Ten famous and fierce female inventors
Get inventive over the Holidays! Prepare to watch Joy, the story of the rise of entrepreneur Joy Mangano, with our list of ten fierce females who invented some of the most important contributions to modern society. Their full biographies linked below are freely available for a short time.
1. Before computers, secretary Bette Nesmith Graham faced correcting mistakes on a typewriter—a tedious, multistep process with questionable results. Bette came up with a novel solution, developing a fast-drying paint formula that could be applied to paper and typed over. The resulting product is known today as ‘Liquid Paper’.
2. Ruth Marianna Handler was president of Mattel, Inc. and is best known for inventing the Barbie doll - “who was never sold as a doll but as a person, in the hope that both daughter and mother would mould the former’s personality on Barbie herself.”
3. Among other devices, Caresse Crosby attempted to perfect a perpetual motion machine, but her most memorable accomplishment was the creation of a ‘backless brassiere,’ the first modern bra, for which she received a patent in 1914.
4. Katharine Burr Blodgett developed an ingenious technique for controlling the refractive index of the film. The basic patents she got on these methods are the foundation for the antireflective coatings used to cut glare due to reflection in applications ranging from optical equipment to the exhibition of artwork.
5. In 1997, Hedy Lamarr was honored with a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for having envisioned spread-spectrum communications, which was crucial, in particular, to the development of the cell phone industry.
6. In 1953, Gertrude Elion developed the first two successful drugs for the treatment of acute leukaemia.
7. It was at a very young age that Margaret E. Knight created her first invention. At twelve years old she designed a stop motion device to protect workers in the cotton textile mills from injury.
8. Sarah Elizabeth Goode blazed a path for black female inventors. Goode’s Folding Cabinet Bed was designed for the needs of people moving into homes with increasingly crowded conditions.
9. Marjorie Stewart Joyner was the first black woman licensed as a beauty culturist and looked for a way to speed up the procedure of making hair permanently “wavy”. She tested her idea to make a permanent wave by linking pot roast rods to a hair dryer hood. Joyner’s subsequent invention was the mechanical device known as the Permanent Waving Machine.
10. Harriet Williams Russell Strong patented a sash pull, a window lock, and a type of hook and eye. When a lack of sufficient water threatened her crops, she patented a system for the storage of water for irrigation and for a flood-control system. Later she patented a system for impounding debris and water in hydraulic mining.
Image: Hedy Lamarr in ‘Dishonered Lady’. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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