Two Great Women Inventors In the 19th and early 20th centuries, women had limited opportunities for a technical education and career, and few of them had an independent income. However, the history of women inventors in this period is very long. These are the personal stories of two of them.
The nineteenth-century inventor Margaret Knight was born in the USA in 1838. As a young girl, she was made to work in a cotton factory by her parents. While she was working there, there was an accident and somebody was almost killed by a machine. Margaret was only 12 at the time, but she invented a way to fix the machine so that if there was the same fault again, the machine would stop at once.
She had more than eighty inventions, and the most important one was a machine producing paper bags with flat bottoms. But none of them brought her much money. In those days, women were not encouraged to be business people any more than they were encouraged to be inventors. Once Margaret Knight had produced an invention, she would usually sell it to somebody for not much cash, and when she died in 1914, all she left was 275 dollars.
Beulah Henry also began inventing things when she was a young girl. In 1912, at the age of 25, she got her first patent for an ice-cream freezer. A year later, she patented a parasol — an umbrella for the sun — within changeable covers so that a woman could match her parasol with her clothes. The invention earned her about 50,000 dollars from the manufacturers.
In all, she patented 49 inventions. But for someone with such a long career, surprisingly little is known about Beulah Henry’s personal life. She was bom in the USA in 1887 and grew up in an artistic family. The only other fact which is known is that she entered university in 1909.
These women’s lives and achievements will always inspire future generations of inventors. |