As the UK's longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth bore witness to immense engineering and technological developments during her 70-year reign.Queen Elizabeth's commitment to promoting engineering excellence may have been bom out of her own first-hand experience of the profession during the Second World War. Aged 18, she became the first woman of the Royal Family to be an active-duty member of the British Armed Forces, after joining the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS) as a subaltern in 1944. She trained as a me- chanic in the spring of 1945, earning the nickname of "Princess Auto Mechanic" from the press at the time.Throughout her life, the Queen continued her support of the sector. In 1956, she opened the world's first nuclear power station at Calder Hall, Cumberland, pulling the lever which would direct electricity from the power station into the National Grid for the first time. "This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community," she noted in her speech.She was a patron of a number of engineering institutions, including the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IM-echE), the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Royal Society, the Royal Aeronautical Society, the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST), and the Institution of Royal Engineers. Furthermore, she inaugurated some of the UK's most important engineering projects, such as the Channel Tunnel and the Diamond Light Source, and was also reportedly the first monarch to send an email!
展开▼
