Betty Lou Bailey

Bailey died suddenly on November 13, 2007, during an ADK cycling trip.

Bailey was an active environmentalist. She enjoyed sewing. She was active and loved to travel, canoe, cycle, and hike. She walked the entire Appalachian Trail in segments over a few years. Bailey was a member of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK). In 2004 she received their highest award for her work in monitoring hydropower applications to the Federal Regulatory Commission. She did work in dam-licensing that helped ensure that sufficient water was released downstream to support river life and water recreation.

In 1964, Bailey attended the first International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists Conference in New York. She travelled to Britain for the second ICWES conference in Cambridge in 1967, where amongst other things, she was taught how to wear a sari by Indian engineer K. K. Khubchandani alongside British engineers Rose Winslade, Cicely Thompson, Hettie Bussell and US engineer Louise Davies.

Bailey joined the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) in 1951, where she was an officer of the Philadelphia section and served on the SWE Executive Committee. In 1985, she was elected to the SWE College of Fellows. A SWE endowed scholarship was established in Bailey’s name in 2011.

Bailey attended the undergraduate program in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois a year early, at the age of seventeen. By the time she finished her freshman year, both of Bailey's parents had died. In 1950, Bailey graduated with University Honors. In her graduating class of approximately 700 engineers, she was the only female engineer. In her sorority, she was one out of a total of two engineers (the other one was a civil engineer). In 1967, she graduated from the Penn State Graduate Center in King of Prussia with a Masters in the Engineering Science, although she was not impressed by the course or teaching.

Betty Lou Bailey (1929 – 2007) was a General Electric Company mechanical engineer from the United States. She held a patent for an aircraft variable exhaust nozzle. The invention operated so that one would vary both the throat and the exit diameters for the hot gas flows. In honor of her legacy, the Society of Women Engineers named a scholarship after her. To date, that scholarship is still being distributed to eligible female graduate students who pursue a career in engineering.