Great lives
It’s the week after National Women in Engineering Day (#NWED2016) and the results of our exclusive poll on the most
inspiring women engineers you voted for are being counted. This week, CIBSE
Press Officer Matt Snowden takes a look at some information about some of the most popular
entries nominees.
We’ve had a
phenomenal response to our poll, and we’re thrilled that so many people have
been inspired by women past and present who have blazed trails in the
engineering industry. What has been particularly interesting to see is the
sheer variety of engineers suggested, with over 20 separate individuals
receiving votes, showing that women engineers occupy a greater place in the public consciousness than we often realise.
We’ve had a look at your responses, and here
are some of the top choices (in no particular order). Watch this space, because soon we'll be announcing the engineers past and present in full who have inspired you most. We're also dedicating our second podcast to women in engineering, and the issues affecting their careers!
Dame Caroline Haslett
Having transferred from secretarial work at the Cochran
Boiler Company to works during the First World War, she trained as an engineer
on-the-job having been moved to their Scottish Office thanks to her skill as a
manager. From there, she designed transatlantic shipping boilers and became an
expert electrical engineer, wiring up her own flat in London.
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| A maid operates an early electric vacuum cleaner |
She began advising the Government on the education of women,
and was invited to join as organising secretary to the new Women in Engineering
Society. Thanks to her work, the Society soon spread its ideas around the world
to the USA and Russia, and Dame Caroline continued her work with women and with
electricity – meeting famous figures including Einstein and Henry Ford to
espouse her views.
As an engineer, she promoted the disciple as a means to make
the lives of women in the home easier by spreading electricity far and wide to
power lights and labour saving devices. She also strongly believed in
electricity as a means to promote safety, particularly with regards to lighting
in poorly lit factories.
Ada Lovelace
Often regarded as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada
Lovelace ‘The enchantress of number’ is most famous for her work with Charles
Babbage on his Analytical Engine, but her contribution to science extended
beyond her work on the first mechanical computer.
As a lifelong devotee of science and the scientific method,
Ada was ahead of her time in analysing the effect that computers could have on
our lives in the future, when her colleagues focused only on the technical
abilities of the machine itself. A controversial figure in her time, this
included running up thousands of pounds in gambling debts while trying to
develop a mathematical model for betting.
As a woman she was
ahead of her time, mixing and corresponding with some of the finest minds of
her day, and is today rightly memorialised in countless buildings, awards,
educational institutions and even one of the Crossrail tunnel boring machines
under London. Her views on computing began our conversation on the place of
technology in society one hundred and fifty years before the present day, when
it is changing the way we think, work and communicate.
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| A prototype Analytical Engine © Bruno Barral |
An economics graduate from Hull, Amy Johnson seemed like an unlikely
aviation pioneer, but she had the skill and determination to turn a hobby into
a career against the odds in a male dominated industry.
Taking her first flight at the age of 23, she gained an “immense
belief in the future of flying”, and began taking lessons at her own expense.
Leaving a promising career in a London solicitor’s office behind, she took a
job as an aircraft mechanic after gaining her pilot’s license and passed her
exam to become the UK’s first woman ground engineer.
Unable to make a living as a commercial pilot, Amy’s
determination to fly saw her complete ever more daring feats of aviation –
becoming the first woman to fly to Australia, breaking the record UK to Cape
Town time held by her husband and flying from Britain to America in one hop,
flying a custom designed plane with massive fuel tanks.
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| Amy with her plane 'Jason' in India on her flight to Australia © Dabbler |
Turning her attention towards the war effort, her passion
claimed her life in 1941 when she was accidentally shot down by friendly fire
while undertaking a mission for the Air Transport Auxiliary. Amy used her skill
as an engineer to achieve the unthinkable throughout her life, and displayed
great dedication to her love of flying.
Emily Warren Roebling
In one of the greatest stories in engineering history, Emily Roebling took on one of the greatest engineering challenges of the 19th century and oversaw the construction of New York’s Brooklyn Bridge based on her self-taught education in engineering.
In one of the greatest stories in engineering history, Emily Roebling took on one of the greatest engineering challenges of the 19th century and oversaw the construction of New York’s Brooklyn Bridge based on her self-taught education in engineering.
Building the longest suspension bridge in the world over a
busy river with banks frequently covered in a layer of frozen mud proved
backbreaking work, which claimed the health of Emily’s father-in-law, the
original chief engineer of the project. Her husband also succumbed to illness
while working in the cassions under the massive towers, which were pumped with
compressed air to stop the mud flowing in.
Facing financial problems and the collapse of the project,
Emily began helping her paralyzed husband in running the construction. At first
as a messenger and then as an advisor, Emily started studying topics in civil
engineering - maths, strength of materials, stress analysis, and cable
construction. From a woman who had never studied engineering in her life, she
became the project’s unofficial chief engineer, and ended up heading
construction on the first steel cable suspension bridge for 11 years – a ‘wonder of the industrial world’.
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| The Brooklyn Bridge under construction between 1872 and 1887 |
Such was the public gratitude for her work that she was named in its opening ceremony, and became the first person to cross it when it opened in 1883.
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