Now that's a geek

Thanks to the geek feminism blog's "Geek Woman Wednesday" this week, I have learned about Beatrice Shilling. An electrician, electrical line worker, motorcycle racer, and one of the folks who helped Britain win the war by enabling spitfires to engage in limited negative G maneuvers.

From the blog entry:

Of course, she also applied common-sense engineering approaches to her home life: "There are plenty of pockets of resistance in this house occupied by spiders so I decided a flame thrower was the only thing for under the sink."

and

In her retirement, her biography "Negative Gravity" records that: "Her idea of relaxation was to drive a fast car at full throttle, and if the car was not fast enough, her workbench was there in the back room to machine new parts to make them faster."

Hell yeah.