Hilda Lyon
| Hilda Margaret Lyon | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
31 May 1896 Market Weighton, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 2 December 1946 (aged 50) Surrey, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Newnham College, Cambridge |
| Engineering career | |
| Employer(s) | Siddeley-Deasy, George Parnall, Royal Airship Works |
| Projects | R101 |
| Significant design | "Lyon Shape" |
| Awards | R38 Memorial Prize |
Hilda Lyon, ARAeS (1896–1946) was a British engineer who invented the "Lyon Shape", a streamlined design used for airships and submarines.
Lyon was born in 1896 in Market Weighton, Yorkshire. She was the youngest daughter of Thomas and Margaret Lyon, her father was a grocer. Hilda Lyon attended Beverley High School and then in 1915 went to Newnham College, Cambridge, from which she obtained a BA in mathematics.
After graduating, Lyon took an Air Ministry course in aeroplane stress-analysis and then obtained a job as a technical assistant. She saw no prospect of promotion or more responsibility "for a woman mathematician" in this job, so she and her sister quit their jobs and went to Switzerland for six weeks.
In 1918, Lyon worked as an Aircraft Technical Assistant for Siddeley-Deasy. She moved to George Parnall & Co. in 1920.
Around 1922, Lyon was admitted as an Associate Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. From 1925 onwards, she was a member of technical staff at the Royal Airship Works in Cardington, helping to develop the R101 rigid airship through her work on aerodynamics.
In 1930, Lyon was awarded the R38 Memorial Prize by the Royal Aeronautical Society for her paper "The Strength of Transverse Frames of Rigid Airships". It was the first time that any prize of the society had been won by a woman.
Lyon's work involved travel to America, Canada, and Germany. In 1930 she went to America on a Mary Ewart Travelling Scholarship and took up studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was first permitted to use a wind tunnel. In 1932, she submitted a thesis on "The Effect of Turbulence on the Drag of Airship Models" to obtain her MA. After submitting her thesis, Lyon went to Göttingen in Germany, and conducted research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft für Strömungsforschung with Ludwig Prandtl.
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