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| Elsie MacGill, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" on Japanese paper by Ele Willoughby, 2025 |
It is once again Ada Lovelace Day, the 16th annual international day of blogging to celebrate the
achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2025 (ALD25). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging.
I am working on a new woman in STEM portrait for ALD25 and an upcoming #Spacetober print, but sometimes life gets in the way. We had a family emergency this week, so I am quite behind. But I want to share what I can, so read on to find my yearly - if a bit shortened - biography of aeronautical engineer Elsie MacGill (March 27, 1905 – November 4, 1980). Elizabeth Muriel "Elsie" Gregory MacGill was born in Vancouver, in 1905, and became the first woman aeronautical engineer and professional aircraft designer in North America, and likely the world. She was the first and, usually, only woman through her education at four different universities and engineering departments. She collaborated on many of Canada's famous and innovative bush planes and aircraft components, was entirely responsible for Canada's Maple Leaf Trainer II, a military flight trainer aircraft, and most famously, as chief aeronautical engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry (CC&F) in Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay), she oversaw the manufacturing of 1,451 Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft during WWII for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and the British Royal Air Force (RAF), as well as 835 Curtiss Helldivers for the US Navy, becoming known as "The Queen of the Hurricanes." Her work helped make Canada a powerhouse of aircraft manufacturing. Later, she served as a Commissioner of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, which published their report in 1970.
Elsie came by her aptitude for social justice and blazing her own trail honestly. Her mother Helen MacGill was a suffragette like her mother before her, a journalist, a judge and a leader in Canada's women's movement. Her father James Henry MacGill, was a prominent Vancouver lawyer, part-time journalist, and Anglican deacon and supporter of women's suffrage. Elsie grew up with two older step-brothers and an older sister. Early home-schooling including drawing lessons with renown Canadian artist Emily Carr and swimming lessons with prominent lifeguard Joe Fortes. Then she attended King George Secondary, associated with McGill University, before entering UBC Applied Science, but the dean asked her to leave after one term. She moved on to the University of Toronto, where, she wrote, "My presence in the University of Toronto's engineering classes in 1923 certainly turned a few heads." She spent her summers working in machine shops, where she gained practical hands on skills to go with the classroom theory, and where she was exposed to aeronautical engineering. When Elsie graduated from the University of Toronto in 1927, she was the first woman electrical engineer in Canada. She got a junior job with Austin Aircraft Company in Pontiac, Michigan and began part-time graduate studies, then enrolling full-time at the University of Michigan. Two years later, she graduated from the University of Michigan, as the first woman with a master's in aeronautical engineering, anywhere. Just prior to completing her master's she fell ill with polio and found herself paralyzed from the waist down. She spent much of the subsequent three years in bed or relying on a wheelchair, told she would never walk again. She nevertheless fought to regain her mobility and taught herself to walk again using two canes. She treated her disability as a mere inconvenience. She continued to pursue her doctorate from MIT from 1932-1934, supplementing her income with writing magazine articles about aircraft and flying. At MIT she was finally not the lone woman, as a contemporary of aeronautical engineer and technical writer, M. Elsa Gardner. Upon graduating she returned to Canada, taking a job as assistant aeronautical engineer at Fairfield Aircraft in Longueuil, Quebec. There, she worked on the Fairchild Super 71(the first aircraft designed and built in Canada featuring a metal fuselage), the Fairchild 82 (a bush plane), and the Fairchild Sekani(twin-engined transport aircraft) and presented her paper, "Simplified Performance Calculations for Aeroplanes", to the Royal Aeronautical Society in Ottawa, on March 22, 1938, which was later published in The Engineering Journal. She took part in the CBC's six-part series
The Engineer in War Time in a segment called "Aircraft Engineering in Wartime Canada." In 1938 she was also first woman elected to corporate membership in the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC).
In 1942, she was hired as Chief Aeronautical Engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry (CanCar, or CC&F), where she designed a training aircraft, and oversaw its production: the Maple Leaf Trainer II. It did not end up being used by Commonwealth forces, but Mexico purchased ten of them because of their excellent high-altitude performance. Then, the company was selected to manufacture Hawker Hurricanes for the RAF. She became responsible for increasing the workforce from 500 to 4,500 mainly women workers and the tooling of 25,000 precision parts which had to be interchangeable with the British made Hawker Hurricanes, and streamline the mass production of these aeroplanes. This involved designing the manufacturing tools and adaptations to the plane, including de-icing controls and landing skis, for use during Canadian winters. She wrote and presented a paper about the experience, "Factors Affecting Mass Production of Aeroplanes", later published in The Engineering Journal. It won the Gzowski Medal from the Engineering Institute of Canada in 1941. The work made her famous and she even appeared in a comic book biography in an issue of True Comics in 1942, using her nickname, "Queen of the Hurricanes”.
Seeking a job to replace the Hurricanes, CC&F in 1943, they were awarded a contract from the US Navy for the SB2C Helldiver. Production did not go smoothly; MacGill and CC&F were foiled by repeated changes in specifications making mass production all but impossible. The US Navy, frustrated with delays fired MacGill and line production manager Bill Soulsby, rather than figure out the source of the problem. Soulsby and MacGill got married two weeks later.
The couple moved to Toronto and set up a consulting firm. MacGill wrote the International Air Worthiness regulations for the design and production of commercial aircraft, as a Technical Advisor to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). These regulations, with their updates, are still important to safety of commercial aircraft. She became the first woman to chair a U.N. committee, in 1947 as chairman of the United Nations Stress Analysis Committee. MacGill presented her paper "The Initiative in Airliner Design", to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and subsequently published it in The Engineering Journal. The next year the SWE awarded her their annual Achievement Award.
While recovering from a broken leg, in 1953, she sorted through her mother's papers. This in turn lead to writing her biography, My Mother, the Judge: A Biography of Judge Helen Gregory MacGill, which she published in 1955.
She followed her mother's example and worked on women's issues, serving as national president of the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs from 1962 to 1964. Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed her to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada and she is a co-author of their 1970 report. She
filed a "Separate Statement" so she could voice her opinions which differed from the majority on the commission, including her belief that abortion should be removed from the entirety of the Criminal Code. Abortion had become legal in 1969, through the Criminal Law Amendment Act, but only if a 3-doctor committee determined that the pregnancy posed a danger to the parent's health. In 1988, the Supreme Court agreed with MacGill, striking down the remaining Criminal Code provisions restricting abortion as unconstitutional; abortion is healthcare. MacGill was also a member of the Ontario Status of Women Committee, an affiliate of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. This work along with her engineering career earned her the Order of Canada in 1971. She wrote, "I have received many engineering awards, but I hope I will also be remembered as an advocate for the rights of women and children."
She was granted honorary doctorates in law from the University of Toronto in 1973, and in science from the University of Windsor in 1976. The Ninety-Nines: International Organization of Women Pilots, awarded her the Amelia Earhart Medal in 1975. In 1977 she received the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal. In 1979, the Ontario Association of Professional Engineers presented her with their gold medal. She was inducted in the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983 and she was a a founding inductee in the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 1992. She has been honoured with a stamp, a commemorative loonie dollar coin, schools and cadet squadrons have been named in her honour and she was a subject of a Heritage Minute for her work during WWII.
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