Each week this blog will feature a prominent woman who made significant contributions to engineering or science. If you have any women you'd like us to feature please let us know and we'll do our best to include them.
Do you know of a great woman in engineering that should be recognized? Let us know! Submit a few paragraphs about that person and we'll add her to the blog. Please provide a citation for the material that you submit so that we can verify it. Please note - it has to be original material. We cannot publish copywritten material or bulk text taken from books or other sites (including Wikipedia).
For the next few months, we’ve decided to dig into the CR4 archives and expand upon some blog posts from 2007. Back then, we published a series of lists of women inventors and now we will write full blog posts about those who have yet to be featured. Do you know of a great person to be a subject? Let us know!
A rare combination of art and innovation lead Patricia Billings to create a revolutionary invention.
In the 1970s, a sculpture she had been working on for months fell and shattered. She was devastated but inspired. Thinking back to the time of Michelangelo and other Renaissance sculptors, she drew inspiration from the cement additive they used to give their plaster longevity.
After eight years of research, she created a non-toxic, heat resistant material called Geobond. The material is immensely strong, stops leaks, prevents rust and does an excellent job of preservation. It also became a viable alternative to Asbestos. While this wasn’t her intended goal, the discovery will protect lives for years to come as well as serving as a preservation agent.
She has two patents related to the material, but the exact makeup remains a secret that only she knows.
Patricia Billings was born in 1926 in Clinton City, Missouri. She married a salesman and began working as a medical technologist and studying fungal and bacterial diseases at Kansas City Junior College. In 1947, she left the job and divorced her husband.
In 1956, she began studying art at Amarillo College and specialized in Plaster of Paris sculptures. In 1964, she opened a store in Kansas City where she sold many of her sculptures including the one that fell, broke and sparked the inspiration for her invention.
Check out this video to see her discuss the product:
