by Pam North

What element do drip coffeemakers, modern paper sacks, typewriter correction fluid, smallpox vaccine and computer programming share in common?  All were the creations of ingenious women inventors.

Making coffee was a pretty disgusting process at the beginning of the twentieth century.  A cloth bag containing coffee grounds was plunged into boiling water, resulting in a gritty and bitter brew from the grounds' inevitable escape into the water.  In 1908, Melitta Bentz, a German housewife, spying a piece of blotting paper (used for soaking up ink from leaking fountain pens), put it into the bottom of a brass pot in which she had poked holes.  Placing the grounds on top of the blotting paper, she poured boiling water over it, and so was born the idea of drip coffeemakers, as well as the Melitta Company, which now sells its coffeemakers to over 150 countries worldwide.

Paper bags were once tediously made by hand (and all had V-shaped bottoms), until the late 1800s, when a
female employee of the Columbia Paper Bag Company, Margaret Knight, devised a machine that automatically made folding, square-bottomed bags.  Unfortunately, as she was building the prototype, she was observed by a man who subsequently stole her idea and claimed it as his own.  The result was a court battle, during which her adversary's primary argument was Knight's "womanhood."  Knight claimed victory in court, however; the idea was acknowledged to be hers, and she patented her machine in 1870.  She ultimately was awarded 27 patents during her lifetime, but she died in 1914 with only $275 in her estate.

Liquid Paper has been the esteemed aid to legions of terrible typists, and it was the brainchild of a bank secretary, Bette Nesmith Graham, who was prone to making numerous errors herself.  Frustrated that her efforts to correct mistakes on her IBM typewriter always resulted in smears, she was inspired by the signpainters lettering the windows of the bank where she worked.  She observed that they did not try to erase any errors that they had made, but instead just simply painted over them.  She put water-based paint in a bottle and, using a small watercolor brush, corrected her typos.  After responding repeatedly to requests from other secretaries for supplies of her "Mistake Out," she decided in 1956 to market the product.  A year later, after changing the formula, she founded Liquid Paper, Inc., and in 1979 she sold her company to Gillette for $47 million.  Her family was lucky financially; her son, Michael Nesmith, was a member of the famous Monkees band, and made a fortune of his own.

The smallbox vaccine was the contribution of Lady Mary Montagu, a British noblewoman.  While traveling in Turkey in 1917, she became aware of a curious custom there called ingrafting.  Nutshells of virulent live smallpox were brought by old women to families requesting the service, and the smallpox was ingrafted into a patient's open vein, infecting them with a mild form of the disease that kept them in bed a few days, but then rendered them immune to smallpox.  Montagu convinced Caroline, Princess of Wales, to use the technique on her own daughters, and after the continued success of ingrafting, Montagu anonymously published "The Plain Account of the Inoculating of the Small-pox by a Turkish Merchant," despite opposition from church and medical establishments.  Thirty percent of England's smallpox victims had been dying from the disease; after ingrafting took hold in the country, the smallpox death rate dropped to only two percent.

The "analytical engine," forerunner of modern computers, was the brainchild of George Babbage, a mathematical engineer, who formed a partnership in 1834 with Lady Ada Lovelace (daughter of British poet Lord Byron) to work on the engine's prototype.  During that process, Lovelace created the first programming method, which used punch cards.  The machine itself, although it worked in theory, was never completed, due to the unavailability of tools sophisticated enough to actually make it.  Lovelace pursued the study of cybernetics for the remainder of her life.

All of these inventions have become a part of our everyday life, and as such are often taken for granted and their creators forgotten.  Even more remarkable than the ingenuity of these women is the fact that they accomplished their projects in a time when women were discouraged from such activities.  Their efforts and vision helped lay the foundations for other women to pursue achievement.
 
 

Resource:  Uncle John's Giant 10th Annual Bathroom Reader.