Women have always invented things. They just haven’t always gotten credit for it. From colonial times to the Civil War, few American women knew enough about law and business to patent and sell their inventions. (A patent is granted by the government. It gives the exclusive right to sell an invention for a number of years.) Even if women did know how to get a patent, it usually didn’t matter. In those days, women were not allowed to own property if they were married, and patents are a form of property. Most women’s inventions in early America were therefore credited to their husbands.

Today, historians are giving more attention to the work of women inventors. Let’s meet some of the women who have contributed to America’s rich tradition of invention.

The Early Years

The first known female inventor in the colonies was Sybilla Masters of Pennsylvania. She devised a new method for cleaning and milling corn. King George I awarded the patent to her husband in 1715.

The first woman to receive a patent from the United States was Connecticut’s Mary Kies in 1809. She figured out how to weave silk or thread with straw to make bonnets. Connecticut’s Sophia Woodhouse and Rhode Island’s Betsey Metcalf made additional improvements to bonnets. Their work made New England’s hat-making industry among the best in the world.

After Mary Kies, patents granted to women were few and far between. The next one came in 1815, the one after that in 1819. By the time the Civil War broke out, women had received only 63 patents. Men had received nearly 32,000! But as men went to war and women took over farms and businesses, the number of inventions by women increased.

One woman’s invention helped the North to victory. Martha Coston’s husband died when she was just 21. In his notebook she found a design for signal flares. He never made them work, but she did. Martha sold her idea to the Union navy. Ships used her red, white, and green flares to communicate in code and outsmart the Confederate navy. Her invention also saved lives. Shipwrecked sailors could shoot off her flares to help rescuers find them.

Late 1800s to World War II

In the late 1800s, laws against women owning property ended, and women started making money from their inventions. Margaret Knight received 27 patents. She got rich from inventing the flat-bottomed paper bag (the kind you get at supermarkets). Amanda Theodosia Jones invented vacuum canning, in which air is sucked out of cans so the food inside doesn’t spoil. She started the Woman’s Canning and Preserving Company, an enterprise owned almost entirely by women.

The first African American woman to become wealthy from her inventions was Madame C. J. Walker. She was in her twenties when her hair started falling out. She tried various treatments to make it grow back and became a saleswoman for the product that did the trick. In 1912, she began selling her own hair products. Her business did so well that over the next seven years it hired hundreds of African American women as hairdressers or saleswomen.

With the coming of World War II, women inventors again contributed to the nation’s military efforts. Katharine Blodgett developed a coating for glass that increased the effectiveness of submarine periscopes and airplane cameras. Lillian Greneker figured out how to manufacture rubber fuel tanks for submarines and warplanes. Movie actress Hedy Lamarr contributed to the invention of remote-controlled radio signals that couldn’t be jammed by the enemy. (Her idea wasn’t used until after the war ended.)

Modern Times

In the last 50 years, American women have become free to choose any career they want. Female computer programmers and scientists are no longer unusual. But they were still rare in 1952, when Grace Hopper invented the software that makes it possible to program computers with words instead of endless strings of 1’s and 0’s.

Hopper also helped invent a computer language called COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language). It’s still used for many business programs today. And after she found a moth in her computer, she made a lasting contribution to our vocabulary. She coined the term “bug” to describe computer problems.

New York City’s Gertrude Elion graduated from college with a degree in chemistry when she was just 19. After her grandfather died of cancer, she wanted to devote her life to curing the disease. At first no one would hire her. World War II changed that. Now laboratories were very willing to employ women. Together with George Hitchings, Elion created drugs to fight leukemia, a form of cancer. They also invented Imuram, which slows the body’s rejection of transplanted organs. In 1988, Elion and Hitchings won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their lifesaving discoveries.

In 1991, Elion became the first woman elected to the Inventors’ Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. “I may be the first woman in the Hall of Fame, but I know that I certainly won’t be the last,” she predicted. She was right. Several women have been elected since, and more are on their way.

Enrichment Activity

Create an illustrated timeline that includes these features:

•	a title, such as “A History of Female Inventors and Inventions”
•	a starting date of 1715
•	an ending date of 2000
•	illustrations and appropriate captions for at least six inventions and inventors mentioned in this essay