http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,1129451,00.html

And woman created ...


Female inventors have been denied their place in history for far too
long. Sandi Toksvig on a new book that sets the record straight

Friday January 23, 2004
The Guardian

The old saying is that "Necessity is the mother of invention". This may be true, but it leaves out the fact that the inventor may also be somebody's mother. Years ago, when I was studying anthropology at university, one of my female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with 28 markings on it. "This," she said, "is alleged to be man's first attempt at a calendar." We all looked at the bone in
admiration. "Tell me," she continued, "what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar."

There are a lot of things that no one can prove. I firmly believe that women invented agriculture. If the men were all busy being he-man hunters, who had the time to pop some seeds in the ground and watch them grow? The woman left behind holding the baby. Studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies show that the hunters (the men) tend to bring in only 10% of the group's food, while the gatherers (the women) make up the remaining 90%. Who gets all the publicity? The big butch hunter.

Part of the problem is that women and their achievements have been the silent story of history for too long. It will not surprise you to learn that a woman invented the chocolate-chip cookie (Ruth Wakefield, 1930), the dishwasher (Josephine Cochran, 1886) and even the disposable nappy (Marion Donovan, 1950); but did you know that it was a woman who made
the first computer work? That a woman found the first computer bug? (Grace Murray Hopper, 1947. Grace later became the first rear-admiral in the US navy.) And how about Stephanie Kwolek, who invented Kevlar, a steel-like fibre used in tyres, crash helmets and bulletproof vests?

Some of the stories may never be told. Many people think that Sybilla Masters may have been the first American woman inventor. In 1712 she is said to have invented a new corn mill, but she couldn't patent it
because women were not allowed to register. Three years later a patent was filed in her husband's name.

Ingenious Women is a book that needed to be written. It is time to celebrate the way in which women have changed and improved the world. My only regret is that I didn't think to write it myself.

The dishwasher

Since the middle of the 19th century men and women have been devising machines to ease the endless household chores of washing clothes and dishes. In the 1880s, Josephine Garis Cochrane, the daughter of an engineer, tired of servants breaking her fine china and decided to work on perfecting a dishwasher.

Cochrane patented her design in 1886. It consisted of a wire crate to hold plates, cups and saucers, which fitted into a wheel inside a copper boiler. A motor turned the wheel and, as the crate of dishes rotated, a continuous stream of either soap suds or clear hot water was squirted up from the bottom of the boiler and streamed down over the dishes before
draining away.

With this prototype, Cochrane established the Garis-Cochrane Dish Washing Machine Co. Her machine was shown at the Chicago Exhibition in 1893 and won an award for "the best mechanical construction for
durability, and adaptation to its line of work". Machines were bought by the city's restaurants, but dishwashers did not become widely popular in the home until the 1950s.

The windscreen wiper

Mary Anderson came up with this idea while travelling on a motorised tram in New York in the snowy winter of 1903. Visiting from the hot, dry state of Alabama, she noticed that the driver frequently had to stop the tram to clear snow from the windscreen.

Anderson devised a gadget that had a rubber-bladed squeegee on the outside of the windscreen which was connected to a handle on the inside by a spindle through the top of the window. All the driver had to do was turn the handle on the inside to clear the rain or snow outside.

This simple solution later became an essential and legal requirement for all vehicles. It is not known how much Anderson earned from this invention, but it was certainly nothing like the sums earned by Percy
Shaw for his cat's eyes.

The coffee maker

It was a German housewife, Melitta Benz, who introduced the world to filter coffee. Unhappy with dregs in the bottom of her cup, she came up with a nifty idea. She rolled blotting paper into a cone, put it into a brass pot drilled with holes, and placed it on a coffee jug. Ground coffee was spooned into the paper cone and hot water poured over it. The paper cone provided a simple answer to the problem of how to stop coffee grounds getting into the cup. The ownership of the idea was registered in Berlin in 1908 as a Gebranchsmuster Utility Model.

Benz's name and system live on today in the Melitta brand of coffee filters today - which is more than can be said for the original brass pot. It was, unfortunately, destroyed in the allied bombing of Berlin in the second world war.

Dipped headlights

It was Emily Canham from Highbury, north London, who in 1908 first addressed the problem of blinding light from oncoming car headlights. To lessen the glare, she proposed dividing the lenses into zones. Over the top half of the lens would be placed opaque, ground glass (patterned with wavy lines or geometric shapes) or coloured transparent material.
The bottom half would be the only one emitting pure, bright light.

Computer language

Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and scientist, was the world's first computer programmer. In the 1840s, Countess Lovelace collaborated with Charles Babbage, the inventor of an analytical engine that is generally claimed to be the first computer.

In 1843, at the age of 27, Lady Lovelace suggested to Babbage that she should work out a language for the engine based on her knowledge of advanced mathematics. This is now considered to be the first computer program. The software developed by the US department of defence was named "Ada" in her honour in 1979. She predicted that such a machine would compose complex music, produce graphics, and could be harnessed for both practical and scientific use. She was evidently a woman ahead of her time. So much so, in fact, that it apparently took 100 years before anyone else understood it so well.

Suspension bridge piles

Sarah Guppy was a remarkable woman who put her inventive mind to both the domestic and the technical. Besides her ingenious combined coffee maker/egg boiler/toast warmer, she created a four-poster bed with drawers that doubled as steps and a suspension bar that doubled as a gym.

In 1811 Guppy patented a method to make the piling safe for a suspension bridge. "I do fix or drive a row of piles, with suitable framing to connect them together, and behind these I do fix, or drive, and connect, other piles or rows of piles and suitable framing, or otherwise, upon the banks of the said river or place."

This was seven years before Thomas Telford started work on the suspension bridge over the Menai strait. It is not reported whether Guppy's invention was ever put into practice, and she was not credited with any of this in histories of engineering and bridge building. But she did not stop there. After her husband died, she remarried, at 68, a man of 28, and continued to invent. Under her new name, Sarah Coot, she applied for a patent in 1844 for caulking (weatherproofing) ships.

Maritime flares

Widowed at 21, Martha Coston perfected her naval scientist husband's system of coloured flares corresponding to different numbers, making for quick, clear communication at sea. Gunpowder was difficult and dangerous to ignite at sea so, using pyrotechnic technology, Coston found a way that the flares could be hand-held and incorporate an ingenious self-igniting device. The US navy tried to claim the idea as its own before Coston successfully patented her own refinements to her husband's invention in 1871. She was granted the contract to manufacture the flares and sold them to other navies, maritime insurance companies and yacht clubs all over the world. The Coston Supply Company remained in business until the late 1970s.

Canine chastity belt

In 1903, German Baroness Margarethe Johanne Christianne Marie von Heyden and her husband, anxious to maintain the purity of the pedigree of their dogs, designed a device to prevent "coition in the case of bitches and other female animals more particularly for the purpose of preventing cross-breeding". It was made of a shield of plaited material strapped to the animal's body to "cover the genital parts without interfering with the animal's excretions".

· Ingenious Women by Deborah Jaffe is published by Sutton Publishing, price £17.99. To order a copy for £15.99 plus p&p, call the Guardian
book service on 0870 066 7979.