Aeronautical Engineer and Queen of the Hurricanes, Elsie MacGill for Ada Lovelace Day

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 

Ada, Countess Lovelace, 3rd edition linocut by Ele Willoughby 

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.

 

You can find my previous Ada Lovelace Day posts here.

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.

References

Bourgeois-Doyle, Dick. QUEEN OF THE HURRICANES — The Elsie MacGill Story, Vintage Wings of Canada, accessed October, 2025

Queen of the Hurricanes Engineer Elsie MacGill, Canadians At Arms, accessed October, 2025

Elsie MacGill, Wikipedia, accessed October, 2025

Schiedel, Bonnie. Soaring High - Elsie MacGill was the world’s first female aeronautical engineer. Canada's History, February-March, 2025.

Paddling the Humber River

After finding we were too early for the salmon run at Étienne Brûlé park on Saturday we canoed the Humber on Sunday.

Even though it was busier than I have ever seen it with people in the park we saw so much wildlife. The biggest treat was a pair of deer, which you don’t expect right in the city.

In the same marsh on the Humber River there was a great egret and great blue herons.

The Humber is home to a very large number of double-crested cormorants. We often see mute swans, Canada geese and mallards but this time as the water level was so low in the marsh we saw dozens of these adorable little lesser yellow legs wandering around in the mud.

There were literally piles of turtles, mainly map and painted turtles too.

Making Cyanotypes in the Sun

I've been taking advantage of the late summer sunshine to make some cyanotypes with some of the specimen I gathered and put in my flower press while in New Brunswick and some "volunteers" from my garden.

Proso millet cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby

Proso millet cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby

Wild Carrot and Other Wildflowers cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby

Wild Carrot and Other Wildflowers cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby

Two Ferns Cyanotype,  on handmade paper with a deckle edge, about 7.25" x 9.75"
by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Fern Leaf Cyanotype, on handmade paper with a deckle edge, about 7.25" x 9.75" 
by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Found Monarch Butterfly Wings, Wildflower and Leaves Cyanotype, on handmade paper with a deckle edge, about 7.25" x 9.75" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

New Natural History Prints

Every September I take part in #SciArtSeptember and post art on the daily prompts. You can see my picks and new prints on my socials  (Bluesky or Instagram or Cara). I'm going to share my new prints, including sneak peeks here.

First up, for the prompt islet, I made a mono print on my gel plate using pencil and acrylics. 

Islet monoprint, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2015

I was thinking about the tiny islands in the lake in New Brunswick. Islets, too small for human habitation can be a refuge for wildlife.

For the prompt jewel, I made a linocut ebony jewelwing damselfly. The forests of southeastern Canada and the eastern US are home to these metallic blue-green beauties known as ebony jewelwing (Calopteryx maculata) or black-winged damselflies. The males, like the one in my hand-carved and hand-printed linocut are turquoise with elegant black wings. The females are a duller brown with a white spot on their wings. Each print is on handmade khaki green paper with fibre inclusions and a deckle edge. I designed my linocut based on a photo I took in the Rouge National Park. Each print is 8" x 10".

my photo of an ebony jewelwing from earlier this summer 

Ebony Jewelwing, 8" x 10", by Ele Willoughby, 2025

For mimic, I shared the flower fly from my last post. The prompt trawl was also one which needed something new.

The Glass Sponge Reef, linocut print, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Glass sponges are fragile, brittle, living animals with skeletons made of silica, the same material we use to make glass. Reefs, widespread during the age of dinosaurs, are now quite rare, and in fact, were long believed to have gone extinct 40 million years ago. Then in 1987, scientists discovered 9,000 year glass sponge reefs or bioherms offshore northern British Columbia. All known glass sponge reefs today are found offshore BC, and its neighbours Alaska and Washington state. These important and beautiful biomes filter bacteria out of water, provide habitat for several species like spot prawns, halibut, squat lobsters and the rockfish in my print, store carbon and fertilize the ocean. These reefs in Canadian waters are now in marine protected areas as they can be destroyed, literally shattered, by pawn and crab traps, fishing lines, anchors and bottom trawling. Ocean warming and acidification are also damaging to these unique, vital ecosystems and natural wonders.

My 11" x 14" limited edition linocut print is made in watercolour paper and illustrates different glass sponges and a rock fish at the seafloor. The edition is limited to 8 prints.

Recent prints and patterns and calendars!

Since completing my Manufactured Ecosystems show I made one more pollinator. This print shows a great little pollinator in the garden: a transverse-banded flower fly (Eristalis transversa) on Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower. Because of its yellow stripes, tendency to hover (it's a hover fly after all) and love of flowers, this little insect can be mistaken for a bee, but it's a bee-mimic fly. Like the bees, it's an important pollinator and friend to flowers and gardeners. The transverse-banded flower fly and purple coneflowers are native to eastern North America. Each print is made by hand on assorted, beautiful Japanese washi papers and collaged to make the final 8" x 10" image, which are hand-embellished with posca pens.

Transverse-banded flower fly, linocut, 8" x 10" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

I've been delving into surface design, creating all sorts of repeat patterns using my prints. You can find them on fabric and wallpaper in my Spoonflower shop.

Some of my repeat patters: monarch, echinacea and black-eyed susans; clownfish and bubble anemone; radiolarians; velvet worms; crows; heart cockles; diving beetles; humpback whales and T.rex amongst the flowers.

New this year, I decided to make a postcard calendar with my terms of venery prints!

My 2025 Terms of Venery Postcard Desk Calendar! Check it out here.

A note on tariffs:

On August 29, the US removed de minimis exceptions for imports from anywhere. A lot of small businesses worldwide are really struggling to make this work. As a Canadian, the artwork and products I sell are CUSMA-compliant; that is they are tariff-free subject the pre-existing North American free trade agreement. So, buyers in the US should that be hit with unexpected extra fees. That said, there remains a fair bit of uncertainty with how Customs will see with mail or couriered packages. I have not suspended shipments. I can get Delivered Duty Paid service to ensure that buyers don't get a nasty surprise, though I am still figuring out how that works when no Duty was due in the first place.

The Future of Pollination Artist's Talk for Manufactured Ecosystems

My full artist's talk for the Future of Pollination art show for Manufactured Ecosystems is available here: Everything you ever wanted to know about my art about bees, and more ;)

Rita Levi-Montalcini, from her clandestine WWII bedroom lab to Nobel Prize winning neuroscience

 

Rita Levi-Montalcini, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025. She leans on the incubator built by her brother, and holds an egg with her prized binocular compound microscope in her WWII secret bedroom lab.

This is a linocut print of Italian neurobiologist and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909 – 2012) who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor. Hand-carved and hand-printed on delicate Japanese mulberry paper, each print is 11" x 14". She's long been on my radar as a possible subject for a portrait, being so well-known as a Nobel laureate and for many years, the oldest surviving laureate. Pictures abound online of her apparently living her best life, with a knowing smile and her signature swirled updo, often with a glass of wine

Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrating something

in hand, well into her 90s and even past her 100th birthday. So I had imagined a fun portrait of this delightful, elegant and charming, active Jewish senior scientist, continuing to produce good work, mentor younger scientists, establishing (with her twin sister) a foundation to provide scholarships worldwide, especially for African women, acting as Italian senator for life and regularly pissing off right-wing politicians.  But a client commissioned the portrait and specifically requested not her late life, nor the period around her Nobel win or research, but her wartime work, in her secret lab created in her bedroom. This seemed a real challenge as most photos I could find were in later decades, and the lab itself was not photographed. But I eventually found a couple of articles about her early career, which included a photo of her with her family in 1940, when they agreed she could make her lab, and a great article by fellow scientist/printmaker Bob Goldstein specifically about her wartime work. Bob kindly answered all my questions and even got me in contact with the archivists at Zeiss, so I could make sure I depicted her prized microscope accurately (if not the precise but unknown model, at least a plausible model which would have been available in Italy in 1940 and which would have served her goals) as well as an image of the type of observations she was making.

via this paper

The youngest of four, Rita (along with her twin Paola) was born to an Italian Jewish family in Turin. Her mother Adele Montalcini was a talented painter and her father Adamo Levi was an electrical engineer and mathematician. She had planned to be a writer but the death of a beloved nanny to cancer inspired her to pursue medicine. Her father thought university would disrupt his daughters’ lives as wives and mothers but Rita knew she was not cut out for domestic life. Eventually he came to support her aspirations. As an undergraduate she was inspired by neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi (no relation) to study the nervous system and she stayed on after med school graduation in 1936 as his assistant. Her research and Levi’s, both, were cut short by the Italian dictator Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race and the introduction of racist laws baring Jews from academic and professional careers.

In 1939 she left Italy for Brussels, Belgium, where her older sister Nina and her family lived, and she was able to do research which involved using fertilized chicken eggs as a source of material. The research environment was challenging and she missed her family terribly. Soon, nowhere in Europe felt safe; she wrote "the whole world was in danger." She opted to return to Turin in December of 1939 to at least be close to her family, living with her mother, painter sister Paola and architect brother Gino in her large childhood home. They were not allowed to take part in the workforce and once Mussolini joined forces with Hitler and declared war on Britain and France, the industrial city of Turin became a target of nighttime aerial bombings. She was disappointed by the forced interruption in her research but that changed after running into a former colleague from the University of Turin, Rodolpho Amprino, by chance. While not Jewish, he too had left the university after the introduction of the racial laws. He was disgusted with the unjust treatment of Giuseppe Levi and the promotion of the new director of the Institute (not for his mediocre scientific sills, but for his closeness to the fascist regime).  Amprino went to work in Chicago but returned to Italy in 1940. When he learned Levi-Montalcini was idle due to being barred from employment he told her "you don't lose courage in the face of the first difficulties." He advised her to set up a small laboratory, reminding her that the famed neuroanatomist and Nobel laureate Ramón y Cajal had managed to do fundamental work in the sleepy city of Valencia, so she could work at home. With her family’s support, Rita transformed her bedroom into a a secret research lab. In the summer of 1940, she read an article by US-based German scientist Victor Hamburger about the development of the nervous system and how nerve cells accurately connect muscles to the brain. Rita called this a “conversion” moment for her research goals. Hamburger described the surgery he did on chick embryos the size and shape of a typed letter ‘f’ with a glass needle, investigating what would occur if he removed the limb bud target of a nerve; would nerve cells still grow towards the limb? Their absence post-surgery lead him to conclude the nerves never formed if he removed the limb bud. Her brother built her an incubator for eggs so she could use egg embryos in her investigations. She had a heater for melting wax in which to embed the embryos, so she could make paper-thin slices she could observe with her microscope. In December 1940, she made a a daring train trip to Milan to purchase a binocular compound microscope from Zeiss. In arguably the most Italian anecdote ever about the history of science, police spotted her with her cake-sized box and demanded to see what was inside, suspecting she had a contraband panettone only available illegally under rationing. Luckily they were uninterested in her microscope and did not suspect that she needed it for her clandestine bedroom research lab, because her heritage barred her from an academic research job in fascist Italy. It became her most precious possession. She lugged it with her, along with glass slides, when she needed to use to the bomb shelter. She ventured out into the bombed out city of Turin to fetch fresh eggs regularly. She repeated Hamburger’s experiments using a sharpened sewing needle for surgery, and expanded on his research, investigating chick embryos not just before and after surgery, but daily, counting thousands of nerves for for 2 to 19 days after surgery. She captured the development through time, rather than a simple snapshot. In August 1941, her former mentor became her assistant, having fled Liege, Belgium where he had been working until the Germans arrived. Levi-Montacini saw something unexpected (contradicting Hamburger’s understanding); Hamburger had thought it was the muscles like those in the limb bulb that told nearby cells to become nerves whereas Levi-Montalcini saw that nerve cells formed regardless of the existence of a limb bulb but would die when deprived of a target. This was a fundamental observation; cell death plays a central role in how our nervous systems form. She published her results in Belgium and in a Vatican science journal in 1942, where Jewish scientists were still able to publish. My portrait represents Levi-Montalcini in her bedroom lab in 1940, leaning on her incubator, holding an egg, next to her precious microscope. Next to her is an image of nerves she photographed through this microscope.

Eventually the bombings and damage in Turin became too intense and the family, like most other residents fled the city for the country, making a home in Asti. During occupation she was in continuous contact with the partisan leaders of the Action Party (Partito d'Azione) and after Florence was liberated she volunteered her medical expertise for the Allied Health Service, treating the injured and refugees with typhoid and other diseases. 

Hamburger read her article and invited her to the US after the war, to continue her research and collaborate as a research associate at Washington University in St Louis, where she ended up working for 30 years. Her research established fundamental role that cell death plays in the formation of nervous systems. Her ongoing investigation into how target tissues like muscles communicate with nerve cells so only those that find targets survive, ultimately led to her co-discovery with Stanley Cohen of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in 1952. NGF is a molecule taken up by nerves from their targets and it allows them to survive. She transferred bits of tumours to chick embryos and saw a halo of nerves grow around it "like rivulets of water flowing steadily over a bed of stones," unlike anything she had seen before. She hypothesized that the tumour itself was releasing a substance that was stimulating the growth of nerves; this was verified with Stanley Cohen's help. Foundational to neurobiology, this research was important to our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.  She became a full professor in 1958 and, missing Italy, opened a second laboratory in Rome in 1962, dividing her time between Rome and St. Louis. 

She was director of the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), from 1961 to 1969 and of the Laboratory of Cellular Biology from 1969 to 1978. She was appointed director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome in 1977 and continued as a guest professor after her "retirement" in 1979. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1986. She wrote several books including her 1988 biography 'In Praise of Imperfection.' During the 1990s, she was amongst the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology and she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. On 1 August 2001, she was appointed as Senator for Life by the President of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. She went on to found the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and served as its president. She was active well into her later life, even attending the opening of the senate at age 97 and attending Pope Benoît XVI 's visit to Rome's main synagogue at age 100. She died in her home in Rome on 30 December 2012 at the age of 103 after many years as the longest living Nobel laureate.

References

Goldstein, Bob. A Lab of Her Own, Nautilus magazine, December 1, 2021.

Piccolino, Marco. Rita Levi-Montalcini's first intellectual emigration and her research in her laboratory "à la Robinson Crusoe": The Letters from Brussels and a "Whiggish" recollection. Multidisciplinary Research in Neurosciences. Conf. Cephalal. et Neurol. 2021; Vol. 31. N. 2:e2021016.

Rita Levi-Montalcini (b. 1909), Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis Missouri, 2007.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Wikipedia, accessed May, 2025.

RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Thursday 12 June 2025. 

Stafford, Ned. Rita Levi-Montalcini, February 2013. BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f804 (Published 11 February 2013)