She Wasn’t Even Driving: 12 Women Behind Everyday Inventions, Like the Windshield Wiper

On a snowy day in the early 1900s, Mary Anderson was riding a trolley car in New York City. She noticed that the drivers kept opening their windows to see, and sometimes stopped the car to go out and clear the glass.

Her fix was a lever inside the vehicle that swung a rubber blade across the windshield, with a counterweight to keep it pressed to the glass. She got her patent in 1903, and it was the first windshield-clearing device that worked well. As driving became more common, her wiper was adapted for cars.

Josephine Cochrane found washing dishes by hand tedious, and it kept chipping her dishes. She vowed, “If nobody else is going to invent a [mechanical] dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.” She filed for a patent in 1885 and got it in 1886.

Her machine held plates, cups and saucers in wire compartments on a wheel inside a copper boiler, while a motor pumped hot soapy water over them. The big model could wash and dry 240 dishes in two minutes.

In 1947, a technician found a moth, that had passed away, stuck in Relay 70 of Harvard’s Mark II computer, where the mathematician Grace Hopper worked. The team taped it into the logbook with a note: “First actual case of bug being found.”

The word was older than the moth: Thomas Edison had used “bug” for technical faults back in 1878. But after that day, Hopper and her staff used it for computer glitches, and it stuck. Her team later built one of the first compilers, a program that turns instructions written by people into code a computer can run.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an engineer and psychologist, and she and her husband, Frank, had 12 children. They turned their household into a lab for efficiency, studying faster ways to wash dishes and brush teeth. Two of the children later wrote about it in “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

ASME credits her with the shelves inside refrigerator doors, including the egg keeper and the butter tray, and with the foot-pedal trash can. To design better kitchens, she interviewed more than 4,000 women about the right height for stoves and sinks.

Marion Donovan was tired of changing her daughter’s cloth diapers, clothes and bedsheets over and over. So she cut up a shower curtain and sewed it into a waterproof diaper cover.

The big manufacturers weren’t interested. “I went to all the big names you can think of, and they said, ‘We don’t want it. No woman has asked us for that,’” she recalled in 1975. So she made the covers herself, and they were an instant success. After her first patent in 1951, she sold her company and the rights for $1 million.

Margaret Knight left school at 12 to work in a textile mill. Later she built a machine that automatically cut, folded and glued flat-bottomed paper bags, the kind we still carry groceries in.

Then a man from the machine shop that built it tried to claim the design, arguing that a woman could not “possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine.” Knight showed the court her original blueprints and won. She got her patent in 1871 and went on to patent at least 26 inventions.

In 1954, Bette Nesmith Graham was a secretary at a Dallas bank who also worked as a freelance artist. Instead of erasing her typing errors, she started covering them with white tempera paint, a trick she brought over from art.

Two years later, she was sharing the mixture with other secretaries. She refined it in her kitchen, blending paint and other chemicals with an old-fashioned mixer, and her son and his friends filled the bottles. In 1979 she sold the business for nearly $48 million.

Katharine Burr Blodgett was the first woman scientist at her industrial research lab in New York, and in 1926 she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge.

She found a way to coat glass with films just one molecule thick. Stacked the right way, they cancel out reflections, and the result was the first completely transparent, “invisible” glass. The technique was patented in 1938. Coatings like hers are now on eyeglasses, microscopes, windshields, screens and camera lenses, and “Gone With the Wind” was the first major movie shot with her glass.

Marie Van Brittan Brown and Albert L. Brown filed their patent in August 1966, and it was granted on Dec. 2, 1969, as a “Home security system utilizing television surveillance”.

A camera at the front door sent a picture to a monitor in another room. Two-way audio let the person inside talk to the visitor, and a button could unlock the door without getting up. An alarm button could also alert a security station. It reads a lot like a description of today’s video doorbell.

Mary Engle Pennington earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1895 from the University of Pennsylvania, at a time when it didn’t award degrees to women. In 1906 she applied to run the federal Food Research Laboratory, and her boss changed her name on the exam to “M.E. Pennington” to hide that she was a woman. She got the highest possible score and the job.

Her tests of the country’s 40,000 refrigerated railcars helped set national standards for ice-cooled refrigerator cars.

Beulah Louise Henry’s first patent, in 1912, was for a vacuum-sealed ice cream freezer. By the 1920s she was the most prolific woman inventor in the country, and newspapers called her “Lady Edison.”

Her ideas included a typewriter attachment that made four copies without carbon paper, a “Kiddie Clock” that taught children to tell time and an umbrella with snap-on covers that could be changed to match an outfit. In all, she was granted 49 U.S. patents and is credited with more than 100 inventions.

In May 1809, Mary Dixon Kies of Connecticut received a patent for weaving silk or thread into straw to make hats. It is often called the first U.S. patent granted to a woman.

At the time, New England was making its own hats instead of importing them, and women were braiding straw and building bonnets at home. Kies’ silk-and-straw look became a fashion fad and helped the straw hat business grow. The bonnet in the photo isn’t hers, but it’s the same idea: straw and silk, around 1815.