Susan Casey - Women Invent!. Two Centuries of Discoveries That Have Shaped Our World

We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongsand wants to belongexclusively in the home.... The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half of its people if we are to solve the many problems which beset us.

Dr. Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Prize winner, 1977

T he horse trotted at a steady pace, pulling the open carriage. It was a pleasant day in the mid-1880s in Baltimore, Maryland. The family riding in the countryside, especially the mother and father, talked of the birds that flitted about. Their daughter was too busy to chat. She was watching the birds as they flew from branch to branch. Then a loud blast, an explosion, frightened the horse. The little girl turned to look and saw the horse rearsaw its front hooves fly into the air and then down again. The carriage rocked unsteadily. Her mother and father held onto her and the carriage. Then the horse began to run, gallop, too fast, much too fast. The carriage was tipping to one side, then another. The little girl screamed. How were they going to get the carriage free of the runaway horse?

Patent drawing for Annie Chiltons Horse Detacher and Brake.

That was exactly the question Annie Chilton answered when she invented a device that would do just that. In 1891, the Baltimore woman gained a patent for a Horse Detacher and Brake, a device that would prevent accidents like the one about to happen in the story above.

Annie saw a problem that needed to be solved. Then she created a solution with her invention. She is only one of many women inventors, before and after her, who did the same.

So what are inventions, exactly? An invention is a discovery of something new that is useful to people. People might see it and say, Wow, thats great. I could use that. Like what?

In 1976, in another part of the world, Magdalena (Maggie) Villaruz of the Philippines wanted to grow rice in the fields of her farm, but the fields were very wet. Tractors used to cultivate the wet fields got stuck in the mud. That is, until Maggie invented TurtlePower Tillers, a small tractor that can be pushed by hand. It doesnt get stuck in the mud; it floats. She obtained a patent in the United Kingdom and Japan in 1981. She has since gained nineteen other patents for inventions of farming machinery and was awarded the International Federation of Inventors Association Cup as the Most Outstanding Woman Inventor of her country in 1995.

Annie needed a way to stop a runaway horse. Maggie needed to be able to farm in her fields. More than five million inventions have been patented in America, and millions of others have been patented in Canada, Europe, and other areas of the world in the last few hundred years. Inventions by women are included in those millions. Women, like men, have invented what they needed.

Women of the 1800s and early 1900s who lived on farms in America needed harvesting equipment, supplies and equipment for raising livestock and poultry, and tools for planting and tilling. So they invented and patented. Other women received patents for garden tools and equipment. Others invented insecticides to get rid of critters that killed the plants.

Anna Corey Baldwin, the wife of a dairy farmer in New Jersey, received four dairy-related patents in the 1860s and 1870s, including one for cooling milk quickly and one for gloves that promised to help speed up the milking of the cows. In 1887 Hannah Harger of Manchester, Iowa, worried about all the flies that were bothering her babies, invented and gained a patent for the screen door. In 1892, Sarah Boone, an African American woman of New Haven, Connecticut, designed an ironing board that made it easier to iron the sleeves of ladies garments and mens coats. In 1917 May Conner of Garden Grove, Iowa, invented a hay-handling device that used a well-planned system of ropes and pulleys to make it possible to easily transport hay to a storage area. The object of my invention, she wrote in her patent, is for use in stacking hay or moving hay away in a barn... for carrying hay along a stock or barn. Her device was connected to a carriage and to forks used to move the hay.

Decades later, in the 1990s, a much younger woman who lived on a farm thought that the world needed biodegradable containers for fast food. So Disa Rubenbauer, who was in elementary school in Marshalltown, Iowa, created a container for hamburgers and other fast food out of corn products. Because it was winter, the fields on her familys farm were full of corn stalks. Disa and her father gathered some. After Disa ground them up in a blender, she combined the mushy corn stalks with corn syrup, corn oil, corn meal, corn starch, and water. She experimented with the amounts of each ingredient and with how much time the mixture had to be baked. When she finished she had created a container that would hold food and not harm the environment. She received an award from Invent Iowa!, an invention program of Iowa schools.

Years earlier, Amanda Jones was concerned with food, too. She thought there ought to be more ways to preserve it. When Amanda, who was born in 1835, was growing up in upstate New York, she loved the outdoors. And she loved to read. Her parents thought books were important and encouraged her, and her many brothers and sisters, to read. By age fifteen Amanda was a teacher at Buffalo High School. Then her favorite brother died a sudden death. It affected her deeply and led her to an interest in spiritualism, a popular movement of the day. She conducted seances in an attempt to communicate with him and claimed to have a spiritual guide. The guide was the one who prompted her career as an inventor. He suggested that there was a way to can fruit. He left it up to Amanda to figure out the method. In 1872 she came up with the vacuum process of preserving food with the aid of her cousin, Professor Leroy C. Cooley of Albany, New York. Food was placed in a container, the air was drained out, and hot liquid was added to seal it so that it could be stored for future use. Amanda started the Womans Canning and Preserving Company in 1890 to manufacture and sell her canned food. She had plants in several states and advertised her products in national magazines.