Bear with me, for this is a real thing. We're talking Second World War, and the battle in the air. British planes of the day used a carburettor, whereas the Germans, like the nation of BMW drivers they would become, insisted on fuel injection. It seems a trivial point, but for a moment in the early stages of the war, this was a crucial technical difference. The problem, you see, is G-force. A fuel injection system supplies fuel to an engine at the same rate regardless of pressure put on it. But take a carburetted engine and expose it to negative G, say, by putting it in an aeroplane that's attempting to pitch downwards hard, and one of two things will happen. Fuel will flow back into the carburettor. So firstly the engine will be starved of fuel, which means a loss of power. Keep this up and the carburettor floods with it, and (skipping some technical stuff), the engine will cut out. Not the best thing to happen if you're in an aeroplane that is already pointing downwards.

This being the infancy of modern aerial combat, all sorts of new maneouvres were being developed day by day, but one that proved very effective for the Germans was to, essentially, dive downwards until the plane was inverted and travelling in the opposite direction, then right it and escape. Dangerous, certainly, but at the time, there was very little that wasn't. British planes would be more or less unable to follow without cutting out their engines, so you can see where this would providing an imbalance. Almost certainly a minor mechanical detail like this cost lives.

And it was fixed by an obscenely named piece of technology. Miss Shilling's Orifice was a quick-and-dirty (ahem) fix invented by a scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and what it amounted to was a tiny washer that restricted the amount of fuel flowing from the carburettor, to the maximum amount needed by the engine. At the risk of a massive oversimplification, no excess fuel kicking around, no backwash to the carburettor, and Spitfires and Hurricanes could fly around upside-down to their hearts' content, at least until someone came up with a better solution.

The inventor was an interesting woman, as you might have imagined. Beatrice Shilling, military scientist, militant feminist (for the day), sometime motorcycle racer, and general troublemaker. That last can be inferred by her working for the RAE for the better part of thirty years, and the sole memorial to her being a Wetherspoons chain pub named after her. It's rather sad, in a way, but at the same time, she made her mark on history, and by all accounts was pretty badass in the process. Supposedly she made her husband lap a racing circuit at over 100mph before she would marry him.

Oh, but she's not completely forgotten. Allegedly, 'to Miss Shilling's Orifice' remains a toast in the officers' messes of various RAF fighter squadrons.

Iron Noder Last-Minute Frenzy. 3/20. 2 hours and 6 minutes remaining.