The Amazing Aerial Adventures of the ‘Flying Feminist’ Lillian Bland

“Hoots and derision—which did not worry me at all,” Lilian Bland wrote, describing her visit to an air show in Blackpool, England, in 1909. She’d been telling everyone there that she intended to build and fly her own airplane. They were unimpressed. Bland was undeterred. She built a DIY plane of bamboo, wood and fabric, with a bicycle handlebar for steering and an engine she carried from England back to her home in Ireland. But would the Mayfly, as she called it, fly?

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Katie Hafner  This is Lost Women of Science. I’m Katie Hafner. This episode is a personal one for me. It’s about our fascination as a species without wings of our own with flight. My father was a physicist and musicologist. He had PhDs in both. As a young boy in Brooklyn in the 1920s, he became captivated by airplanes. Here’s how he told the story.

Everett Hafner:  When I was seven years old, my mother gave a birthday party for me with all the kids from the neighborhood, and suddenly all the bells and whistles, everything, all the churches and the fireboats in Brooklyn and Manhattan went off. I went to my mother and I said with great joy, how did they all know, thinking it was for me?

Well, of course.  It was Lindbergh landing in Paris just at that moment. There was no event like that before. Probably none will ever be just like that afterward, where a single person does such a heroic thing.  Like so many other kids my age, I lost interest in cars and took up an interest in airplanes, and it changed my life.  

Katie Hafner: My father got his pilot’s license when he was in his 70s. And when he was 78 while flying a single-engine Cessna, one beautiful summer day in New England, the plane, unbeknownst to him, had a faulty fuel line, and the engine failed. The plane crashed. My father didn’t survive. So the episode you’re about to hear has a special resonance for me.

But this story is an uplifting one. It’s about courage and verve and venturing forth. I’m joined by Johanna Mayer, who brings us the aviation adventures of an Irish woman named Lilian Bland.

Johanna Mayer:  In 1965, a writer traveled to Cornwall, England, to interview a woman. Cornwall is far on the western coast of the country. This woman was 86, and she lived in a house perched on a cliff near the ocean. She was slim, she wore slacks and a jacket, and she paced along her terrace during the interview. 

The woman told the writer that she spent most of her time gardening. She hated people and preferred to be alone. But years ago, she’d led a totally different life. She’d ridden horses, she homesteaded in Canada, she worked as a photographer. But the writer was interested in one specific piece of her story. And when he broached the subject, the woman said, quote, “It’s like being resurrected from the dead.  

Johanna Mayer: Her name was Lilian Bland. And she was the first woman to design, build, and fly an airplane.

Katie Hafner: So, Johanna, hey.

Johanna Mayer: Hi, Katie Hafner.

Katie Hafner: Tell me about this airplane-building misanthrope. 

Johanna Mayer: I cannot think of someone with a less appropriate surname than Lilian Bland. I mean, you read her life story or her Wikipedia page and it’s like someone who had lived ten lives.

Katherine LaGrave:  She was an inventor. She was a bird watcher. She became a journalist at a time when there were not many women journalists.

Johanna Mayer: This is Katherine LaGrave. She’s a writer and editor who’s written about Lilian. 

Katherine LaGrave: ​ She wrote about sports, she wrote about hunting, she wrote about riding. She was a chain smoker. And she was also practicing Jiu Jitsu. I mean, she seems like she’d be a lot of fun at a dinner party. She was someone who- who persisted in being wholly herself at a time when that was not encouraged. 

Johanna Mayer: She was born in 1878 to a wealthy Irish family in England, the youngest of three children. 

Katherine LaGrave: You know, at this time it was all about being a society lady. So being really prim and proper. And she did all of the things that were expected of her at that time. She traveled across Europe. She studied music in Rome. She spoke multiple languages. But she kind of found it all empty.  

Johanna Mayer: I mean, I think studying music in Rome sounds pretty fun, but the point is Lilian Bland is someone who is cut out for a very different kind of lifestyle. She’s a woman who refused to ride side-saddle, and I do mean that both literally and figuratively.  

Katie Hafner: Absolutely, she did. 

Johanna Mayer: Then, in the summer of 1909, when she was 30 years old, Lilian received a piece of mail that would change her life. It was a postcard from her uncle. And on that postcard he’d drawn an airplane, listing all its measurements. And when Lilian got this piece of mail, something clicked for her. The year before, she’d been in Scotland, working on articles and photographing birds. She would wake up at dawn and go out to this remote island to observe them, she would climb the cliffs and just lie down on her back and watch these birds soaring above her. She was totally mesmerized by their wingspan and their glide.

Johanna Mayer: So Lilian got this postcard. And the plane her uncle had drawn on it belonged to the aviator, Louis Bleriot. Louis had done something that no one had ever accomplished at this point, which was… he flew his plane across the English Channel. So, when Lilian got this postcard with the airplane on it, she made a decision. She was going to fly – like those birds.

Katie Hafner: And just to put this into context, the Lindbergh flight across the Atlantic didn’t take place until, what, almost twenty years later, 1927.

Johanna Mayer: Exactly. And I mean the Wright brothers flight, that was only six years before. Amelia Earhart was 12 years old at this time.

Katie Hafner: And here we get to this question, which I know I drive everyone at Lost Women of Science crazy, but I just am so I just am so- I mean, I look at birds in flight. I am completely mesmerized with the way they glide and- and they use the air, but I’m not interested in building an airplane. Right? Are you?

Johanna Mayer: No. Never. It’s ‘cause we’re not Lilian Bland.

Katie Hafner: Exactly, which is why her surname is so inappropriate. Okay.

Johanna Mayer: In all seriousness though, the fact that she did this, as a woman in 1909, it’s pretty incredible. When that reporter visited Lilian back in 1965, she told him she’d been raised like a boy, and that she’d always worked with men. But she still wasn’t encouraged to go out and do something as adventurous and dangerous as flying. I mean, her father, for one, definitely didn’t approve. We’ll get to that later…

But as Lilian tells it, she was always someone who wanted freedom and a taste of every kind of adventure. From the beginning, she was always hungry for new experiences. So when her uncle sent her the postcard, she thought, well, here’s something I haven’t tackled yet. I gotta try it.

Katie Hafner: ​​We need more people like that. Just going after whatever catches their fancy. Alright, so we have this 30-year-old woman who has spent her life to date learning all this stuff, speaking all these languages, she’s traveled the world, she’s one of those people who just is interested in so many things, and then she gets this postcard from her uncle, decides she wants to fly, and how did she do that? Did she go to flight school? Did she get a degree in aeronautical engineering, which I’m sure they didn’t have then? Or physics? Or tell me.

Johanna Mayer: Right, where would you even start? It doesn’t seem like she pursued any sort of advanced degree.  But what Lilian did do is she just taught herself a bunch of stuff. And like we said, flying was brand new. So if you wanted to learn about it, you went directly to the few people who knew anything about it. Which is what Lilian did. She subscribed to Flight magazine. And Lilian began writing letters to them. She asked questions. She just really kind of threw herself into that world as much as she could. And in 1909, so this is the same year that she got that postcard—she wasted no time—she actually attended one of the first great air shows in Britain. These were a big deal at you know the sort of the blossoming days of aviation. It was just multi-day event where aviators would race planes. There were model planes on display. So at this 1909 show, I imagine Lilian would have been taking very careful notes, inspecting the planes, and apparently, Lilian would announce to anyone who was willing to listen that she was going to make her own plane. 

Katherine LaGrave: She kept talking to people there and saying, okay, you know, I want to build my own aircraft and I want to kind of do what these men out there are doing. The response wasn’t great.

Katie Hafner: I can imagine the response wasn’t great. 

Johanna Mayer: Yeah. But, didn’t bother Lilian too much, um, at least not on the surface, because she would later write, quote, “Hoots and derision, which did not worry me at all.”

Katie Hafner: What’s striking me now, I mean, what makes it even more impressive was not just the fact that she was diving into a brand new field, but also this idea that it was so new, you know, it’s anyone’s game. It’s like the very early days of Silicon Valley. Yeah, there was this transistor and there were these semiconductors, but what you’re gonna do with them is open to anyone. 

Johanna Mayer: Yes! It was an incredibly exciting time. I mean, planes, these contraptions were brand new. But flight itself was nothing new. Before planes there were hot air balloons, there were zeppelins, which look a lot like blimps except they have a rigid interior, and instead of big heavy machines like planes, these contraptions were filled up with gasses to make them lighter than air. And the fascination with flight in general goes even further back. 

Dan Bubb: I mean, you think back to Greek mythology with Icarus and Daedalus,  Leonardo da Vinci had his sketches about different concepts of flight.

Johanna Mayer: Dan Bubb is an aviation historian and a former commercial airline pilot.

Dan Bubb: So it had been around, but it was so new. How do we build this thing? How do we defy gravity?

Johanna Mayer: The way Dan tells it, it is nearly impossible to overestimate how thrilling this whole concept of airplanes was at the time.

Dan Bubb: A spectator might accidentally sunburn their tonsils from staring at the plane flying around because their mouth is a gape. It’s wide open. It was just so captivating, almost really to a point of obsession. You know, this whole notion of watching an airplane fly. I mean, this is, this is one of the biggest things in world history, right? And people are there to witness. 

Katie Hafner: Sunburn their tonsils? That is…

[Johanna laughs]

Katie Hafner:  that’s… that takes a lot to sunburn your tonsils. Is that even possible?

Johanna Mayer: You don’t sunburn your tonsils for nothing, man. 

Katie Hafner: Okay. So, this is amazing. People sunburning their tonsils, that would have been me, uh, staring up at planes, but what kinds of people were actually flying them back then?

Johanna Mayer: Well, it’s interesting because obviously today, airplanes and flying have completely transformed our world, you know, in terms of travel, in terms of military, mail delivery, all of these things. But Dan says that in those early days, people really weren’t thinking about airplanes and flight in terms of those utilitarian aspects. It was really a sport. I mean, there were competitions, there was prize money for certain lengths of flights; there were air shows like the one we talked about earlier that Lilian attended. And another thing to keep in mind here is a lot of people in aviation at the time were wealthy. Not everyone – the Wright brothers were a notable exception – but for the most part, flying was a hobby for the rich.

Katie Hafner: Yeah, right up there with horses. Ok so as we know, Lilian came from a wealthy family. 

Johanna Mayer: She also had the right kind of personality for flying.

Dan Bubb: To be a pilot back then, you had to basically have ice in your veins. Uh, it was very dangerous. And the other thing too, to keep in mind is during this time, airplanes are made of cloth and wood. They were actually made of relatively flimsy materials. And so lots of times you might have a wing fall off a plane, a tail falls off it. The gas tank gets hit by a lightning bolt if they hit a pocket of turbulence. There are stories of this where wings and tails literally fell off planes because they hit decent turbulence.

Katie Hafner: Wings are – wait, did he say wings are falling off planes? 

Johanna Mayer: That is what he said, yes. 

Katie Hafner: Oh my goodness gracious. I mean, planes coming apart—not totally a thing of the past… a piece fell off a Boeing plane just a few months ago, right? 

Johanna Mayer: Right, yes that did happen. There was a big hole, and stuff started flying out of the plane. Like, this teenage boy’s shirt got sucked right off his body, and the only thing keeping him in the plane was his seatbelt. So, unnerving, but overall, modern flying is still the safest way to travel. And the fact that this incident with the Boeing door was newsworthy, given all the many thousands of flights that take off every day, just shows how unusual this kind of thing is.  

So, all this to say: Lilian was brave. She was doing all this at a kind of unnerving time. The first person ever to die while piloting a powered plane was actually that same year that Lilian was working on her plane – 1909. He was a French pilot. His name was Eugène Lefebvre. He died when his plane just dropped to the ground from 20 feet in the air. Another pilot died the same year. His name was Ferdinand Ferber. He was flying too low, and his wing hit the ground, and his plane turned a complete somersault.

But, I will say, on the whole, It wasn’t a big bloodbath on the daily. Dan Bubb says that some of the crashes were fatal, but most were not. So, to illustrate this, he told me about this old telegram he came across in some of his research. And I absolutely love it.

Dan Bubb: A pilot had to basically telegram his boss saying, engine quit, had to land in a pasture, hit a cow, cow killed, I’m okay, Smith. Right? You might get banged up a little bit. You might break an arm, break a leg, but like I said, these guys are, they’re air cowboys, right? 

Johanna Mayer: And Lilian wanted to be an air cowboy too. 

Katie Hafner: Okay, Johanna. We’re back. So Lilian Bland wants in on this exciting new thing. She wants to be up in the sky like a bird. How is she going to make that happen?

Johanna Mayer: Well, she wasn’t just going to build a plane, hop in and hope it flies. First step was to build a smaller, model plane to see if it worked. It wasn’t tiny though. Lilian’s model had a wing span of six feet. So something like that is going to have a pretty decent amount of weight to it.

And think about the challenge there. Most of us take it for granted now – we see these gigantic 747s just floating up in the sky with nothing but air underneath them. But I mean, even a six-foot glider, how do you make an object that big and heavy defy gravity?

Katie Hafner: Right- what makes airplanes stay up in the sky? 

Johanna Mayer: It is a good question, Katie Hafner, and one that I have never truly given a lot of thought to, even though I’ve ridden in an airplane unquestioningly many times.

Dan Bubb: So there are basically four forces that work on an airplane: lift, weight, thrust, and then drag. 

Johanna Mayer: Dan Bubb again, the aviation historian.

Dan Bubb: Weight is gravity. It’s going to pull it back down to the earth. So when you’re ready to land the plane. You have weight.

Johanna Mayer: That one’s pretty self-explanatory.

Dan Bubb: Thrust is like the gas pedal on your car. It helps push the airplane forward 

Johanna Mayer: So these days thrust comes from huge engines.

Dan Bubb: And then drag is going to slow it down. 

Johanna Mayer: Okay, so obviously in some circumstances, drag can be a problem. You mostly want the plane to move forward, but also sometimes you want the plane to slow down. Or you want to turn the plane. Drag on one side can help with that. There are all sorts of ways that you can create drag. Sometimes it’s as simple as a rough texture on plane wings. If you look out the window of a modern airplane, you’ll see these flaps that pop up on the wing when you’re landing. Those are creating drag too. 

And obviously, a plane has a unique challenge, which is defying gravity, which means that you need to have a lot of that last force: lift. 

Dan Bubb: …which is what happens when you generate enough airflow over the wing and under the wing and the planes ready to lift off the runway. 

Johanna Mayer: Okay, so Katie Hafner, have you ever looked closely at an airplane wing?

Katie Hafner: I have with awe and wonder and complete lack of understanding.

Johanna Mayer: [Laughs] you probably noticed that the bottom of the wing is relatively flat, but the top has a bit of a curve to it.

Paul Walsh: So the air has to pass over it, and to do that it has to speed up to get over that hump on the top surface of the wing.

Johanna Mayer: Paul Walsh is a professor of aerospace engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Paul Walsh: If the air speeds up, the pressure of that air goes down. Right? So in that instance, there’s a pressure difference between the bottom surface and the top surface. And that’s what generates the lift that keeps the aircraft flying.

Johanna Mayer: And because of that lower pressure above the wing, it basically sucks the wing upward, lifting the whole plane with it. 

So that’s the classic explanation of what lifts an airplane. It’s called Bernoulli’s Principle. There is more to it, though. The angle of the wing and other aspects of fluid dynamics come into play too. These can help explain how a plane can, for example, fly upside down, even when the flatter part of the wing is on top. Or how planes can even fly with symmetrical wings. Who knew the physics of flight was so complicated!

Johanna Mayer: Anyway, back to Lilian and her model plane. It was a glider, so no engine. And a biplane, which…do you know how the old Wright brothers planes looked, Katie Hafner?

Katie Hafner: I think so, with those double wings right?

Johanna Mayer: Yes. So those are biplanes. A biplane is two sets of wings stacked on top of each other, as opposed to a monoplane, which only has one set of wings. Okay, so Lilian had to create a model plane that had just the right balance of forces, enough lift, not too much drag – or it would never get off the ground. And she wasn’t going to actually sit in this plane – it was way too small. She was going to fly it like a kite. So she returned home after the air show, she sketched it out, referring to the model that she’d seen at the show, and she made it! She made this model biplane, and she flew it like a kite. And it worked. But again, just a model, no engine on this thing.

Katie Hafner: So, okay, she’s made that model plane, but that’s a model plane. She hasn’t flown yet, except her kite. So what’s step 2?     

Johanna Mayer: Lilian decided she was going to make a full-size glider plane. So it wouldn’t have an engine, but it would be full-size. And she was going to see if that thing could fly. She decided to post up at her late uncle’s estate, which like I said, a hobby for the rich at the time, her uncle had a lot of space, he had a big workshop full of tools, and Lilian got to work. 

She basically bent and shaped and combined everyday materials into an airplane. So she used molding ash for the main structure of the wing. Um, she found some bamboo that she used for the outriggers, and this is my personal favorite uh, item that she used for construction. She made steering mechanism out of a bicycle handlebar.

Katie Hafner: Oh that makes sense, I can totally picture that. 

Johanna Mayer: So simple, but it worked. Yeah. One quirk though: She did have the wires crossed so when she would turn the handlebars to the right, the plane would turn to the left.

Lillan finished her full-scale glider in 1910. It had a wingspan of 27 feet, seven inches. And she called it Mayfly. Do you get it? 

Katie Hafner: Oh, wait, may fly, may not fly? 

Johanna Mayer: Exactly. Exactly. So, that is the million-dollar question: Will this thing fly? So remember the four forces: lift, weight, thrust, and drag. And she didn’t have an engine yet, so she was gonna have to make her own thrust. She just really wanted to see if it could get enough vertical lift if they moved fast enough.

Katie Hafner: So she was gonna put her worst enemy in it?

Johanna Mayer: Yeah, good plan. And the big thing was that she was trying to test out how much weight the plane could carry because ultimately she wants to add an engine, right? So Lilian enlisted the help of some very tall volunteers. She wrangled four six-foot-tall men from the Royal Irish Constabulary, which are basically police, and also her aunt’s garden assistant named Joe.

Katie Hafner  Joe!

Johanna Mayer: Yes, brave Joe. So Joe and the four others brought the plane to the top of a hill. And they grabbed the wings and they started running. And so they’re running, running, running. They get to the edge of the hill… and their feet picked up. The plane actually started to lift them. And the policeman, of course, got very quickly freaked out. And they let go right away and dropped to the ground. That is not the point. The point is that the plane took off.

Katie Hafner: Oh my goodness, the point is that the plane took of.,

Johanna Mayer: Lilian had made a full-scale glider that held weight.

Katherine LaGrave: She was thrilled by this. She thought, okay, you know, if five men, if this, this plane can lift the weight of these, these people, it can handle the weight of an engine. 

Johanna Mayer: Which means it was time for Lilian’s final step in this project.

So at this point, everything was kind of going great for Lilian. I mean, she was pumped, her plane had flown, she was having success. She fired off a letter to order the engine. It was from an English carrier. And that is when she hit some rough air. The engine didn’t come, didn’t come, there were delays upon delays. Lilian just kind of got sick of waiting around, and she finally decided to take matters into her own hands. Very classic Lilian move, can’t say I’m surprised. So she headed to England to pick it up herself, and she brought this engine home with her on the train.

Katie Hafner: She puts it on the train? I mean, does she buy a seat for it? Or did she, was, did she crate it up, or? 

Johanna Mayer: I love imagining her buying a seat for the engine and putting a little seatbelt around it.

Katie Hafner: Aw.  

Johanna Mayer: So I will say it was not the world’s biggest engine. It was a 20-horsepower engine, so we’re not talking about a commercial airliner here. But still. When she got home, she was so excited that she immediately started up the engine in the pitch black, in the middle of a storm, and also she did not have a tank yet, so she actually took an old whiskey bottle. And she had an aunt that was hard of hearing, and she used that aunt’s ear trumpet to funnel in the fuel into the tank.

Katie Hafner: Wait, her aunt’s ear, so ear trumpet, meaning if someone was deaf back then, you would use this thing to shout into their ear?

Johanna Mayer: Yes, I’ve seen this in old books and movies. It’s about a foot long. It’s thin on one end which you stick into your ear and then it falls, flares out at the long end, so it’s just sort of a natural magnifier of sound. So, I don’t know if that aunt ever used her ear trumpet again after this. So she took the whiskey bottle and the ear trumpet, poured in the fuel, and started the engine. It made a horrendous noise.

Katie Hafner: I can imagine! Her aunt would have heard it without the ear trumpet.  

Johanna: Yes!

Katherine LaGrave: And people are like, what is happening? You know, imagine this crazy noise coming from this workshop on the property. They thought that initially there had been an explosion at a nearby mill. 

Johanna Mayer: It woke up everyone around her.   

Katie Hafner: Including her deaf aunt. Ok.

Johanna Mayer: So Lilian promptly shut off the engine. But this was just the beginning of her troubles with it. It ended up snapping a bunch of wires. It caused some nuts to fly out of the bolts. She was really kind of working with new territory here. And I do want to say that this all sounds kind of cartoonishly funny, right? You know, the- the ear trumpet, her lugging this engine, waking up everybody in the neighborhood by turning it on. 

Katie Hafner: No argument there.

Johanna Mayer: And honestly, I think this might have been the point where I would have just given up on this project. 

Katie Hafner: Are you even thinking you could possibly have been – and nobody could have been Lilian except Lilian, but okay, go on.

Johanna Mayer: I mean, let’s get real. I would not have gotten this far. But if by some miracle I had gotten this far, this is the point where I absolutely would have stepped no further. Um, she was really alone in this. I mean, she showed up to that first flight show in England, all excited, and she got laughed at. She had no mentor. She didn’t even really have any peers. She just kind of toiled away in her workshop and went through trial and error with nobody really encouraging her or even just keeping her company.

Katie Hafner: You know, this makes me think about the women we cover in the series and this, you know, you hear this story over and over. And we say, oh, she persevered in the face of adversity. Maybe – I’m just positing here – maybe there were people like Lilian who didn’t even really notice, I mean, the adversity. Maybe there was something in her personality where it just didn’t even really register that she wasn’t being encouraged. 

Johanna Mayer: I mean, I think that that’s exactly what happened. Lilian just kind of wiped her hands on her mechanics overalls and kept going. And she actually really did wear mechanics overalls, by the way. Lilian once wrote that, quote, ‘I find mechanics overalls are the best thing to wear. Skirts are out of the question with all the wires, etc. Not to speak of oil.”

Katie Hafner: I think I rest my case here.

Johanna Mayer: Yes. So, finally, Lilian was ready to put this plane to the test. And her plan was to fly over her neighbor’s giant estate. And she wrote, quote, “It is a fine place, 800 acres, but it also contains a loose bull, and if it gets annoyed and charges, I shall have every inducement to fly.” Which I will say is some pretty great motivation.

Katie Hafner: Wait a minute there’s a bull on the ground and she’s in the air but in case she isn’t in the air, she can take off? Ok, got it.

Johanna Mayer: It better work. So she was all ready to go, and then she was delayed by five weeks of bad weather. Which I can’t imagine the frustration after waiting for the engine, building the plane. She had been working on it for about a year at this point. Finally, in September of 1910. Sky was clear and Lilian and the Mayfly were ready to go. 

Johanna Mayer: The grass was damp that morning. A small crowd had gathered and Lilian climbed into the cockpit. And her aunt’s gardener, Joe, is there again. So he began to swing the propeller that was in the front of the plane, and there was a little bit of stuttering. Lilian bounced for a bit and then, after about 30 feet of running… she took off! The plane lifted off the ground! But the really funny thing is in an interview a little bit later on, Lilian said that at first she didn’t even notice that she was flying. She was so wrapped up in checking and double-checking her engine and her levers that she didn’t even notice that she was off the ground. 

Now, it’s tough to say exactly how long or how high she flew – the sources vary here. Some say she rose to about 30 feet, that she flew about a quarter of a mile. But what we do know… is that Lilian flew. And she escaped that bull beneath her. 

Katie Hafner: Right? Who knows how the story would have turned out differently? And then and then she renamed to the plane Doesfly.

Johanna Mayer: The Doesfly… for a quarter of a mile. And I love imagining that moment for Lilian. Because you know, we’ve been hearing about Lilian in this whole endeavor, and she’s alone for the vast majority of it. She was alone building the planes in her uncle’s workshop, she was alone carrying that engine back from England, she, you know, people snubbed her at the air show, this is really a very solitary endeavor for her.

But when she was up there, in the Mayfly, in the air, for the first time, it doesn’t make me kind of sad to think of her alone. Like, she was up there by herself with her accomplishments. And I imagine it must have felt pretty amazing. And just a few days after her success, she wrote another letter to Flight magazine. And in it, she just wrote simply, quote, “I have flown.”

Katie Hafner: And that’s all she needed to write.  So, what happened to Lilian and the Mayfly?

Johanna Mayer: Well… she quit. 

Katie Hafner: She quit? 

Johanna Mayer: She quit flying. She quit her interest in aviation. 

Katie Hafner: Oh no. Do we know why?

Johanna Mayer: Well, she’d had designs on making sort of take-home kits for these planes and selling them, kind of starting a business out of it. People just didn’t really seem interested in that.  She also knew that, you know, while she had gotten the Mayfly to fly, if she wanted it to really work to fly long distances, it was going to take a whole a lot of extra work. She’d already dedicated a year of her life to working on it. Wasn’t ready to do more of that.  But the main thing is, it seems like a lot of it had to do with her father. 

Katherine LaGrave: Her father thought that these pursuits were, this is a quote, “unbecoming for a lady.”That they were dangerous.

Johanna Mayer: After her flight in the field that day, Lilian’s father, made her an offer. He said 

Katherine LaGrave: Okay, well, you know, if you stop flying, I’ll buy you a new car, a Model T Ford.

Johanna Mayer: And she took him up on it. Lilian donated the mayfly, uh, somewhat ironically, to a local boys club, and her interest in aviation vanished as quickly as it had appeared.  

Katie Hafner: Well, I, I find that it’s sad and, also, it couldn’t just have been her father saying, oh, I’ll get you a car there had to be more to it. Or not. Who knows? I mean, she did go from interest to interest.

Johanna Mayer: Yes, yeah, that’s kind of my read on it, is that  endless things could captivate her attention, that there’s always something next. So, even though she quit aviation, the same old Lilian was in there and she went on to teach herself to drive.

Katie Hafner: Well I should hope so! Her father gave her a car! [laughing]

Johanna Mayer: Yeah. [laughing] She actually ran the first Ford dealership in Northern Ireland for a while, so got into business. She eventually got married. And she and her husband had this really incredible period of life where they moved to Canada. They moved to a small island near Vancouver Island, and they were homesteaders. They raised chickens. They worked on boats. They had a daughter. The marriage didn’t work out, and sadly, Lilian’s daughter died of tetanus when she was 16 years old. And Lilian was alone again. 

Katie Hafner: Oh gosh that is so sad.

Johanna Mayer: So she eventually moved to England, and she spent the rest of her days gardening, painting. And trading stocks. She apparently did quite well at that.  And that’s how she ended up an old woman, alone in that house on the cliff. 

Johanna Mayer: It’s easy to think “what if” with Lilian.

Katherine LaGrave: I mean, we can imagine a man at that time would have likely been met with more encouragement. So there’s this tension point, and I do think about that. What if her dad was more encouraging, right? And would that have changed? Then she’s someone who’s selling these planes, and she becomes kind of a plane provider for Ireland and in the UK and becomes known in that way. 

And it’s hard to imagine that gender didn’t… Play a part there, right? That if it were a man who’s done this thing and shown that they can produce a plane, I would have a hard time believing that someone wouldn’t support that. 

Johanna Mayer: Lilian did get some recognition for her work while she was alive – a few publications gave her small write-ups.  And today, there’s a park in Northern Ireland that’s named after her. And she earned herself a nickname: “the flying feminist.”

Katherine LaGrave: She wasn’t bitter about it. She said you know I’ve proved wrong the people that thought that no woman could do this and that gave me great satisfaction.

Johanna Mayer: Katie, I have to admit that the ending to Lilian’s story kind of bummed me out a little bit. I wanted her to continue flying and reach for greater and greater literal and figurative heights. And I hated that she quit in exchange for a Ford. But when I asked Katherine about this, she had kind of a different take.

Katherine LaGrave:  One of my first reactions was, oh, I wanted something different for her, wanted her to have this long career and to have done all these different things in aviation, and then I thought, well, why? Why? Right? Like, she did this really cool thing. She seems happy with it. She seems proud of it. She was many things. She was so many other things than this aviation pioneer. And I think that’s really cool. Especially at a time when women were expected to only be a wife and mother. And especially even at a time now, as people, when we are expected to sort of do one thing and stick with it. She is a person, throughout her life, that always did what she wanted.   

Katie Hafner: This episode of Lost Women of Science  is dedicated to the memory of my father, Everett Hafner, who might actually have known about Lillian Bland. And even if he didn’t, now, we hope, many more people do.

This episode was hosted by me, Katie Hafner.  

Johanna Mayer: And me, Johanna Mayer. I wrote and produced this episode with help from our senior producer, Elah Feder. Lizzie Younan composes all of our music. We had fact-checking help from Lexi Atiya. Hans Hsu sound designed and mastered this episode.

Katie Hafner: Thanks to Jeff Delviscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. Thanks also to my co- executive producer Amy Scharf and to our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger. The episode art was created by Keren Mevorach. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX.

And by the way, Johanna, I don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned our donate button to people, have we?  

Johanna Mayer: Wait… we have a donate button?

Katie Hafner: We have a donate button! 

Johanna Mayer: Tell me all about it.

Katie Hafner: It’s pink, it’s up on the upper right-hand corner of the website, lostwomenofscience.org. And it would be great if you clicked it. Well, not you, Johanna. You don’t have to click it, but everybody else, please do.

Johanna Mayer: Let me navigate to this website right now… Okay, lostwomenofscience.org. Oh, there it is, the little pink button that says donate. I’m clicking on it… thrilling. I highly recommend. 

Katie Hafner: Bye everyone.

Johanna Mayer: See you next time!

[We want to thank James Fallows, a journalist, pilot, and the author of Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel, who helped us refine our explanation of the science of flight.]

HOST
Katie Hafner

REPORTER/PRODUCER
Johanna Mayer

SENIOR PRODUCER
Elah Feder 

Art: Keren Mevorach; credit: lilianbland.ie

GUESTS:
Katherine LaGrave, deputy editor at AFAR media

Dan Bubb, aviation historian and associate professor in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Paul Walsh, professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Centre for Advancing Engineering Research and Innovation in Aerospace Science at Toronto Metropolitan University. A big thank you to Professor Walsh for taking the time to answer our many questions about the science of flight in our interview and in follow-up emails.

FURTHER READING:
The “Flying Feminist” Who Was the First Woman to Design, Build, and Fly Her Own Plane, by Katherine LaGrave

Lilianbland.ie – a website honoring Lilian Bland, including photos, articles, and correspondence.

If you want to learn more about the science of flight, take a look at this NASA page giving the classic explanation of how planes achieve lift, but also see this Scientific American article challenging the idea that this explanation can fully account for lift. The debate is more complicated than we could give space to in the episode or resolve ourselves. You might find this discussion on Research Gate illuminating.

Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel  by James Fallows, a journalist and pilot, who helped us refine our explanation of the science of flight.