With Thanksgiving and National Women’s History month (in Canada) both upon us, I thought I would take some time to combine both of those topics into this week’s post.

In particular, I want to give thanks to some past women entrepreneurs who have improved our lives by inventing items that we use just about every day (some of which we would probably all agree we couldn’t live without!).

So here’s my shout out to women entrepreneurs and their inventions!

Windshield Wipers

On a wintry day in 1902, Mary Anderson climbed aboard a streetcar in New York City. After a few minutes, the driver stopped to engage in a ritual common at the time–getting out and wiping the accumulated snow off of the front window so he could see. As he exited, the cold wind blew into the vehicle through the open door. Anderson, sitting near the front, huddled to keep warm.

The driver eventually returned, closed the door, and continued driving the car. However, it wouldn’t be long before he had to repeat the procedure. Anderson began to wonder…couldn’t a better way be developed? And that’s just what she set out to do.

After several months, she finished her prototype. It consisted of two long pieces of wood, each with a rubber edge, mounted onto the window. To make them work, a handle was installed inside the car. All the driver had to do was pull the handle and the wipers moved.

Excited with her design, she applied for, and was granted, a patent in 1903. But monetizing her invention was another matter—she couldn’t find a company interested in them. A few years later, her patent expired. But the automotive industry was on the rise, and someone else, somewhere, soon picked up on the idea.

Mary never earned a dime from her invention. But soon after her patent expired, wipers began to be standard equipment on cars.

So the next time you turn on your wipers to get rid of rain or snow, don’t forget to thank Mary Anderson.

Liquid Paper

Back in the days before computers, documents were prepared on manual typewriters. While fixing a mistake today is as simple as pressing a few computer keys, in those days it wasn’t so easy. One typing error meant the whole document had to be retyped—or sent as is. There were erasers, but they left a noticeable mark. There was just no easy way to fix errors.

In the 1950s, a secretary named Bette Nesmith took this problem into her own hands. Nesmith was also an artist, and that’s where her idea of painting over mistakes came from. When she made an error in a painting, she just painted over it, so why not do that with her typing?

Working in her home, she developed a white paint mixture that she could carefully dab onto mistakes, let dry, and then type overtop of. She found that her idea worked well, and she started selling small bottles of what she called “Mistake Out” to other secretaries. Her business grew, and in the early 1960s she changed the name of the product to “Liquid Paper”.

Nesmith applied for a patent, and she also approached IBM, then a large typewriter manufacturing company, to see if they were interested in her product. Both turned her down.

Undaunted, she went on to open her own factory. She continued working and growing her business until 1979, when she sold it to the Gillette Corporation for over $40 million.

Now that’s what I call an entrepreneur!

Aquariums

In the early 1800s, an amateur naturalist named Jeanne Villepreux-Power lived with her husband on the island of Sicily. She loved to spend her days exploring the seashore and examining the animals and plants she found there. She studied them, drew pictures of them, and even published scientific books about them.

One animal, the Paper Nautilus, particularly attracted her attention. It was a strange creature—an octopus that lived in thin, papery shell. Scientists of the time assumed the animal found its shell on the sea floor, the abandoned house of some other sea creature. But Jeanne wanted to know for sure.

In order to find out, she knew she needed to undertake an extended study of the animal. So she came up with the idea of a glass, water-filled cage in which she could keep a specimen. This would allow her to carefully observe the animal daily. She built the cage—what we now call an aquarium—and began her observations.

By studying her aquarium daily, she eventually discovered that this octopus actually made its shell itself. But it wasn’t actually a shell. Using its own secretions, the female octopus built up a thin, paper-like container around half of her body. Inside this container she laid her eggs. She then carried it around with her until the eggs hatched.

Jeanne went on to study many more types of sea life in her aquariums and continued to contribute scientific knowledge to the world. Her wonderful invention is now commonplace and has given millions of people a small window into the wonders of the sea.

The Dishwasher

Josephine Cochran was an American socialite who loved to throw dinner parties. She would lay out a fancy table, dressing it up with an expensive set of china that had been in her family for generations.

She was dismayed, however, when many of the dishes began to chip. She discovered that this was happening in the kitchen during the dish washing process. Servants would accidentally bang dishes against each other, or against the sink wall. Her first solution was to wash the treasured dinnerware herself, but she found the process long and tedious. She needed a new plan.

Cochran wasn’t trained as a scientist or engineer, but she did come from an inventive family. Both her father and grandfather were inventors. So she went to work designing a machine that would gently wash the dishes in a way that none of them touched each other. She wasn’t just thinking of herself—she wanted to help housewives around the country by relieving them of the tedium of daily dish washing.

Once the design was complete, she hired a mechanic to build the machine in her shed. It worked much as modern dishwashers do. The dishes were placed on wire racks, which sat inside a large, sealed metal container. A hand crank forced jets of hot, soapy water over the dishes. This was followed by a clear water rinse.

The machine worked, and she began building and selling them to her friends. In 1903, she entered her machine in the World’s Fair and won first prize for best mechanical invention.

Sales weren’t great, however. The machine needed lots of hot water—something that was hard to come by in average homes of the time. And it cost over $100, a huge sum at the time.

So she changed her strategy. She began marketing her invention to places that had plenty of water—and money. She was soon making a healthy income selling to hotels, restaurants, and hospitals.

Soon, her company was so successful, she was able to sell it to KitchenAid, a much larger appliance company.

I suppose it’s not surprising that in days gone by many household devices were invented by women. Who better to see a need around the house, and develop a plan for filling it, than the person that was running the home? Other items such as the ironing board, the foot-operated garbage can, disposable diapers, and the home security system were also invented by women.

* * *

While researching this article I learned that there are a ton of inventions developed by women. So thank you to all the women entrepreneurs, past and present, who have improved our world.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and happy Women’s History Month!

Cheers,

Tim

Helping you engineer the business of you

Inventions we can’t live without (that were invented by women)