- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_MacGill
- Wiki Biography Notes:
- Elizabeth Muriel Gregory MacGill OC (March 27, 1905 – November 4, 1980), known as the “Queen of the Hurricanes”, was a Canadian engineer. She was chief aeronautical engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry (CC&F) in Fort William, Ontario during the Second World War. There she oversaw manufacturing of 1,451 Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force and the British Royal Air Force, then 835 Curtiss Helldivers for the U.S. Navy, which contributed greatly to the war effort and did much to make Canada a powerhouse of aircraft manufacturing. After her work at CC&F, she ran a successful aeronautical engineering consulting business. Between 1967 and 1970, she was a Commissioner on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, which published a report in 1970.
- MacGill was born in Vancouver on March 27, 1905, youngest daughter of James Henry MacGill, a prominent Vancouver lawyer, part-time journalist, and Anglican deacon, and Helen Gregory MacGill, a journalist and British Columbia’s first woman judge.
- MacGill was admitted to the University of Toronto’s Bachelor of Applied Sciences program in 1923. During the summers she worked in machine shops repairing electrical motors to supplement the theory and practical teachings during the school year. It is also here that she became exposed to the nascent field of aeronautical engineering. Contracting polio just before her graduation, MacGill was told that she would probably spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. She refused to accept that possibility though, and learned to walk supported by two metal canes. Elsie graduated from the University of Toronto in 1927, the first Canadian woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering.
- Her role in the company changed when the factory was selected to build the Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft for the Royal Air Force (RAF). The factory had to be quickly expanded from about 500 workers to 4,500 by war’s end, half of them women. McGill was responsible for tooling up production for more than 25,000 precision parts; the parts had to be interchangeable with Hurricanes manufactured in the U.K. For much of the war MacGill’s primary task was to set up and streamline operations in the production line as the factories rapidly expanded.
- By the time the production line shut down in 1943, CanCar had produced 1,451 Hurricanes. In 1940 she wrote and presented a paper on the experience, “Factors Affecting Mass Production of Aeroplanes”, later published in The Engineering Journal . Her role in this successful production run made her famous, to the point of having a comic book biography appear in an issue of True Comics in 1942, using her nickname, “Queen of the Hurricanes”. Numerous popular stories were published about her in the media as well, reflecting the public’s fascination with this woman engineer.
- Third Great Granddaughter of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=15688
- Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/90530253/elizabeth_muriel_gregory-soulsby
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