, much like the German fuel-injection system. But in the middle of a war, ‘superior’ isn’t always what matters. ‘Available’ is what matters.

‘Trusted’ is what matters. Converting an existing Spitfire to the new pressure carburetor was a complex, eight-hour job. It required extensive modifications, new fuel pumps, and rewiring. That was eight hours a plane was on the ground, not in the air. Eight hours it wasn’t protecting a bomber or intercepting a raid.

Fighter Command, in the thick of the fight, simply couldn’t afford to ground its squadrons for that long. So, in a classic case of frontline pragmatism, many aircraft simply kept Beatrix Schilling’s washer. New-production Spitfires rolling off the line got the new carburetor, but the older, veteran aircraft kept their ‘orifice.’ Pilots trusted it. Ground crews knew how to maintain it.

It had proven itself in the one place that mattered: combat. In the workshops of the R.A.F., they had a saying: ‘If it works, don’t change it.’ This little brass washer was the very definition of that practical, life-saving wisdom. Tilly Schilling’s work, of course, did not stop with the restrictor.

The Royal Aircraft Establishment, now fully aware of her genius, kept her buried in the war’s most critical problems. When Spitfires were sent to the brutal Arctic convoys to support the Russians in Murmansk, their engines wouldn’t start in the minus-forty-degree weather. The oil turned to sludge. The batteries died. Tilly, drawing on her deep, practical knowledge, developed a new cold-start procedure using pre-heated oil and modified fuel mixtures. It worked.

The Spitfires flew, and the convoys were protected. When new Spitfire variants began flying at thirty-five thousand feet, their engines struggled in the thin, oxygen-starved air. Tilly developed altitude- compensating modifications for the carburetors that improved engine power by eight percent at altitudes where pilots needed it most. She was, in every sense, a relentless, hands-on problem-solver.

Her personal life was just as remarkable. Beatrice Schilling never married and focused entirely on her engineering career at the R.A.E. When the war started, she dedicated herself to solving critical aviation problems. And yet, despite her undeniable, war-altering contributions, Beatrix Schilling was never promoted to the top administrative positions.

After the war, when the leadership roles were handed out, those were still, as they said, ‘reserved for men.’ She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, the O.B.E., in nineteen forty-eight. She accepted the medal, posed for the photographs, and then went right back to work in the lab the next morning. She didn’t seem to mind. She preferred the hands-on work anyway.

Her legacy wasn’t going to be a title on a corner office. Her legacy was in the two thousand one hundred engines she fixed. It was in the thousands of pilots who came home to their families, who otherwise would have been a statistic. Tilly Schilling continued her work at the Royal Aircraft Establishment until nineteen sixty-nine, putting in thirty-three years of continuous service. She worked on Britain’s Blue Streak ballistic missile program.

She researched the dangerous effects of wet runways on jet-aircraft braking. She even, in a strange but fitting project, helped design a new bobsled for the R.A.F. Olympic team, applying her mastery of aerodynamics and friction. She spent her retirement doing exactly what she loved— restoring and, yes, racing vintage motorcycles.

She kept that same Norton she’d raced at Brooklands, the very machine that had taught her how engines behave under stress for her entire life. Beatrice Shilling passed away in nineteen ninety, at the age of eighty. The obituaries in the British papers and even The New York Times all focused on one thing: the brass washer.

The fifty-cent fix. ‘Miss Schilling’s Orifice.’ Today, her simple washer is a case study in engineering schools around the world. It is taught as the perfect example of an elegant solution. A simple, brilliant answer to a complex problem, implemented under unimaginable pressure.

A pub in Farnborough, the town where she worked, is now named ‘The Tilly Shilling’ in her honor. Institutions honoring her legacy, such as the new engineering facilities at the University of Surrey have named buildings after her. Her story is a powerful reminder. It’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest, most complex problems aren’t solved by the biggest committees, or the most important-sounding men in the room.

Sometimes, they’re solved by one person with a different perspective, a bit of courage, and a flash of practical, workbench genius. Before you go, if this story moved you, please take a moment to hit that ‘like’ button. It’s the single best way to tell the folks at YouTube that more people need to hear her name.