They say that necessity is the Mother of Invention. And I believe this is mostly true. So many times, those doing the inventing are women. Of course, this is Women’s History Month. I think we should get six months, as right now, men have eleven history months, and we just get the one. But here we are.
As such, there have been some notable women inventors from the past. Thinking of new ways, new ideas, how to make the world a better place.
Take the life raft. I’m not sure when the very first one made the scene, but It was in the 1870s. A decade later, a woman named Maria E. Beasley designed an improved life raft. She was from Philadelphia. And at that time, new groups of immigrants were sailing to the United States. This may have sparked her invention.
Prior to her improvements, the early life rafts were flat boards, basically. Beasley’s raft had guard rails to help keep people inside. That is a handy feature when you are forced to abandon your sinking ship.
Beasley patented her first life raft design in 1880 in both the United States and Great Britain. She came up with a second improvement a couple of years later and got another patent in 1882. She didn’t stop at life rafts, though. She also invented a foot warmer, a stream generator, and the barrel-hooping machine. In all, she earned fifteen patents, Ms. Maria E. Beasley did.
There have been other life-saving inventions from women, like the feeding tube. Bessie Virginia Blount was a nurse here in America. They say she was also known as Bessie Blount Griffin — which I suppose was her married name. Anyway, not only was she a nurse, she also wore the hats of physical therapist, inventor, and handwriting expert. Seems like an odd combination, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. She was also the first Black woman to train at Scotland Yard’s Document Division. Go figure.
During the 1940s, Bessie worked with World War II veterans. This was in the Bronx, New York. She was there to teach veterans with amputations to read and write with their teeth and feet. And it was then that she came up with the “feeding tube.”
Blount devised a tube that delivered food to a person’s mouth whenever they bit down on that tube. She patented part of the design in 1948. Her design, this invention, was the roadmap for modern feeding tubes, used if a person can’t eat on their own. After gaining this patent, Blount went on to become a forensic handwriting analyst. She seems quite eclectic.
There have been loads of innovations from women. Sometimes, the inventions would be life-savers in a much different way. We see this with the dishwasher, which also probably has saved a lot of marriages.
The dishwasher comes to us from Josephine G. Cochran. She was a wealthy socialite in Shelbyville, Illinois. She must have been pretty darn rich, as Ms. Cochran employed servants to perform housework in her mansion. But, you know the old saying. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Cochran started washing her fine china herself when she discovered some of the servants had accidentally chipped them. And Josephine found out pretty quickly that she didn’t like housework. So, she vowed to invent a machine that could wash the dishes for her.
Long story short? She did it. She built the first commercially-successful dishwasher, and she had it patented in 1886. Others had tried before her to create dishwashers, but they used scrubbers. Ms. Josephine Cochran’s dishwasher used water pressure to clean the dishes. It was much more effective. So, with a patent in her purse, she founded Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine Company. I should add that the common folk couldn’t afford her dishwashers. As such, Cochran mostly sold to hotels and restaurants.
So, a small selection of women inventors and their bright ideas.
May your day be filled with bright ideas. You never know. Maybe your next big thought could change the world.
Lightbulb!
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“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle
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“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
― Mary Shelly
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“The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, ‘You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
― George Carlin
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To make something that has never been before.
