This program was presented by Carol Simon Levin for our patrons on March 20, 2024.
This conference will now be recorded okay um good evening everyone uh um before we move into tonight’s program I just wanted to take an opportunity to let you know about some future programs that are coming up in the Mercer County Library System um this Saturday March 23rd at 2 o’clock there’s
Going to be an inperson program at the Robinsville Branch uh with our speaker tonight Carol Simon Len is going to be doing a presentation nobody owns the sky fascinating stories of Forgotten female aviators so if you would like to see Carol present in person you can go um to
That event and I will drop in the chat in a moment a link to all of our events and uh the registration information for that uh then also coming up um another virtual program we’re doing on Wednesday March 27th at 6:30 is the Lindberg Nanny an author talk with Mariah Fredericks
Who’s going to be discussing her novel The Lindberg Nanny and the extensive research she did to write about the 1932 kidnapping of 20-month-old Charles Lindberg Jr uh so that’s coming up on March 27th and then um finally an additional virtual program that we’re doing on Thursday April 4th at 7 p.m. uh creature
Of the night the the bats of New Jersey bats often get a bad reputation for being spooky or even fearsome but they are actually some of the most beneficial animals to people and right now bats need our help so you can learn more about bats um during that virtual
Program and I will put again a link in the chat uh to all of our events and the registration information um so tonight we have a program um overlooked Ingenuity uh the presenter Carl Simon Levan is a professional Storyteller historical impersonator and NJ Council for the humanity scholar specializing in
Fascinating women that history forgot women of all colors and Creeds who have fought for women’s rights Carol holds a ba focusing on women’s history and history of Technology from Cornell University and a master in library services from the University of Arizona she is the author of the book remember
The ladies from Patriots in petticoats to presidential candidates and the Garden State Le Legacy article reclaiming our voice New Jersey’s role in the fight for women’s suffrage she also does programs on Emily robling bridge builder in petticoats Girl Scout founder Juliet Gordon low the women the women Air Force service Pilots of World
War 2 as well as about female aviators astronauts and inventors and tonight’s program is sponsored by the friends of the Ying Branch Library so without further Ado I will turn it over to Carol thank you thank you and thank you to the friends for their sponsorship tonight
Without friends libraries would be in in big trouble so thank you friends for for being there for so many reasons so yes uh my husband has nicknamed me Syble he says who are you going to be today some of you of a certain age will know the
Reference I I like to say that I get to have multiple personalities without uh the mental illness and tonight what I’m going to be doing is portraying uh a very uh early inventor who I’ll be telling you about a minute in a minute named cila Masters and I just need you
To imagine because I’m not here standing in front of you that I’m in a fulllength black uh Quaker outfit so let’s get started let’s get started let’s see there we go I like to start with the old TR Anonymous was a woman and say that because if you imagine the fact that
Women were in charge of agricultural agriculture food production food uh making uh that also includes of course uh medicine because medicine was herbal as well as clothing and so forth any innovation in those fields was most likely something that came out of a woman’s experience and brain but
But the first documented evidence of an invention by probably a woman anywhere but definitely an American woman was my own so uh as I mentioned my name is siila siila wrighton Masters and I was born around 1676 in right here in New Jersey in Burlington uh when I grew up I
Married a Quaker Merchant who soon became a uh Pennsylvania judge and eventually the mayor of Pennsylvania sorry the mayor of Philadelphia and we I had we had four children and somewhere in those years I noticed that the indigenous women were spending a lot of time and energy uh grinding the
So-called Indian corn uh to make what you would Now call grits and I came up with a better way I thought you could pound the GN the the corn in a mill powered by water or horsepower and then I and it appears to be I myself without my family went to England to
Pursue the patent at the time there was no patent system in most of the colonies and definitely not in the Pennsyvania colony and so in 1712 I’ll sail to in uh to England I got uh good wishes from my Quaker Meeting House and then uh I
Applied to the king for a patent it would take three years but finally it would be issued and it was issued in an interesting way it was issued uh to Thomas Masters for a new invention found out by cila his wife for cleaning and curing the Indian corn and the reason it
Was issued that way is I was a married woman and under the law of the land fam coov I was covered in law by my husband which meant that I did not could not own either personal or intellectual property um but I was issued was issued in that way patent number
401 incidentally while I was waiting I opened a shop in England and figured out a way to make hats and uh chair covers out of a combination of interweaving of straw and paleto leaf and eventually got another patent patent number 403 for that before sailing back to America once
I returned home uh Thomas petitioned for recognition of my British patents our British patents in Pennsylvania and they end up getting issued in my name which is quite curious and we would eventually build a successful Mill which produced what we call Tuscarora rice what you
Call grits and it was used as a patent medicine for tuberculosis well prior to 1790 theoretically only men could author a patent in most colonies but the US patent law of patent Act of 1790 created a national patent system and it did not mention gender or race and so 3 years
Later we have the first evidence of a patent by women on woman under the US patent law her name was Hannah Wilkinson Slater and she was also a Quaker uh lived in Rhode Island married a an immigrant from Britain who had along with his brother or his partner built a
Uh a waterp powerered cotton mill and she and her sister devise a new way to spin that mil cotton to make a very strong thread and she applies to the patent office and uh her 1793 patent is issued in the name of Mrs Samuel Slater
Uh we don’t know a whole lot more about that patent or what she did with it um and sadly in fact when she dies giving birth to her 10th child and her husband writes a lovely Memoir about her after her death he doesn’t mention her patent
At all so there we have it it will be not until 1809 so um 16 years later before we see a patent that really we think benefited the woman who invented it and that is uh Mary Keys she receives a patent as I said in 1809 in her own name under Mary
Keys for her method of weaving straw with silk for uh the hats that were fashionable at the time and her timing was perfect because we were in the Napoleonic Wars what would be uh come called the um become the 18 the War of 1812 and the US government had stopped
Importing European Goods so America American women needed homegrown homemade Replacements and Dolly Madison Praises Mary keys for boosting the nation’s hat industry which was really quite immense particularly in the uh New England colonies um the New England towns Massachusetts loone had a half a million
Dollar in that uh in those days so about $5 million uh today industry in any event her hats were widely used for over a decade but then fashion changed and fell out of favor and uh we uh see that she dies penniless at uh a jd5 in Brooklyn New York so sad
Ending but slowly others follow and by 18 1950 at least 30 patents had been issued to women mostly for domestic uh inventions which makes sense that’s what they were most familiar with cooking tools clothing but we also see Mechanical Devices including Sarah Mather’s submarine telescope and lamp
Which were widely used by the uh Union Navy during the Civil War now I say at least uh 30 by women because some may have been issued in in uh under initials uh or the word misses may have uh been in the file the files burned in 1836 so
We don’t have a lot of evidence it is not until 1821 31 years after patents begin that we get our first known African-American patent and that was issued to Thomas Jennings who was an emancipated enslaved person who had become a tailor in New York City and
In 1821 gets a patent for dry scouring what we’d Now call dry cleaning and because he was a fredman he was a citizen and thus eligible to patent his intellectual property and apparently he was quite successful and was involved in abolition and civil rights and so much
So that upon his death Frederick Douglas issued a eulogy now under the horrible uh system at the time slavery enslavers legally owned the fruits of the labor of the slave both manual and intellectual but the US patent law had a bit of a wrinkle because the person uh
Applying for the patent had to swear that he or she was the original originator of the idea the original inventor and of course if a if an enslaved person had done it the enslaver technically couldn’t do that probably many did anyway uh slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write they didn’t
Have a lot of wherewithal to fight but at least two slave owners were actually um denied uh that we have in record but even after emancipation it was very was expensive and took education it took means to get a patent and the legal system of course was biased against black inventors what were
They going to do if a white person infringed against their patent they didn’t have a lot of wherewithal to fight and could of course be uh uh harmed if they tried so so some black inventures probably hid their race to avoid discrimination or they took on a
White partner or agent we really don’t have uh a way of finding all of the black inventions but we do know there were some of them um both enslaved and free um steam inventing Steamboat propellers cotton scrapers and you may have heard of the phrase The Real McCoy
That was an oiling system for locomotives that was R invented by a man named Elijah McCoy and many people tried to imitate it but everybody wanted that the real deal The Real McCoy so now you know that backstory in any event uh it wasn’t until three years after the Civil
War ended that we have our first evidence of our black of a black woman inventor that’s Martha Jones who in 1868 receives patent number 77,4 194 for her Improvement to the Corn Husker and sheller basically the other end of my process she had an automatic way or mechanical way to husk the Indian
Corn and then the husks could be used for Mattress fillers as well as um to feed uh certain animals we don’t know a whole lot more about her patent except for that document but six years later we see the second known uh patent to an African-American woman and that is Mary
Jones D Leon’s steam table precursor to uh what we see today on many uh buffets she almost certainly was working in food service but again we don’t know much else about her the next known black woman is better we have a better backstory and her uh name was Judy
Woodfolk Reed and in 1884 she will patent a Don needer and roller we know that she was born enslaved she married she had six children um three of which were uh were sold but fortunately locally I say fortunately because after the Civil War the family was reunited we
Also have the Curious evidence that at her owner’s death in 1864 she somehow had the the money to buy a bedstead a brush and a comb which suggests she was earning money outside of her enslaved bonds probably as a seamstress or something in the neighborhood in any
Event um her as I said the family is reunited after emancipation her husband dies in 1881 she moves to Washington DC and at the age of 58 in 1884 she receives a patent for her uh D needer which has a a box to keep the do dough
Sanitary and it goes through rollers to simplify the process and we the other thing we know about her is that she was illiterate because her patent is signed simply with an X which would have been typical since as I said enslave people were not allowed to to learn to read or
Write many uh enslaved people uh moved North after the war or before the war if they went via the they self emancipated through the Underground Railroad um and moving to the northern towns they were in uh cramped Urban settings and this inspired Sarah good a shop uh a
Furniture shop owner to invent a new kind of bed now she was her father was a freedan her mother was enslaved which means she was born enslaved because slavery came through the mother’s line but by age 15 the family is living free in Chicago whose father is a skilled
Carpenter her uh her husband is a stair maker so also a carpenter and she opens a furniture store uh Fe not them both and she as I said recognizes that existing uh Furniture is too big for these cramp spaces so she designs a folding bed that will be a desk during
The daytime and in 1883 she’ll have hire a patent attorney and mails the application it’s initially rejected they reapply in 1884 and uh in 1885 Sarah good receives the patent tragically just two years later the business fails we don’t know if it’s a general depr there was a recession
Around then or whether it was bad luck illness death uh what discrimination whatever that that led to its failure but her Hideway bed was a prec precursor to the Murphy bed which would be patent about 15 years later which brings us to the question of who invents and who gets the credit
And we have a very interested sto interesting story that we only know about because of a very shortlived publication the woman inventor only published two issues but in one of those issues in 1890 it had an interview with a woman named Ellen Elgen who was a black woman
She was working as a domestic servant in Washington DC when she invents an improved clothes ringer but instead of patenting it herself she sells sells it to a white agent for $18 which even that isn’t a lot of money and the agent will sell it to the American ringer company
Which makes an enormous amount of money from it and in fact a version of this design is still in use if you see a janitor going around with a with a rope mop a string mop uh they’re uh ringing it out with that kind of ringer in any
Event uh the magazine asked her why she had to decided to sell and she said you know I’m black and if it was known that a negro woman patented The Invention white ladies would not buy the ringer I was afraid to be known because of my color and having it introduced to the
Market that’s the only reason she also said that she was working on another invention which she planned to patent in her own name but sadly we have no evidence of that so we don’t know what happened whether she died or just wasn’t able to do that in any event we have
Evidence that approximately 5 th000 patents were awarded to women between 1790 and 1888 which sounds like a lot but it was really only only about 1% why is that well I indicated some of the reasons already uh women inventors were faced real obstacles patents are timec consuming expensive you need model
Makers draftsmen agents attorneys and in Most states as I mentioned a married woman would have no right to control their earnings or any profits from the patent so as um Matia Joselyn Gage who was one of the early suffrage activists in fact she was a partner alongside Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susie B
Susan banthony she wrote an article in 1883 called woman as an inventor pointing out these difficulties that she has no right title or power over this work of her own brain and went on to say that it had been only 30 years since the first state had even given any property
Rights to women and that women woman has not been an inventor to an equal extent with man is not so much a subject of surprise as that she should have invented at all but women did invent and some were even assisting others including Miriam e Benjamin she’d been
Freeborn in South Carolina she’d moved to segregated Washington DC and become a school teacher then a government Clerk and then goes to Howard University law school and after graduation she sets herself up in business as a solicitor of patents to help others and in 1888 she’ll obtain a patent for her own
Invention a Gong and Signal chair for hotels to staff and that was sort of the Prototype that was used by uh the House of Representatives for a signal system there I’m not sure it was actually her system and she would um also eventually patent a a temperature regulating so for
Shoes and there’s some suspicion she might have been the composer for theater Roosevelt’s inaugural uh presidential March in 1904 because it was composed uh by someone using the pseudonym EB Miriam we don’t know for sure what we do know is that in 1892 a woman named Anna
Mangan patents a pastry Fork she uh was living in New York City and she uh created a pastry fork with angular tines and Cutters everybody apparently was quite excited about this and she wanted to show it off at the Colombian Exposition in Chicago the World’s Fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of
Columbus but uh women and people of color were not in initially allowed to exhibit but repeated exam uh demands for inclusion finally got a little corner of the second floor uh for their use and apparently people were impressed uh a writer on female inventions called it a
Kitchen wonder the only thing of its kind at the patent office and apparently it was the prototype for the influenced the design of a lot of other kitchen utensils that same year Sarah Marshall Boone invents a hinged ironing board now she’d been born enslaved in North Carolina moves via the Underground
Railroad to connectic with Connecticut with her husband has eight children becomes a dress maker is widowed and faced with the difficulty of of ironing the very fancy sleeves that were fashionable at the time on the ironing board which was literally at the time a board between chairs a flat board she
Invents a much more complex ironing board that will handle all of these features and and then she learns to read and write shortly before turning 60 years old which I’m very impressed about and then she files for her patent she studies other drawings does the mechanical diagrams to create the
Illustration and she receives her patent in 1892 and that board ining board became very popular but we don’t know much about what happened to her afterwards now my next women don’t Fade Into Obscurity quite the reverse and they all get their patents for women black women’s hair and cosmetics and the
First one in this series is a woman named or I should call her a girl when she first gets her patent Lydia Newman she’s born in Ohio the family moves to New York City for better opportunities she becomes a hairdresser in her early teens and at age 13 devises the first
Synthetic bristle hairbrush and it also has a little pocket uh section that captures debris that comes out of the scalp and hair as you’re brushing it and she applies for a patent and receives it in 1898 at the age of 13 and she does very very well with it uh later she’ll
Become a women’s rights activist and she’s one of the organizers in 1915 of an African-American branch of the woman’s suffrage party uh around the same time we have a woman named Annie Annie turnbo Malone her parents had been enslaved her father joins the Union Army uh the family
Eventually gets to Illinois she never finishes high school but works as a hairdresser with her sister and by age 20 she’s decided she’s going to become a beauty doctor she develops her own shampoo and scalp treatment and through the 1890s she’s traveling in a buggy all around making speeches and selling her
Product 1902 she moves to St Louis Missouri to expand her business and opens a line of products under the name po and one of her proteges you’re going to hear about in a minute uh was at the time her name was Sarah Breedlove uh she’ll will will know her better as
Madam CJ Walker in any event 1903 she briefly marries but divorces because she decides he doesn’t she doesn’t like him bossing around her business and by 1918 she has built a four-story million dooll Factory and Beauty School complex employing over 175 young women employees who she encourages she provid provides
Housing and schooling form for and encourages them to move up in the world and she spends her considerable Fortune uh on opportunities for other African-Americans education YMCAs black orphanages and so forth and her Empire lasted a very long time at the time of her death in 1957 there were still 30 uh
Operating beauty schools of her uh around the nation now here’s the woman probably you’ve heard of Sarah Breedlove she was the first child of her family born after emancipation she’s orphaned however at age seven uh spans her childhood as a sharecropper marries he soon dies but not before she has a
Daughter and she initially works as a laundress to support her daughter but inspired by the eloquent black speakers at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair and frustrated because she’s having hair issues and apparently because she says she had this Vision in a dream she develops her own line of hair care
Products specifically for black hair hair she does a cross-country sales tour recruiting black women at to service sales agents and she and her daughter set up a college to train hair culturist uh and by 1916 the company is selling over half a million dollars worth of product a year employing over 23,000
Sales agents across the country and she becomes the first black female selfman made millionaire in the United States she’s also giving back she’s active in the national uh the NAACP she visits wro Wilson to protest segregation and encourage him to take a stand against lynching and she holds uh conventions to
Empower her employees and quite a remarkable woman she also employs a woman named margorie Stewart Joiner who was born in Virginia very poor goes to beauty school and sets up her own Salon in Chicago where she is recruited by mad Madame CJ Walker to work first as a teacher and then becomes
Vice president and National supervisor of over 200 Walker beauty colleges around the country uh spends a 50-year career with the company but along the way in 1928 she uh invents a permanent wave machine and she said she got the idea looking at the rod she was putting in
Her pot roast in any event it was wildly successful you could uh put permanent waves to straighten or curl hair um do the whole head at once rather than the individual um curing IRS they’d used in the past she applies for a patent and gets it but no never gets any profit
Directly from the patent because she is an employee so the W the patent is Al issued in the company name but again she um gives back passionate about helping other african-amer she becomes a founding member of Mary mcla Bon’s National Council of negro women in 1935 head of the Chicago Defender
Charity Network and befriends elanar Roosevelt becomes active with the Democratic National Committee and several New Deal agencies um fighting racial segregation and discrimination again a remarkable woman and New Jersey has its own madam CJ Walker we call her Sarah Spencer Washington Madame Washington’s started with a beauty shop
In Atlantic City in 1913 then studies chemistry and business and creates the Apex brand of beauty products and beauty schools she’s honored in 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York as one of the most distinguished business women there and by 1946 her beauty Empire employs over 50,000 uh women across the country
And her plant in Atlantic City is manufacturing more than 75 beauty products she’ll become one of New Jersey’s first black millionair s and again a social activist working against discrimination and she gave back to the community she established the first integrated beachfront in Atlantic City and the Apex rest nursing home and golf
Club and she was IND inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2021 and we have another Hall of Famer uh who was inducted the following year uh Madame Louise Scott who is sometimes called neworks madame loer she was raised in South Carolina she comes to New Jersey in the 1930s initially
Working as a maid but in 1944 she opens a beauty salon in Newark and soon more salons a school of beauty culture a line of beauty products and a 50 room hotel and restaurant uh just 14 years after her first o Beauty Salon she buys a
Mansion on High Street in New York it serves as her home and headquarters and has a 700 seat Auditorium where she does radio programs Church Services fashion shows and much more and upon her death it was given to Newark unfortunately it fell into disrepair but there is now a
Project to restore it and make it a um Center of stem and we have Canada’s uh Beauty uh product Queen Viola Desmond she was not allowed to study uh cosmet Cosmetology in Canada because of her race so she comes down to New Jersey and studies at the Apex
School returns and sets up her own beauty colleges and be product line and on a cross country tour of Canada to promote her product she decides to take a break and take in a movie but when she goes to the movie theater they’ll only send sell her a uh a balcony seat
Because of her race but she sits in the orchestra anyway whereupon she is ejected arrested and convicted of not paying the extra Penny tax on the orchestra trick get that they refused to buy her she will end up fighting this and fighting segregation the rest of her
Life uh but it’s only she’s only um pardoned posum asly however in 2016 she becomes the first non-royal woman on a Canadian bank note so you’ll see her on the $10 bill jumping back to the states to the West Coast in 195 we have another
Woman who had to wait a long time for her recognition her name was Alisa Augusta ball she’s raised in Seattle and she goes to the University of Washington where she gets bachelor in chemistry and pharmacology and then goes and gets a scholarship to study get a master’s at
Uh University of Hawaii whereupon she’s hired to become a professor there uh University of Hawaii’s first female and first black professor at the time there is an island in Hawaii that is being used as a leper colony um because uh leprosy was um segregated people were sent away and the only Treatment
Available at the time had been available since mid 1800s was this topically app applied chal mugra oil which wasn’t very effective but she felt that if it was taken um in it was made into an water soluble injectable oil it would be more uh more effective and she um studies
This and works it and develops it and then um it’s ready to go when tragically she dies in just at age 23 various sources say a labac accident or tubercul tuberculosis before her publication has has has gone uh has happened and the dean of her Department whose name is Arthur Dean uh in
Publishes and markets Dean’s method without mentioning her work uh and it becomes the most effective treatment for leprosy for next 30 years until penicillin there’s a brief me mention uh by a colleague but no real recognition until the 21st century and finally in the last 25 years she’s gotten the
Recognition she deserved and in 2020 there’s an award-winning film called The Ball Method finally uh for her her invention meanwhile the following year we have meline uh Turner who uh we don’t know much about her except she lives in in Oakland and tired of the work of manually squeezing oranges she invents a
Machine to do this which revolutionizes the fruit crop you the market for the fruit crop in California and elsewhere and so um it it was uh displayed at the Panama California exhibition in San Diego it as I said revolutionized the industry and from 1948 to 20147 other patents have referenced her
Invention and in 199 19 we have an invention that makes all of our homes much more comfortable even tonight I’m sure you’re using it Alice Parker invented a a way of doing natural gas central heating she’s born in New Jersey as well morrist toown she uh goes however to Washington DC to Howard
University’s High School uh to get her um to go to high school and then she uh graduates with honors but can only get a job as a cook she comes back to Morristown her husband’s the uh the Butler and in 1919 she patents a system of central heating using natural gas and
Forced hot air um bringing the design brought in the cool air and then was conveyed through heat exchanger and delivered warm air through uh ducks to individual rooms of the house the concept of the central heating had existed but her design was unique because it used natural gas rather than
Coal or wood so it was far less risky in terms of house fires um but for whatever reason it’s not the patent that gets referenced by other patents it’s possibly because of her race or her gender that it just didn’t go anywhere but it is basically the system that we use
Today in 1948 we see uh the invention of another um a black inventor a female from New Jersey that’s Bessie blown she wasn’t born in New Jersey she was born in West Virginia and she was left-handed at a time when you were not allowed to be left-handed but she was a stubborn
Little girl so when she was forced to learn to write with her right hand she also learned to write with her teeth and her toes which served her well when she moves as a teen to New Jersey and becomes a physical therapist and is working uh during World War II with the
Wounded veterans who’ve lost their ability to write with their right or left hand or whatever and teaches them to write with other limbs as well and one of these day one of the days she’s working she overhears an army doctor say that they need a better way for these
Men to feed themselves and she so she literally burns the Midnight Oil and quite a lot of her own funds over several years to invent a uh automatic feeding tube for these men and in 1948 she presents the prototype to the VA which sits on it for several years and
Finally gets back to her and say says it’s not needed and impractical but she doesn’t give up she instead uh finds a Canadian company to manufacture it and then offers it to the French military in uh 1952 which are thrilled and they say yes this will be very helpful and uh she
Decides to give the patent to the um the French military and at the signing ceremony she says a colored woman is capable of inventing something for the benefit of mankind and speaking of signing ceremony interestingly enough she later will become a handwriting expert for Scotland yard analyzing historical uh documents and forgeries
For them so quite a career Arc speaking of interesting career arcs we have Marie beatric Davidson Kenner who came from a very inventive family in fact her grandfather invented the tricolor light signal for trains that is of course the same signal system that we use today for automobiles and her uh he
Also invented a stretcher with wheels for ambulances she app ly had an inventive uh childhood as well uh when she was 6 years old she invented a self- oiling door hinge I have to think that that probably was her job and she wanted to make it easier and a convertible roof
That would go over the folding rumble seat of the car which she no doubt was sitting in and a various other uh inventions in 1924 her family moves from North Carolina to Washington DC and she apparently was thrilled to have a tour of the US patent office um in 1931 she
Gradu grates high school and wanted to go to college but it’s the depression there is no money she does a sorted job she works in the 1940s during the war as a federal employee and then becomes a professional florist but St keeps her mind active as with inventive uh
Thoughts and gets her first patent in 1957 for a sanitary belt um she had thought of it 30 years prior to this but couldn’t find a company uh to manufacture it because she was black in 1976 she’ll uh invent an adjustable tray in pocket for Walkers and wheelchairs
1982 an improved bathroom tissue holder with a a flap that allows you to tear off the the tissue and in 1987 a wallmounted back washer and shower massage feels good at the end of the day she never got any awards or Rec or formal recognition but for many many
Years she had the record five for the greatest number of patents awarded to an individual black woman uh by the US government this same year that she gets her first patented we have the uh an indigenous Woman by the name of Susan Olivia P getting her patent for the Jolly
Jumper and uh she grew up on uh the uh White Earth reservation in Minnesota where women would hang their babies from slings uh cradle boards from trees to kind of Bounce them keep them happy while they were working nearby and um after she goes to college
And meets her husband when she has her first baby she remembers that cradle board it’s uh in 1910 and she fashion her own version and uh she continues to make it better with each of her subsequent seven children and finally in 1948 her family convinces her to produce
In market and her son helps her apply for a patent which she receives in 1957 for a baby supporter and exerciser and uh they they manufacture it for a little while and then they sell it uh to another company which markets the Jolly Jumper which many of you have may have
Used for your very own children at one point or another and for your very own sanity meanwhile within the US government we were starting to see opportunities for women and African-American women and uh uh women of color in um and uh the fir we have our first Native American aerospace
Engineer with Mary gar Roth so the first male or female she’s the Great granddaughter of a Cherokee Chief she gets uh degrees in uh math and astronomy and then is hired by loed as a mathematician during the war and becomes lockheed’s first woman engineer and the
Only woman at all among the 40 engineers in their most elite Skunk Works group and their work led to the Apollo man mood Mission now we don’t know a lot of what she did because a lot of it is still classified but one of the reasons
We know that she did it is that in 1958 she appeared on the television program What’s My Line and was revealed to have the job designs rocket missiles and satellites and she was a real go-getter and promoter of other women in the field which leads us to other hidden
Figures that I hope are not hidden anymore I hope you have had a chance to see the film or read any of the books about these amazing black women they were called computers we would Now call them programmers but in that day the the machines they worked on were the
Computing machines and the people were the computers and uh uh the one who led the uh the black unit of computers was Dorothy vaugh she um was studyed mathematics was a teacher was recruited to uh work at Langley and uh ends up in 1949 leading the group The National aeronautic um Computing sorry
Um can’t remember what the C stands for at the moment uh but it’s the predecessor to NASA she becomes their first black supervisor and she uh is so valued uh that uh Engineers viy for her her girls and sometimes they even get her but uh it her their work
Was critical to the space program and one of her uh her proteges was Mary Jackson who um gets a job with West area Computing section and working with other engineers they are so impressed with her brain that they encourage her to study Aeronautical Engineering as well she has
To really persist because uh most of the programs are segregated but she finally does graduate and becomes NASA’s first black female aeronautical engineer her work was critical to the space program and in 2020 NASA named its Washington DC headquarters after her and probably the most famous of the bunch Katherine
Johnson who was a a brilliant brilliant mathematician and uh uh her work was critical in a number of of NASA programs both Mercury and Apollo uh but it’s uh most famously known from the scene in the film where uh John Glenn refused to get into the Mercury capsule until she
Uh Katherine Johnson checked the figures that had been spit out by the computer and verified that they were indeed correct and there they weren’t alone their other ear NASA hidden figures but I I don’t have time to tell you their stories unfortunately in 1969 the same year as
Aollo landed on the moon we had a woman named Mary van Brittain Brown who was working as a night nurse and coming home to quite dicey neighborhood and she realized that it would be a lot safer to come home to a house if she had a security system there working with her
Husband who was an electrician they designed a um closed circuit television uh system to monitor their house and they received a patent on it and it is the basis basically for all security systems today and there 13 other patents that reference theirs following these this uh development we have a number of women
Who come to the four in the 1970s including Dr Shirley an Jackson who um is the first woman to get the first black wom women to get a PhD at MIT in 1973 in theoretical physics and then she gets a job in New Jersey at the AT&T
Bell Labs here and it’s her research her underlying research in electronic Optical magnetic and transport properties of semiconductor systems that have led to caller ID call weding waiting portable facts Fiber Optic Cables after 20 years at B Labs she eventually moves and becomes the first woman and the first africanamerican
President of an engineering school that’s Ren aier and has had quite a distinguished career her contemporary is Ray Jean montigue who grows up in Little Rock AR Arkansas and is inspired to pursue engineering after her father her grandfather takes her to see a captur German World War II submarines she gets
A bachelor’s in business and then Jo joins the US Navy as a clerk typist in Washington DC because they won’t hire a black woman for anything else but she’s watching carefully as a white male ivy league Engineers are operating the univac computer and one day the engineers are sick and rather than shut
Down the machine she says I know how to do it does and the uh uh the department says you you need to go to night school in computer programming which she does and then she becomes a computer systems analyst at the naval ship engineering center well in 1971 her departments
Allotted one month to create a computer generated ship design and she burns the Midnight Oil and 19 hours later she has the design so she is the first person to design a ship on a computer and she’s the first female manager of ships in the US Navy and she designed subs and frig
And air craft car and uh retires in 1990 tragically she’s really forgotten until the hidden figures movement resurrects her her story there’s another Navy gallon then 1970s her name is Dr Gloria twine jism she gets a bunch of degrees in Psychology including a PhD and then uh does a military research career uh
Career in the US Navy and in fact also becoming the US Representative to Nato for Aerospace R&D and along the way she develops specialized safety goggles for Pilots to keep them uh to prep them protect them from Bright Light and losing Consciousness under extreme conditions and and Dr Gladis West who
Grew up in rural Virginia in the 1930s the family was sh were sharecroppers they saw education as a way out and she went right up the ramp she became the valedictorian of her High School got a scholarship to Virginia state and studied mathemati mathematics becomes a teacher and then pursues opportunities
In in the federal government she’s the second black woman hired at the naval surface War Cent Warfare Center she’s analyzing s satellite data and then learns to program catches computer mistakes and the department head recommends her as the project manager for the cessat radar altimetry pro
Project and she programs an IBM 7 7030 to create an extremely accurate geodetic Earth model which is the foundation for our GPS satellite system in use today she retires in 1998 um after having a stroke while she’s recovering she sets herself up for a new goal to get her PhD
And in 2018 at the age of 88 she gets it uh but her again her contributions were largely forgotten in until 2017 hidden figures um uh her commander of the project writes an article for Black History Month and so fortunately she lived has lived long enough to um to see and get
Recognition in NASA during the 70s and ‘ 80s is also doing satellite imaging and Dr Valerie lever Thomas uh is working there she grew up in an all black community in Baltimore um very interested in science goes to a prestigious girls school there but that prestigious girls school doesn’t have
Much in the way of math or science because why should girls need those things she studies them on her own she gets a bachelor’s in physics and then eventually she’ll be getting all her degrees but in 1964 she’s hired by NASA’s Gard Spight space flight sent her
As a mathematician and data um analyst she becomes an expert on LSAT which produces millions of Earth images in 1977 she discovered that concave mirrors could create the illusion of 3D images and she experiments with um translating this discovery so that it can be projected on um screens and and seem to
Be jumping off she works for a couple more years and in 1980 she receives a patent for her illusion transmitter uh which uh gives you the illusion of a holographic image and it’s used today in 3D movies and also in medical imaging so it’s quite important and she and
Continued to be a scientific uh Pioneer on all sorts of NASA projects as well as being a role model and mentor to many students also at the same time we have Olga gonzala Santa Bria she grows up in Puerto Rico she attends a career day in high school and here’s an engineer talk
And says my goodness never thought of such a thing uh but she goes on to study chemical engineering and then um joins NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio where she’s part of the team that discovers how to chemically alter fuel sales to create a long cyc life uh
Nickel hydrogen battery which is crucial crucial for the International Space Station program in 2002 she was named director of systems management at Glenn she’s the highest ranking Hispanic NASA got Oodles of awards through the agency and today she’s the president of her own company and encouraging other young
Women to follow in her footsteps also in the late 80s and 90s we start to see a visible presence of women uh women of color at Nasa in the astronaut Corp the first one is Dr May J Jameson who has a young child or a school AG child got a a
Splinter and was fascinated by the puss in her finger and said I’m going to be a doctor when you grow up and her school counsel you mean said you mean a nurse You’re a black girl you’re not going to be a doctor well she was going to be a
Doctor she goes to Cornell then Stanford Med then uh gets her to get her um her MD and then goes to Africa for two years with a Peace Corp comes back and sees an advertisement for astronauts from NASA applies she’s one of 2,000 applications she’s one of 15 who are chosen the only
Black and the only woman in that class and in 1992 she flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavor conducting 44 scientific uh science experiments in space she will uh later leave NASA to start a foundation promoting stem and the idea that humans will get to another star within the next hundred
Years she’s later followed by other black women as well and by women of uh other nationalities and colors including Dr capana chawa who’s the first astronaut of Indian descent she’s born in India ends up getting Oodles of degrees including a PhD and aerospace engineering becomes a researcher at Nasa
Specializing in vertical takeoff and Landing Concepts which are used in the private uh rockets that NASA’s co uh coordinating with today in 1994 she became an astronaut candidate and she flew two missions on the space shuttle Columbia but tragically died in the second one and we have Dr Ellen Ooa
Becomes the first Latina astronaut she gets a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford patents on three Optical inspection systems which she uses uh at Nasa she becomes NASA chief of intelligence systems uh in 1990 she is selected for NASA Astronaut training and she’ll serve on four uh space missions
Uh awarded NASA’s science uh highest medals and after retiring as an astronaut she becomes director of the Johnson Space Center or something that would have been unheard of in the good old white boy days of the 1960s and she continues to Mentor young people speaking of optical systems we
Have a literal sights saer in Dr Patricia bath she grew up in Harlem and became an opthalmologist and learned that blacks were twice as likely as white people to suffer from blindness because there wasn’t a good monitoring system in the community so she created one training unteers and in 1975 she
Becomes the first woman faculty member uh at in the department of Opthalmology at UCLA and they show her to her new office which is in the basement right next to the lab animals and she says thanks but no thanks I’m going upstairs with all of you which she does she
Eventually Also Rises to become department chair in 1976 she co-founds the American Institute for the prevention of blindness and 12 years later after over 10 years of extension extens of research and testing she receives a patent for the laser fof probe which revolutionized eye surgery in fact if you have eye surgy surgery
Today you’re using a descendant of her device and she was the first African-American female doctor to secure a medical patent from sight to sound we I want to introduce you if you don’t know of her already to Dr Maran croak she grows up in New York City is fascinated by electricians and plumbers
And so forth uh but uh ends up going to to University uh Princeton and then gets a PhD in California in uh qualitative analysis and Social Psychology comes back to New Jersey joins AT&T Val labs and in the 1990s she invented voice over internet protocols the reason that
You’re hearing me today because it’s the way that uh that sound travels um via computer ways um and she it enables secure voice phone calls and of course all of these secure multimedia sessions she ends up becoming the senior senior vice president of development supervising over 500 other scientists
And engineers and she’s credited with creating most of the methods and features of boip um and it’s adopted universally around the world and today she holds over 200 patents including the text to donate patent that you might use if you donate um uh to a charity and in 2014 14
She joined Google as the vice president for R&D and emerging markets and she now leads Google’s research um Center for responsible AI she’s also been an active voice for racial Justice and against genocides and holocausts all over the world quite an EXT extraordinary woman and she along with Dr bath became the
First two black women to be inducted into the national inventors Hall of Fame in its 50-year history she they joined 48 other women and six and 30 black men and uh 600 among the 600 totaled honorary uh honored innovators and in 2023 they added one more and that was Marjorie Stewart
Joiner the inventor of the uh permanent wave machine for Madam Walker’s company they join other women of color including cavity conqueror Dr samita Mitra who was born in India moves to the US for graduate school and then while working as a chemist at 3M Oral Care invented the first uh nanoparticle uh Dental
Filling uh and it was more durable and attractive than existing composits if you’ve had any dental work in the last 30 years you probably have her composits in your mouth and she holds almost a hundred patents and her composits are used all over the world uh and we have Dr Margaret woo Who
Was born in Taiwan after her family escaped from mainland China and all she and all her siblings studied science and she comes to the US for graduate work and then is hired by Exxon Mobile a New Jersey company and spends her 40-year career there becoming one of the most
Accomplished industrial Chemists in the history of the company she revolutionized the idea of synthetic lubricants and if you’ve got anything in your house or car or anything that has to move it probably has one of her lubricants keeping it in motion it’s uh she’s named on over a hundred US patents
And she was the first woman to achieve the title of senior scientific adviser in the company and she uh was inducted as I said to the National inventors Hall of Fame well you don’t need to have a PhD to make a difference and that is shown by this lovely young woman J
Gitten JY Ral who in 2016 when she was just 11 heard about the Flint Water Crisis and how expensive it was to test water for lead so she invented a simple cheap way of doing it and has become an ambassador over the last uh seven eight
Years uh for youth inventors and in 2020 was featured on the cover of Times magazine as its inaugural kid of the year and young people continue to invent uh we have young women young uh two young uh uh women sisters Cara and Leanne fan who uh in 2019 and 22 2022
Respectively received the award for Americans America’s top young scientist Cara created a a nano silver solution to kill and prevent the growth of bacteria and Lan uh inspired by her own ear infections created a lowcost headphone device that uses machine learning and blue light therapy to detect and treat midar
Infections uh hearing loss the the other side of sight loss and we have dassia Taylor who heard as a high school student in Iowa how many uh people uh particularly women having C-sections in uh countries around the world were having infections that were going undetected because the countries
Couldn’t afford uh First World um uh sutures essentially uh coated with conductive material um but working with chemistry teacher she uh tested different materials and found that there was a polyester thread could absorb beet juice which would change color in the presence of the acidity that shows an
Infection there it’s still very much at the Prototype stage but it is possible that that will uh be quite a useful development uh and we have Tahira Reed Smith who had uh when she was in third grade living in the Bronx there weren’t a lot of kids in her neighborhood and
She was frustrated that she couldn’t do her favorite thing which was Double Dutch without because there weren’t enough kids to hold the jump ropes so she sketched on the back of a paper an idea for an automatic jump rope Turner well she didn’t do anything wasn’t able
To do anything about it at the time but when she was a freshman in college in an engineering course uh was encouraged to work on making it turning it to reality she was uh she ended up getting a prize at uh from this sonian and encouraged by
All this she went into the field and ended up becoming a professor she’s now uh associate professor of mechanical engineering uh at uh Purdue encouraging a whole new generation of innovators why is this important because we still lag uh in 1977 3.4% of the patents listed women as an inventor only
3.4 it’s a little better the most recent statistics we have 23% in 2019 uh for black and Hispanics it’s even lower uh even with similar education white men get nine times as many pack P patents as white women Hispanic men five times as their uh Hispanic women and
Black men are two and a half times 2.6 times from 2000 to 2016 US women inventors filed only a third of as many patent applications man why well there are a lot of barriers stereotypes discrimination bias harassment caregiving responsibilities the so-called motherhood penalty and importantly lack of access to mentorship
Social networks patent attorneys and Venture Capital which is much more likely to go to mail even though money that’s given to women women’s projects is much more likely to be successful just a side there and being held to a higher standard than white men and a
Little study proved this they did a um a study that looked at uh What uh that patent office was more likely to reject patents with female sounding names as sole applicants and when they were approved they had more restrictions on them making them less proper less valuable so while we made a six-fold
Improvement from 1977 to 2019 there’s still a long way to go why is that important to encourage women to think about these things well this case study from Deborah baloa and chaal B B I think shows uh shaali was working out out at a
Gy and felt a lump in her breast goes to her doctor who says basically watchful waiting and um that for her was watchful worrying and she was working on a masters in design engineering in London and she uh proposes a joint project with her friend Deborah to find a better way
For home monitoring of breast health and together they create dotplot which is a handheld device that will survey the breast and then send that information to an app on your phone and their prototype seems to work they’re still in the early stages of development and they haven’t
Yet completed CL clinical trials but it looks quite hopeful and hopefully someday soon we’ll all be using their device so we need everyone’s ideas and participation to meet today’s challenges patent diversity strength and Innovation with which results in more solutions that benefit more people as Sally Ry uh
Said you cannot be what you cannot see so if you want to see more evidence of this I highly recommend the book mother of invention how good ideas get ignored in economy built for men and changing the equation 50 more than 50 US black women in stem there are also Oodles of
Books for children picture books and and a chapter books BS that highlight women inventors and inventors of color to help people see so they can be and I have a bibliography and I there’s also a wonderful picturebook bibliography at uh the website what do we do all day.com in
Fact they have 300 plus book lists there um for all sorts of wonderful reasons but they have one on women inventur that I particularly highly recommend so I want to thank you today mention that I have other programs as was mentioned briefly a few minute at the
Beginning of the program I’m in fact doing one in person down at the Robinsville branch and I hope many of you might show up there and uh and and uh I will see you in person for I think it’s is it was it a wasp sng nobody ons
The sky I don’t remember I think it was one of the aviation ones down there and so I will see you Saturday afternoon at 2: o and meanwhile I will finish my slideshow and um and stop my screen share and answer any questions that you would like to
Give to me so let’s see stop sharing there we go so um here we go let me open the uh open the main screen and can I answer any questions or does anyone have any comments well thank you um you you reminded me I was supposed to put the
Link to the events in the chat and I finally did that supposed to do that at the beginning um yeah and you’re your the presentation you’re doing at Robinsville is where did I put that information um it’s nobody owns the sky owns the sky that’s early female aviat so that’s
Looking at the women who preceded Amelia aart wonderful yeah that sounds very interesting too yeah so well as um we’re getting some thank yous I don’t know if you have the chat open Carol but um and I can relay any questions or comments that people have um but as we’re waiting
If people have questions please post them in the chat and um you know uh I was just thinking as you were talking it did seem like for a period of time there that the government was or government jobs were really um an Avenue for a lot
Of these women was that the case that was um the government really did seem to open up it you know you could teach or you could get a a government job basically in Tech I think they were ahead of the private sector right right yeah well
That’s helpful and when how did you uh do your research where did you find um a lot of your information um Oodles of places um I Googled to find black inventors black female inventors and then um that led me to look you know because I needed to
Find names I found some in Wikipedia I found some in books like that stem book of the 50 um I I looked through books of of female inventors generally for women of color um and yeah I just one sometimes one one woman would lead me they they
Mention another woman in there um I’m on Facebook and sometimes I found out women because it would show up in my feed and it would be like oh I didn’t know her and I’d scoop her in and say okay find out more about her um so just all sorts
Of places many times uh you know one place would say the first black woman inventor uh often Judy uh is is the is mentioned there but over the last few years they’ve made the discoveries of these you know the two of women who preceded her that we know
About so we are a lot of people are are digging and and looking for that information and great we do have a question what was the name of the book for young people that you mentioned almost at the end almost at the end that is just give me
One second um there’s uh there are two of them uh you’re there well there actually a number of them but the changing the equation that is the 50 plus women in stem it was the one on the right hand side and yeah that one is um specifically for young people there are
So many and I’m sure Sharon you can help anybody at mer County find what you have and if you don’t have it of course we have inter Library loans so you can get another library for people so I say every librarian is in this profession because we want to help you find
Materials uh find information um and so if you’ve gotten curious about anything today and uh I should also mention my website which is tellinger stories.com which I’ll put in the chat um has if you go under it’s actually Mothers of Invention uh which is my was my first
Women inventors I have a pretty extensive bibliography there um I’ve put great many of these books are there yeah and we will for the folks who have attended sorry um uh for the folks who have uh are attending this uh we will email out um some references resources that we
Have available through our system but like Carol mentioned if there’s things that you’re interested in and we don’t have the material we can always uh put in an inter Library loan uh request and then uh another question was is there a print out of your talk I don’t have a
Print out but you are about to you recorded it so you’ll be giving them the talk again and do you have a print screen option people all of you have a print screen option on your computer so if you’re watching a talk you can always pause it a recording and print out a
Screen if you want more you know if if you’re fascinated by a particular person for instance and you want to take a deeper dive uh you could print out that as a starting point and then and if there’s anybody that you are fascinated fascinated about and you don’t um know
Where to begin when I create a screen like this in my notes field are all my references which means that while you can’t see them you can email me and say you know I want to know more about you know whoever ever it is you want to know more about and I’ll tell
You where I found the information and what I know and that’ll give you a Launchpad because I’m an old librarian so I keep my sources but I don’t I don’t put the sources on the slides because goodness knows they’re crowded enough already um so but I do that and I know
And I put more material on slides than a lot of people do but I know that many people are visual rather than AAL Learners I know I am and for instance if somebody says say to me something and I’m not reading it at the same time I
Have especially if it’s a name or a process or something like that where it’s not a word I might be familiar with having it written at the same time is reinforcing for me so that reflects my learning style I know that many people who do programs screen is only visual
Pictures but the reason that I put more on my screen even though I don’t have time to say everything sometimes there’s a great quote or something and I put it up there I don’t have time to actually read that quote out but it’s there and
And you can see it and again if you’ve um you know you’re prompted perhaps to to go a little further so that’s all part of it great thank you you are so very welcome any other questions or comments or complaints or whatever I’m I’m more than happy Happ to address any of
Them if not I know that Sharon probably needs to start closing down the library for the evening but I don’t want to hurry anybody out if there’s anything else before we need to go but if not I will wish you well and if you want to
See this again I know we covered a lot of territory and you wouldn’t believe the number of slides that I suppressed my programs are always larger than longer and larger and I have to oh gosh I don’t have time for you byebye right but I you know it’s a good problem
To have a good problem to have um I take de Dives and then I have to kind of come up for air but it’s all good so in any event um thank you again for uh inviting me hosting me and I’ll look forward to return engagements if you’re so inclined
And if you know other people who might want to have me I’m always uh always appre appreciate references and um yeah so feel free to put it up I would love as I said to have a uh a link to a a downloadable I don’t have a recording of
This uh program okay so if if it if the recording turned out it’s helpful for me to own it you know to have it because if somebody’s thinking about the program I can a preview um we’ll send that to you for sure yeah that’s great and stay well
And and uh stay happy and enjoy spring and here we go all right thank you so much have a wonderful night everyone take care bye everybody bye- bye