Josephine Garis Cochran’s revolutionary 1886 dishwasher, the first to use water pressure (from the pumps along the bottom) instead of scrubbers to clean the dishes, which were held on the rack near the top and turned by the lever on the right.
The Dishwasher and the Diaper Cover
Josephine Garis Cochran’s revolutionary 1886 dishwasher, the first to use water pressure (from the pumps along the bottom) instead of scrubbers to clean the dishes, which were held on the rack near the top and turned by the lever on the right.
Catharine Esther Beecher, a groundbreaking educator, writer, and lecturer who traveled all over the United States, did not believe that women should have the right to vote or take direct part in “civil and political concerns.” Beecher, who took over running the household of her family at sixteen, after her mother’s death, and saw to the welfare and education of her remarkable younger siblings, believed that women had a much more important role already. They were moral guardians of society and administrators of the home, which was “the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom.”
Women might work as teachers, or seamstresses, or midwives (or writers, such as herself and her famous younger sister and sometime collaborator, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a worldwide bestseller). But they should not expect to enter business or the professions. Regressive as such opinions may seem to us today, Beecher did hold the radical view for her time that women should marry whomever they liked, or not marry at all—as Beecher never did, following the tragic early death of her fiancé.
Beecher also found the education of women in the “domestic arts” to be woefully informal and arbitrary, something she set out to correct, starting with her 1841 manual A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Reprinted every year through 1856, it would become almost as well known in America as her sister’s work. Containing instructions for “everything from the building of a house to the setting of a table,” it marked the start of “home economics” as a real discipline. As Beecher declared, “The care of a house, the conduct of a home, the management of children, the instruction and government of servants, are as deserving of scientific treatment and scientific professors and lectureships as are the care of farms, the management of manure and crops, and the raising and care of stock.” In a day when running a household with or without servants often entailed ceaseless toil and backbreaking drudgery, what Beecher was attempting was a sort of feminism of the deed, in the sphere where women of her time—like it or not—would spend most of their lives.
A phalanx of Beecher’s sisters were already hard at work, devising ways to make that labor a little easier. If there are relatively few women in the ranks of the great commercial inventors, it is largely because they were denied, by law or custom, the opportunity to do such work. But little by little, they were busily changing their world—and, in so doing, building their own opportunities for the future.
Sometimes, meanwhile, what they invented in the home became business—even big business.
The earliest such woman we know of was Sybilla Masters, who in 1715 became the first recorded woman inventor in American history. Dame Masters, a native of Bermuda then living in Philadelphia, had to have her patent for “Cleansing Curing and Refining of Indian Corn Growing in the Plantations” issued in the name of her husband, Thomas, by the British courts, as they would not recognize a woman inventor. Masters’s mill consisted of a wooden gear and shaft, motored by a donkey, and resembled “something after the manner of a musical box.” She would later issue a second patent through her husband, “Working and Weaving in a New Method, Palmetta Chip and Straw for Hats and Bonnets and other Improvements of that Ware.”
Josephine Garis Cochran was a forty-four-year-old, heavily indebted widow and mother of two living in Shelby County, Illinois, in 1883, when she decided she was tired of the servants chipping her heirloom china. She set to work in a shed behind her house to invent a dishwashing machine, assisted by a mechanic named George Butters.
Dishwashers had been attempted before, but none had proved practical. Cochran, the daughter of a steamboat inventor, designed a remarkably modern device, with measured wire compartments customized for plates, cups, and saucers. All were then placed in a wheel that was laid flat inside a copper boiler. While the wheel was cranked by hand, hot, soapy water squirted up from the bottom of the boiler and over the dishes. It was the first such machine to use water pressure to clean instead of scrubbers.
Cochran made dishwashers for her friends, earned a patent for her design in 1886, opened a factory, and went into business. Her design won a top prize at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work.” She sold nine models to eateries at the fair.
Few American homes would have the capacity for hot water to handle a dishwasher until the 1950s, and the price of $150 a machine was high for the nineteenth century, but Cochran was able to sell her machine to restaurants, hotels, and hospitals, which liked its sanitizing hot rinse. She kept improving her invention, substituting an electric motor for the hand crank, adding a drainage hose, and getting the racks to revolve. It was no easy task.
“I couldn’t get men to do the things I wanted in my way, until they had tried and failed in their own,” Cochran told a reporter late in life, while still on the job. “And that was costly for me. They knew I knew nothing, academically, about mechanics, and they insisted on having their own way with my invention until they convinced themselves my way was the better, no matter how I had arrived at it.”
Cochran managed the company herself for the rest of her life, made her own visits to pitch her machines to hotels, and got her Shelbyville neighbors to invest in it. Three years after her death in 1913, “Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine” was acquired by the company that became KitchenAid, which would in turn be absorbed by Whirlpool.
Marion O’Brien Donovan not only invented the 1940s plastic diaper cover depicted here, but also a protoype of the disposable diaper.
Marion O’Brien Donovan graduated from college with a BA in English shortly before World War II and went on to stints as a beauty editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, a résumé that qualified her to . . . get married, have a daughter, and start changing diapers.
Like countless mothers of the time, she was frustrated by how much laundry cotton diapers required—and how they still didn’t keep baby from soiling bedsheets and other materials. There were already rubber pants on the market, but they tended to cause diaper rash and pinch the infant’s skin.
Marion Donovan set to work with her sewing machine (see “The Song of the Shirt”: The Sewing Machine Wars) and a piece of shower curtain. Three years, countless shower curtains, and one more baby later, she had a comfortable, waterproof diaper cover, complete with snap fasteners, to avoid sticking baby with a safety pin. The final product was made of nylon parachute cloth, which reduced diaper rash. She called it the “Boater” because it reminded her of a boat. Manufacturers thought it reminded them of nothing they wanted to produce. Diapers? Why should men worry about that?
Setting out on her own, Donovan managed to sell her Boaters to Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949 and had won four patents for their design by 1951. It was an instant smash, and Donovan quickly sold the patents to the Keko Corporation for a reported $1 million.
She could easily have retired on her laurels, but instead, according to writer Kate Kelly, “She used that money to fund other inventions; her goal was always to create products that made life convenient and more organized.” Catharine Beecher would’ve been pleased.
Donovan went on to earn sixteen more patents for such items as two-ply dental floss that eliminated the need to wrap floss around one’s fingers, a towel dispenser, a hosiery clamp, a facial tissue box, and a closet organizer she called “The Big Hangup.” She went back to school, graduating with a master’s degree in architecture from Yale in 1958, at age 41, one of only three women in her class. She worked in a Connecticut firm, using what she had learned to design her own home (“Everything from the building of a house . . .”), and later became a corporate consultant on home product development.
Still, Donovan didn’t turn her back on diapers, coming up with an idea for a disposable diaper, one that would absorb water and pull it away from the skin. Once again, no one was interested—until ten years later, in 1961, when Victor Mills tried his hand at inventing just such a disposable diaper for Proctor & Gamble. It was called “Pampers.”
the genius details
Sara Elizabeth Goode, née Jacobs, who may have been born as a slave in 1850, became on July 14, 1885, the first African American woman ever to earn a patent, for her “cabinet bed,” a complete desk that folded up into a bed.
Martha Helen Kostyra reinvented herself as “Martha Stewart” and described her career as “just a different way of looking at things that women had been doing for centuries . . . that was more considered drudgery than joy.”
By the turn into the twentieth century, “home economics” was being taught widely in American high schools and in some colleges and universities. Eleanor Roosevelt would call home ec “the most important part of the university, for it concerns the homes of the people of this country.”
Today 75 percent of all US households have an automatic dishwasher. Due to increased efficiency, Americans use just one gallon of water a day, per person, on dishwashers, and dishwasher water is just 1.4 percent of all home water use.
Mattie Knight’s machine for making the modern paper bag, with its groundbreaking flat bottom. Today Americans use an estimated 10 billion paper grocery bags every year.
By 1910, women were awarded less than 1 percent of all patents issued in the United States (as opposed to 7.5 percent of them awarded in 2012). But despite all the barriers they faced, women inventors did emerge into the workplace, where they were, predictably, often dubbed “Lady Edisons” with the usual condescension of male reporters.
The first Lady Edison was Margaret E. “Mattie” Knight. Working with her brothers in the massive Amoskeag Mill, in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1850, she saw a boy stabbed by a spindle that broke loose from its cotton loom. Knight, just twelve years old, quickly conceived of a device that would automatically shut off the loom if something went wrong. Her invention was developed and put into use—supposedly by mills all over the country—though she never saw a dime from it.
By the time she was thirty, she was working in a paper bag company in Springfield, Massachusetts, pursuing the rough, seminomadic existence of a poor, unmarried woman in industrial New England. But Mattie was always fascinated by machines and ways to improve things. She understood that the bags—which were more like big paper envelopes at the time—would be infinitely more useful if they had flat bottoms that would allow them to be stood up and more easily packed.
Knight designed a machine that would fold the bags and glue their bottoms into place. She built her own wooden prototype of the machine, then asked a mechanic at her plant, Charles Annan, to help her build an iron prototype for her patent application. Annan agreed—then claimed the idea was his. This time, Knight was an adult woman, and she hauled Annan into court.
Knight presented witnesses, years of drawings, and that wooden prototype to prove that the design was rightfully hers. Annan simply claimed that a woman could not possibly have invented such a device. It was an argument that had often prevailed in the past—but this time Knight won, getting her patent in 1871. She was one of the very first American women to win a patent in her own name (the very first was Hannah Wilkinson Slater, who invented a type of two-ply sewing thread back in 1793).
Paper bags, now looking much as they do today, took off. Knight founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company to produce them, though she was confounded when her male workers refused to take orders from her, unwilling to believe a woman knew how machinery worked, even if she had worked machines for most of her life. But she raked in royalties and went on to win twenty-seven patents in her lifetime for inventing another machine that cut out shoe soles, a “dress shield” to protect clothes from sweat stains, a rotary engine, an internal combustion engine, an automatic boring drill, and a window frame and sash. A few months before her death, the New York Times reported that Knight, “at the age of seventy, is working 20 hours a day on her 89th invention.”
This was not quite accurate; Knight was already seventy-five. Her one regret? “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy, and have been to my trade regularly.”
One of the most incredible stories involved Bette Clair McMurray Nesmith (later Bette Graham), a twenty-seven-year-old executive secretary at the Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas in 1951. Nesmith, a divorced mother who had started secretarial school when she was seventeen, was exasperated to find that she could no longer make a simple erasure correction of typing mistakes on the new IBM electric typewriters, which used a carbon-based film.
Inspired by watching painters work on the bank windows for the holidays, Nesmith—a professional artist herself—came up with her own mixture of white, water-based tempera paint to cover over her typing mistakes. By 1956, “Mistake Out” was in heavy demand, and Nesmith was selling it out of her North Dallas home with the help of her son, Michael—later a member of the TV pop sensation the Monkees and a Hollywood producer. By 1958 she had perfected her product, renamed it “Liquid Paper,” and patented it.
Company sales were over one million units a year by 1967, and the former secretary now had her own automated production plant and corporate headquarters, despite heavy competition from the likes of “Wite Out” and “Papermate.” The little black-and-white bottles were ubiquitous—icons of corporate ennui, with their labels so often altered to “Liquid ape” or “id Pap” by bored office workers.
Bette Nesmith’s original Mistake Out, renamed Liquid Paper: a revolution in covering up errors.
In 1975, Nesmith moved her company, which now employed two hundred people and sold twenty-five million bottles a year, into its new thirty-five-thousand-square-foot International Liquid Paper headquarters in Dallas. Stressing product quality and a decentralized decision-making process, she provided her employees with a fishpond, a library, and onsite child care.
Nesmith had hit the sweet spot of her profession’s progression, the era between the manual typewriter and the advent of the personal computer, when male executives everywhere would miraculously gain the ability to type and corrections could be made with the push of a key. Perhaps understanding this, she sold her enterprise to Gillette for $47.5 million in 1979, six months before her death. She left behind a major philanthropic foundation and the example of a woman whose inventiveness and fortitude took her to the top.
Stephanie Louise Kwolek, whose parents were both Polish immigrants, learned a love of sewing and fabrics from her mother. Kwolek briefly considered fashion as a career but instead obtained a degree in chemistry in 1946 from what was then the women’s college of Carnegie-Mellon University. She took a job as a chemist with the DuPont Corporation, while still contemplating a career in medicine. There she found herself in fashion after all, researching the new polymers that were transforming American fabrics. Her specialty was finding new fibers that might be created at extremely low temperatures—zero to forty degrees Celsius—and would not melt or decompose at very high ones (above four hundred degrees Celsius).
In 1965, she discovered to her surprise that under certain circumstances, rodlike, aromatic polyamides of a high molecular weight would line up parallel to each other, forming liquid crystal solutions that could be spun into fibers of very high strength and stiffness. Usually, the sort of thin, cloudy liquid her first experiments produced would be tossed away, but this was unlike any polymer solution ever quite prepared before in a laboratory, and Kwolek asked technician Charles Smullen to try spinning it. It was so turbid that Smullen refused at first, convinced the turbidity must be caused by small particles that would plug up the tiny holes in the spinneret.
It spun all right, though—and produced a material that was stronger than nylon, which Kwolek had worked on before. Nylon, nothing: it was five times stronger than steel, pound for pound, and resistant to fire. Kwolek found the fibers could be made even stronger by heating them.
By 1971, she and her team at DuPont’s Pioneering Research Laboratory in Wilmington, Delaware, had produced the sorts of strong, stiff fibers that could be made into Kevlar, the material of “bulletproof” vests—not to mention approximately two hundred other items, including firefighters’ boots, cell phones, gloves, airplanes, boats, canoes, armored cars, tires, ropes, fiber-optic cables, tennis rackets, hockey sticks, and skis. It would also be used to build hurricane-resistant rooms and reinforce steel bridges.
Kwolek had produced fashion that, if it did not stop a runway, would stop a bullet. She received many honors and at least seventeen patents but no extra money from DuPont, which had her sign away her rights to Kevlar before making billions off the material. The lost windfall never seemed to bother her.
“I don’t think there’s anything like saving someone’s life to bring you satisfaction and happiness,” she said.
After retiring, Stephanie Kwolek spent her time tutoring young students in chemistry, especially girls. The week of her death in 2014, aged ninety, the one millionth Kevlar vest was produced. They have saved the lives of an estimated 3,000 police officers.
Dr. Patricia Era Bath grew up in an almost unimaginably different world from ours today, a living embodiment of how far African Americans have managed to push past the barriers imposed by the old Jim Crow system. She would overcome them all and invent a revolutionary new procedure and device for removing cataracts with lasers.
The Kevlar vest, made of fibers created by Stephanie Kwolek, savior of thousands of police officers.
Born in Harlem in 1942, Dr. Bath heard stories from her father, Rupert—a Trinidadian immigrant who had worked as a merchant seaman and a newspaper columnist before becoming the first black motorman for the New York City subway—of his travels around the world. This whetted her appetite to see other lands, other places. From her mother, Ruth, a housewife and domestic who was descended from African slaves and Cherokee Indians, Dr. Bath got her first chemistry set and a love of reading. From both her parents, she got the idea that she could do anything she put her mind to.
Taking part in a summer cancer research project run by Yeshiva University and the Harlem Hospital Center when she was still a sixteen-year-old high school student, young Patricia developed a mathematical equation to predict the rate of growth of a cancer—work that so impressed one of the doctors running the program that he included it in a paper he presented at a conference in Washington, D.C.
The patent for Dr. Bath’s Laserphaco, the all-in-one laser device she invented to vaporize cataracts, and then wash and remove the cataract lens from the eye.
The publicity this garnered won her Mademoiselle magazine’s 1960 Merit Award. Going on to med school at Howard University—her mother literally scrubbed floors to help her afford it—Dr. Bath became an intern at Harlem Hospital, then accepted a fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University. Her research at the Harlem Center showed that black people were twice as likely as whites in the general population to suffer blindness and eight times more likely to suffer from glaucoma. Concluding that too many black Americans were unable to afford proper medical care, Bath invented the discipline of “community ophthalmology,” recruiting her Columbia professors to perform free eye surgery on needy Harlem residents, offer glaucoma screening and other preventive eye care, and provide glasses for children and the elderly—while she herself worked as an assistant surgeon. It was a volunteer effort that would be emulated on a global basis.
A long list of prestigious firsts, appointments, and trips to provide eye care around the world would follow—at one point she got married and gave birth to a daughter, all while completing a fellowship in corneal transplantation and keraprosthesis—but her most resounding contribution would be her invention of the Laserphaco Probe for cataract removal.
At the start of the 1980s, cataracts could still be extracted only through a difficult and extended surgical procedure that basically involved grinding them down—if they could be removed at all. Dr. Bath conceived of doing the job faster, more easily, and more safely with lasers.
Doing even basic research on this proved difficult. Most laser technology in the United States was reserved for military research. Dr. Bath had to travel to Berlin in 1981 to find an available laser, but after five years of work she had come up with the Laserphaco, a sort of “three-in-one” instrument consisting “of an optical laser fiber, surrounded by irrigation and aspiration [suction] tubes.” The laser probe is inserted into a one-millimeter incision into the eye, where it vaporizes—“phacoblates”—the cataract and the lens matter, almost painlessly, and in just a few minutes. What remains of the cataract lens is then washed and sucked out of the eye by the irrigation and aspiration tubes, leaving it clean to insert a new lens.
By 1988, Dr, Bath had earned three patents on the device, making her the first African American doctor to earn a medical patent. She would use the royalties from them to fund the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness and would go on improving the Laserphaco over the decades, as well as earning another patent for a method of dissolving cataracts with ultrasound technology. Today her invention is used around the world.
“The ability to restore sight is the ultimate reward,” she would say.
the genius details
Beulah Louise Henry, another “Lady Edison,” was a direct descendant of Patrick Henry. She would come up with 110 inventions and win 48 patents. Henry’s most successful patent was for an “Umbrella Runner Shield Attachment”—a snap-on cloth cover that allowed the owner to change her umbrella color to match her outfit.
Adm. Grace Murray Hopper served in the US Naval Reserve, reaching the rank of rear admiral, and her work in the Navy and at Remington Rand led to the development of some of the earliest computer languages, including COBOL, in 1959, which would become one of the most ubiquitous business languages in the world.
Cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock discovered chromosomal crossover and genetic recombination (cell division) in maize, a vital step forward in developing more productive generations of corn. It also enabled her to become, in 1983 at the age of eighty-one, the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, unshared.
Dr. Ellen Ochoa became the world’s first female Hispanic astronaut after earning her doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She used her education and experience on four space shuttle flights to become the coinventor of space-related optical recognition systems, optical inspection systems, and systems to remove “noise” from images. A classical flutist who also married and had two children, Ochoa was the second woman, and the first Hispanic American, to be named director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Bette Nesmith tried to sell her idea to IBM in 1956, but the company turned her down. She was fired from the bank she worked at in 1958 for accidentally signing the name of her Liquid Paper company to a bank business letter. Nesmith decided to go out on her own as an entrepreneur, even though she was selling only 2,000 bottles of her invention a year at the time. Liquid Paper remains a $120-million business today, even in the age of the computer.