July 4, 2024 • 41 mins
Women inventors have always had a tough time, for obvious reasons. So we're here today to pay tribute to those who persevered in the face of the laws and customs that prevented progress.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just gonna play
a rousing version of Yankee to do Old Landy or
something like that in the background of this stirring episode.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
You got a.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Picklo, No, I'm just gonna go like this. I'll record
a track of do Do Do Do Do Do Do
Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do
Do Do Do and we'll play that on a loop
underneath us talking. Jerry said she can do it with editning.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm sure this would be an all time great Okay.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
The reason I want to do that is because as
I was reading this, I was what's the word I'm
looking for? I'm toying with enthused. That's not it. That
sounds like the opposite of how I feel. It is inspiring,
but also like, it's just cool that there's this un Well,
in a way, it's not cool. It's cool to discover
(01:09):
this whole group, this whole cadre of inventors that just
are overlooked. That's the uncool part. They've been overlooked. For
so long. But there's a bunch of women inventors here
in America and around the world presumably, but we're just
talking about American ones today that really made some amazing contributions,
and especially at first for the first significant amount of time,
(01:31):
they really had an uphill battle to get their invention
like out there because of just how generally mistreated women were.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. Absolutely, here's a fairly horrifying stat because it was
not that long ago, but in the late twentieth century,
only about ten percent of all patents were awarded to
women and their inventions. And we're going to talk about
some of the reasons before we get going on highlighting
some of these great inventions and some of these great women.
But one reason is just a lot of times, if
(02:04):
you were a woman and you had an invention, you
had to file it at least the patent under your
husband's name, or your brother's or your father's name, or
any man in your life that was willing to sign
on the dotted line saying yeah, that's my idea, because
you can't. You can't grant intellectual property or a patent
(02:24):
to my sister or wife or daughter.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, remember in the Widow's episode we talked about coverture,
which was a woman was either essentially an extension of
her father while she lived with her parents or her
husband after she got married and could not she had
no property rights. If you have no property rights, you
can't own intellectual property, and therefore you can't have a
(02:49):
patent on anything, because that, by definition gives you intellectual property.
And that was a huge deal for a while. In
addition to that, because women were just generally treated, they
also didn't have access to schooling or education, especially technical
education that would kind of help those who were already
inventive by nature to actually like blossom.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, and what an incentive is there too? If you
know that you can't get a patent for something, it's
gonna dull your inspiration to go out and try and
invent something to begin with, because what's the point. I mean, sure,
there's a point to inventing things because you might make
the world better, But I think a lot of the
drive for invention is also to do with like money,
(03:34):
having something in your name and making money on it.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, But yeah, having something in your name
I think is a more sentimental way to put it,
for sure, But it does deter it, and I'm sure
that was part of the whole thing. I mean, at
the very least, women weren't seen as a group that needed,
that should be encouraged to pursue these kind of things,
if not actively discouraged, and some women face that. There
(03:56):
was actually I didn't know about this, but at the
Seneca Falls convey and then the suffrage movement that followed,
there were a couple of competing groups that were like,
we really need to put all of our time and
effort behind suffrage, like giving women the right to vote.
That needs to be our focus. We need to say,
laser focus on that, because that's important. That's the one
(04:18):
you think of when you think of the women's rights
movement of the nineteenth century. But there's a other group
economic feminists that were like, hey, you can have all
the voting rights you want in the world, but if
you don't have any means of being self sufficient, if
you need to be it, it doesn't add up to
a hill of beans. I think that was their slogan.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, there was a woman named Charlotte Smith who, like
you said, she was like, you know, if we want
to make real advances, then how about and she eventually
came to the invention part of it, but how about
property rights and intellectual property rights? And then starting in
eighteen seventy five, she really focused in on inventors and
invention and getting patents and getting the patent Office to
(05:02):
just simply recognize the fact that women were starting to
get patents. Was took nine years. It was in I
believe eighteen seventy nine she moved to DC started hassling
the Patent Office to say, hey, here's all I want.
Just give me a list of women inventors period. I
(05:24):
think it could inspire other women. We could publish it.
So if you could just put together that list, you
got the list, put it together for me, and they
said sure. Nine years later they came back with women
as well. I think she packaged it, but women inventors
to whom patents have been granted, And in eighteen eighty
eight she published it five hundred copies worth, and that
(05:48):
I'm sure was a big game changer as far as like, hey,
look it's happening, it's possible, you can do it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, And while that did kind of open up the
floodgates two women inventors seeing like I can do this,
there is like a path for me here to take
toward inventing. There were women who did have patents in
their name prior to this. It was just extremely rare.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Oh yeah, I mean, well there were how many were there?
Did it? I thought there was a list here?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Uh yeah, the only one that I've come across. I
never saw the list of women inventors to whom patents
have been granted, but I did see one. I think
the first American woman to earn a patent in her
name was named Mary Dixon keys Ki Ees.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, she was the first one about ninety years earlier.
But it supposedly took four clerks ten days to put
this list together, So you know, it was a great
thing that Charlotte Smith did. She had a vision that
this could be a game changer, and it seems like
it probably was.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah. She was like, you can't hide the truth any
longer with your Walrus mustaches and your arm guarters. Give
me that list, and they did.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So should we highlight some of these? These are pretty great?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:02):
All right, Well let's take a break after this first one,
maybe because I want I'm eager to talk about Marie
Van Britton Brown. She was awesome. She was born in
nineteen twenty two in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, an
African American woman who worked as a nurse and oftentimes
was working you know, late night shifts, coming and going
(07:23):
at odd hours. Her husband, Albert Brown, was an electronics technician.
He had odd hours of work too, So how that
shakes out is a lot of times Marie van Britton
Brown would be at home or come home late at night,
be a little worried, and you know, what was a
rough neighborhood at the time as to who may become
(07:45):
a knocking on her door. So she invented along with
her husband's help, but it ended up being kind of
the first closed circuit TV system and home security system
in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It was a bunch of different
systems that they put together to create this one complete
system pretty much out of the box. It was like
a complete security system. But they really had to work
with a lack of technology at the time, Like there
was no way to pan the video camera that the
(08:20):
whole thing was based on. So instead they had four
separate peopoles and you could raise or lower the camera
to the correct peopole depending on the height of the
person on the other side.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
I find that ingenius, great idea, I said, CCTV. So
there were television monitors. This camera fed into these monitors.
So the idea is that you didn't actually have to
go to the door. And even looking through a peepole
can be dangerous if someone knows you're just on the
other side of the door at that people, they can
(08:53):
get you.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
That's what it saysn't the patent application, that's what it said.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
So she had to a remote control that would let
her unlock the door from a distance away, and an
emergency button a distance away that would alert the police
or security in the apartment building. You had these four
peep holes, this sliding camera, and two way microphones, so
(09:18):
she could actually say, like who's you know, basically what
we have now with like ring doorbells and nest doorbells. Yeah,
she thought of this idea and her husband helped her
pull it off in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, and the idea of just how ubiquitous this has become.
This is like such a commonplace everyday thing now is
kind of a testament to what she invented because at
the time This was completely revolutionary. There was nothing like
this at the time, and she and her husband just
invented it from whole cloth. And I think they got
(09:52):
patent number three million, four hundred and eighty two thousand
and thirty seven. That was the US patent for their
closed circuit television security system.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
That's right. She also got an award from the National
Scientist Committee. She was recognized in The Times, the paper
of record. Sadly she passed away in nineteen ninety nine
at the age of seventy six. But it was such
a good idea that thirty two subsequent patent applications referenced
her original invention and their patent application. So, in other words,
(10:24):
great idea.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yes, indeed, you want to take that break, now, let's
do it. Okay, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
And in things.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Job in job, okay, chuck. So up next, we're going
(11:04):
to talk about a woman named Josephine Cochrane who kind
of bucked the trend of inventors and was a wealthy
socialite and supposedly the origin of her invention, the dishwasher,
the first actual useful dishwasher, came from dismay that her
(11:25):
servants washing her fine china that had been in her
family since the seventeenth century, that it was getting chipped,
and so at first she's like, give me that, I'll
do this, And then she was like, oh, doing the
dishes really sucks. There's got to be a better way.
And she put it off to the side for a while.
But then her husband died and left her and her
family in debt, and she decided to bring that idea
(11:48):
off of the shelf and invent her way out of debt.
And that's exactly what she did.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, for sure, you mentioned this was the first sort
of really practical usable dishwasher. There had been other attempts,
but you know, there litle clunky literally clunky. They were
the kind of thing where like you turn a crank
on the side and the dishes are jumbling around. Yeah,
well they would break and chip. And she was like, well, listen,
this is my original problem is that I have chip
(12:13):
dishes here, So why don't we do something mechanical that
you don't crank and move those dishes around. She very smartly,
at least for her, because she was making something for herself.
She measured her dishes and made sure that each compartment
fit the dishes very well and stayed in place. Like
(12:34):
I said, I don't know that she had the idea
that this is going to be a big mass marketed product.
Yet she's just trying to solve her problem. And she
had a motor powered wheel above a boiler spring soapy
water on dishes and got it patent on December twenty eighth,
eighteen eighty six.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yes, kids, you just imagine the person who came over
that hand crank dishwasher demonstrating it, and you can just
hear all the dish yeah, breaking inside, frank in it.
They're like, I'm sure they're fine in there. This is
what it sounds like when they're being washed.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
It rarely happens that way.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
So the eighteen ninety three World's Fair in Chicago, the
White City where the Devil in the White City is set,
that was a huge kind of like introduction of women
inventors in the United States to the world, and Josephine
Cochrane was one of them. She debuted her dishwasher at
the eighteen ninety three World's Fair and actually won a
(13:30):
World's Fair award. So I abbreviated this and I don't
remember exactly how it goes. But it has to do
with mechanical construction, durability and adapted to its line of work.
Oh great, so she knocked out all four of those boxes. Or,
(13:51):
to put briefly, best mech construct durable and adapt to
its line of work.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
End quote looks strange on a trophy. Hey, she earned it.
She earned it, and this little company that she established
ended up becoming Kitchen Aid. It was after she died
in nineteen thirteen. But hey, pretty big feather in the
old burial cap. I guess hotels and restaurants were the
(14:20):
first ones to use it because even though it was
super handy as a thing, houses didn't have hot water
heaters that could kind of sustain that level of output
at the time, so you had to have these big
giant bowlers and boilers and hotels and stuff that could
handle that. But her time would come by the nineteen
fifties when those hot water heaters got better. The home
(14:44):
dishwasher became a pretty great thing. And I think anyone
whoever has lived in a small apartment or his apartment
searching a dishwasher was always very high at the top
of my list because she didn't always get them.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, so hats off Josephine Cochrane.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
You know you gotta sometimes you run a vacation house.
They got two of those things.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Oh yeah, like two dishwashers, like dish washers.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, if you were in like a house on the
beach where you know, they want those houses to sleep
like twenty people.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh I gotcha.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Sure, they'll have like sometimes two stoves, two dishwashers, or
two sets of washers and dryers and stuff. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
We got one of those ones that's like one full
size washer but broken into two drawers so you can
run your dish dishwasher like pretty frequently.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
It works really well.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
I like them too, And we can thank Josephine Cochrane
for that. It's originated that in a pretty direct way.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
I wonder who came up with the drawer style.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I don't know. I just don't know. Yeah, do you
want me to look it up?
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No, that's okay, okay, kid, because we're gonna talk about diapers,
right yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
We're gonna move on to an inventor named Marion Donovan
who has a bunch of inventions to her name, but
the one that she's most famous for is disposable diapers.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
That's right. You know. A lot of times, necessity is
a mother of invention. And at the time Mary and
Donovan was working at home as a homemaker. And this
is after graduating from college and working for Vogue magazine
and after inventing things even as a kid. I think
(16:29):
in elementary school she came up with a toothpowder that
improved dntal hygiene. So Mary and Donovan just had one
of those inventor's brains. But while she was working as
a mom and at home, she was putting her little
babies down right after she changed that diaper for a
little nappy time, and that baby would just be so
(16:50):
happy they would peel over the place. And with those
cloth diapers at the time that you safety pin, that
would leak out onto the bed sheets. So now she's
got a baby or poopy baby, and you've got a
wet or poopy diaper, and then you have wet or
poopy sheets, and that is no good. And she said,
there's got to be a better way.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, And at the time, there were something called rubber
pants already, which is like a diaper made of really
thick material that didn't breathe, so you would just pee yourself,
and your neglectful parent would leave you to wallow in
your own urine and get diaper rash because that stuff
wouldn't leak out.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
I think they went over the diaper. It's like a
little pair of pants exactly. Yeah, but it would keep
it would prevent those leaks from happening. But that didn't
mean you didn't still pee yourself, so you would get
diaper rash as a result.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah. I'd probably cut off some circulation to the calf
and the waistline.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah, and then they would take you out in one
of those death strollers that we were raised in, and
you'd spend some time on the jungle gym. That was
also related to death because not only were there like
rusty edges, there were also hornets nests in the end
of every single one of those.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
That's right, So all you have to do is not
vibrate those things in your Fine, this onen't just going
to stay in place.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, if you just hang from the monkey bars without moving.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Dead still like a yet, you'll be fine. So she
said nuts to all this, ran and grabbed a shower curtain.
Cut it. Actually two size and was like, this isn't
just a big pair of rubber pants, and sewed it
on the outside of the cloth diaper, added some snaps
so you didn't need those safety pins, and all of
(18:35):
a sudden you had your cloth diaper that could fit
inside of a fitted shower curtain.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Basically, yeah, I think that's what she started out with,
was a shower curtain, but she landed ultimately on something
like nylon parachute material. It could generally keep leaks in,
but it was much more breathable and so this is
not necessarily the dispoper. This is the thing that led
to the disposable diaper. She marketed and called it boaters.
(19:06):
To her, they looked like boats. I looked at these things.
I did not see it, but that's what they were called.
It's a catchy, cute little name. And what it was
was like an improved rubber pants or rubber like diaper cover,
because you still use the cloth diaper in there, but
it would prevent leaks, but it was breathable enough that
it didn't cause diaper rash. So this called the attention
(19:28):
to a lot of people. Apparently it started being sold
at sax Fifth Avenue in nineteen forty nine, and the
Kiko Corporation came and knocking and said, we'll give you
one million dollars for this idea. And Marion just laughed
all the way to the bank.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, because she said, you know what, that's nineteen forty nine,
and these two dopes podcast about me in twenty twenty
four h ask me like thirteen million bucks.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, which is pretty sweet for Yeah, a woman who
just invented something out of necessity.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, I mean it meant she was ra immediately. She
got a patent for those boaters nineteen fifty one, and
then went to work on what you were talking about,
the disposable paper diaper, and did that and it worked
pretty well, but it wasn't a big commercial success because
the diaper industry didn't get behind it. They were like, hey,
(20:20):
you know, this is pretty good, but all that really
is doing is keeping you from having to wash cloth
diapers over and over, and we don't see the value
in that.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Right, It's an unnecessary convenience.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Nih get back to work exactly.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
It took ten years then finally Procter and Gamble saw
the usefulness in this and came up with Pampers and
the landfills of the world just shuddered in expectation.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Some other I said that Mary and Donovan also invented
some other stuff too. She invented something called the Zippity
do you very cool? Very cool? So it's like an
elastic extension that you put onto a zipper so that
you can zip your own dress much more easily. Yeah,
there's also something called the Big hang Up.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
It came out in the late sixties or seventies, based
on the font used in the advertisement. But it essentially
took your clothes and turned them the opposite way that
you would normally hang them from a hanger. So you
would hang it at like a rack from the what
is the thing that you hang the hangers on in
(21:24):
a closet, the rail, the pole, rod, the rod, thank you,
And you would take those clothes and turn them the
opposite way so you could fit more clothes front to
back and side to side. It was an enormous space
saving measure.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Yeah, I mean it was basically a grid, like a
metal grid, and you could hang anything. So it used
paper or not paper clips, clothes pins, right, so you
could hang your belts, you could hang a hat, you
could hang a pair of boots, You could hang whatever
you wanted, what else, and more lots of things. But
the point is this one grid could hold like four
pair of pants, two pair of boots, seven belts.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
You sure you can hold a pair of boots up
with some clothes pins, That's what he had said, all right,
They must have been lightweight boots back then. Like maybe
they're talking about like Aladdin shoes.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, well, I think it speaks to the clothespins too.
Sure they're not like these woke clothes bends these days.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
So one other thing about Mary and Donovan, if you
weren't already spitting with her enough. At forty one, she
went back to school and received a degree in architecture
from Yale and then used it to design her own
house in Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Amazing, agreed, Should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, I think it's time.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
All right, we're gonna come back and talk about grocery
sacks right after this and things jogging job. All right,
(23:08):
we promised talk of grocery sacks. And you might be thinking, well,
did someone invent the grocery sack? And was that person
a woman? And why is that a big deal? Because
it's just a bag. No, that's not what we're going
to tell you. We're going to tell you what a
historian named Henry Petrowski told you in an article called
the Evolution of the Grocery Bag. And a woman named
(23:29):
Margaret Knight, who was another one of these kids who
was inventing things from a very very preteen age.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, she got a job at twelve at a or
fabric factory, textile mill, that's what they call it, yeah,
cotton mill. And when you're using when you're weaving using
a loom in an industrial setting, there's these little torpedo,
heavy wooden torpedo things with the steel tip on the
(23:59):
end that you use to basically separate the fibers as
you're weaving. And the whole thing moves very fast, and
if you lose your grip on it, that thing that
is called a shuttle can go flying and injure your
neighbor at the next loom. Right. So Marion Knight got
a job at one of these mills, saw this, that
how dangerous this could be, and before she turned thirteen,
(24:22):
invented a way to prevent steel tip flying shuttles from
flying off of the loom and injuring somebody that became
distributed industry wide at all textile mills, that became like
a standard part of any loom. She wasn't even thirteen yet.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, also preteen. The age of twelve, she got a
patent for a device that automatically just stops an industrial
machine if something gets caught up in it. So I
mean that every industrial machine on the planet now stops.
When your arm gets caught or when something goes wrong,
something gets caught in the machinery, they all stop. And
(25:02):
that is because of Margaret Knight. Yep.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So we finally, after years and years of this of
coming up with great ideas and implementing them, she's like,
I just starting to look into patenting these things. And
she got a job ultimately at Columbia Paper Bag Company
in Springfield, Massachusetts, and this is where her greatest patent
came along. There were paper grocery sacks already, but they
(25:29):
were kind of envelope like they didn't do the job
very well. Like you know when you buy a greeting
card and they put it in that bag that doesn't
really do anything. It's just an envelope. It's like a
cover for your greeting card to go home with.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Okay, yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Sure, Okay, that's what grocery bags were, like paper grocery bags.
And she said, we can do way better than this.
If we just make a square bottom grocery sack, it'll
stand up on its own and as you put stuff
into it, the weight will be distributed and you can
carry so much more stuff.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, people were putting can goods in basically envelopes, like
total morons, Like total morons. She came along and not
only figured out that that was a good idea, figured
out how to do it. In eighteen seventy, she built
a wooden machine that would cut in, glue, fold and
glue these things and manufacture them. She was working on
(26:26):
a heavier duty or prototype made out of iron, and
some jerk comes along and bald face steals her idea.
Like he had seen this thing before. His name was
Charles Annon ann An, and he had seen it a
few months earlier, went to file a patent. She filed
a claim against him, a patent interference suit, and he
(26:47):
was like, there's no way that this lady came up
with this thing. And she came into court with just
reams of the most detailed blueprints and spelled out exactly
how and when she invented it, and they went, you're wrong,
and she's right, buddy, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That thieve and sob Charles Ann and I couldn't see
anything about what became of him aside from losing that
patent suit and something he should have gotten some sort
of come up, and he shouldn't have just been let
off the hook for, like you said, bald faced, stealing
an idea or an invention that shouldn't be unpunished, you know.
But I guess we'll have to go dig them up
(27:26):
and have a talking to you with them. That's the
best we can hope for at this time.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
We can besmirch his name, I guess.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I guess we kind of are, but we're not besmirching.
I think besmirching indicates a certain level of like exaggeration
or you know, Oh okay, that's just my interpretation. I
don't know if it's correct or not.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I've never read the definition, so you're probably right.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
So she won that patent claim and won of the
device the patent for the device in eighteen seventy one,
and went on to be awarded more than twenty patents
in her lifetime.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Amazing again.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Yeah, way to go, Margaret night boo, Charles Ann and booooooo.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
So let's move on to the windshield wiper because this
is a pretty fun one. It was a woman from Alabama.
Her name was Mary Anderson born in eighteen sixty six,
a long long time ago, long before the car came along.
She was visiting New York City and she was on
the I guess they were street cars, and she's like,
(28:29):
these guys are driving around in rain and snow with
their head out the side window because they can't see.
They looked like a Sventura pet detective and.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
They would have to stop and get out and wipe
the snow off of the trolley windshield like every so often.
That was part of the trip, That was part of
driving a trolley at the time. And she said, there
has to be a better way. So she took this
experience back to Alabama and she invented the first windshield wiper. Essentially.
(29:01):
It was pretty clever as a matter of fact.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, she said, this thing wipe's windshields. I just don't
know what to call it.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So there was a spindle, right, so like kind of
like a spool, but with a point on it sticking
out of the windshield and attached to it was an
arm with a squeegee on it, and the other side
of the spindle that went into the car was attached
to a cord that had a handle in the car,
and when you pulled the handle, it operated the spring
mechanism that made that windshield wiper go back and forth
(29:33):
and it would reset and then the next time you
needed to clear off your windshields, you just pulled it.
No stopping, no getting out, no sticking your head out
of the car, like ace Ventura. It could all be
done within the car, and in I think very short order.
Cadillac I think ten years after she got the patent
for this, Cadillac started making wind shild wiper standard on
(29:54):
their cars starting in nineteen twenty two. So that was
all Mary Anderson.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Yeah, absolutely, it was more like twenty years, but still
it was the first. It was the first thing to
roll off the line. Is something you didn't have to
ask for. What do you call those options?
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah, it wasn't an option, it was standard. That's nineteen
years later. Uh.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
And she also would go on to build and manage
an apartment building in Birmingham, made some good money doing that,
and said, I'm going to California, And she went out
to Fresno and operated a cattle ranch at a vineyard, yes,
in her later years.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Unfortunately, though, on the way out there, she got a
punch in the nose and it started to flow. She
thought for a second that she might be sinking, but
she made it out. Okay, Oh man, it's on the
tip of my tongue.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Uh, led up one. Okay. It was one of those.
It was like it was rattling in my head and
I heard it and I heard it. Oh God, that's
frustrating when those never come, you know, I'm glad that
it came. Then I just saw this, uh this weather
person who does the weather on the news. Sure, and
I guess is a Pearl Jam fan and inserts Pearl
(31:11):
Jam lyrics into his weather report. Oh yeah, on the
rag it was pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
What news national?
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Local? I think it was a local news. I didn't
catch the city. I mean maybe Seattle.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Oh gotcha. So you saw this on like like the internet.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah, I was on the internet. I wasn't just
watching the news.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I didn't know if you were like talking about in
Atlanta news person, I'm like, why aren't you telling everybody who.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
No, no, no, no, I don't. As we know, I
don't watch the local news. But what I do enjoy
occasionally on tour is watching local news wherever I am,
if it happens to be on Sure, I don't seek
it out, but it's kind of fun when you hear about.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Car work going on nearby.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Exactly a car rick in Boston. Very fascinating, right, everyone
was okay.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Though, That's good. That's usually how it pans out on
the news.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Can we talk about car heaters?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, Chuck, I think this might be the last one, right,
I think? So, okay, Well, let's talk car heaters because
Margaret Wilcox Margaret A. Wilcox, my apologies, invented the car
heater as you know it today, the car heater decades
before there was such a thing as cars. W Yeah,
(32:24):
she invented the car heater for railway cars. Because when
she came along and reached I think her late twenties
has sort of been the eighteen fifties eighteen sixties, rail
travel was still pretty no frills for most people. Like
you see that one railcar that the millionaire has, and
it's like all outfitted and beautiful, like velvet and there's
(32:45):
oil lamps and everything. Most people's experience was nothing like that.
And in fact, especially during cold like cold months and
cold climates, you would be freezing in the railway car.
And Margaret Wilcox went stood up and said, enough enough
of being cold. Let's get warm everybody. And they said,
invent it, Margaret, and she said I will, I'll be
(33:07):
right back.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
They said, what is warm? Even we forgot this is
in Chicago, So you know, she had plenty of experience
in the cold.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I cannot imagine how cold it was.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Oh man, I mean it's like now, but maybe colder.
With no break, no heat, you just stayed cold.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah. I mean people's roofs collapse in Chicago in the
winter because it gets so snowy, and that would indicate
it gets pretty cold.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah. Absolutely. So she's like, hold on a minute, I
know that they're shoveling coal up there. Those guys are
sweating up there in the engine room where freezing er
took us off back here? What do we gotta do
to get some of that heat back here? And shockingly,
no one had ever thought of that the fact that
there was heat on board that train in Spain, and
(34:01):
all you had to do was send it back to
the what do you call them passenger cars.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, so that's essentially what she did. She figured out
how to pipe engine heat back to the passengers. There
were some problems with this invention the train car heater.
One was there was no way whatsoever to regulate this heat.
I mean, I imagine you could open the windows when
you needed to, but it would just get hotter and
(34:28):
hotter and hotter in the rail car. And that was
kind of a problem, but I think it was still
preferable to the cold.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Yeah, and now is where I introduce you to my
first car as a sixteen year old. Talked about it
before nineteen sixty eight, Volkswagen Beatle. Sure, and if you
ever run those old volkswagens, you know they had heat
that I like to refer to as the ankle burners.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
I remember that.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Same concept as Margaret Wilcox's heat idea. H those Oldvw's
would just pump heat straight from that rear engine out
these little vents on the floorboard right by your ankles.
And there was at least in the sixty eight that
I had. There was no way of regulating it. I
think at a seventy five later on that had like
a little lever that you could, you know, bring in
(35:14):
a little bit of the cool air too.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It just opened the passenger door.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Yeah exactly. But I had a hole in my floorboard too,
so that up that.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, I'm sure you said that, and I'm sure when
you've told me that before, I told you that my
dad had a hole in his floorboard of his Malibu
when we were kids.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
So right, less just sit there and watch the world
go by under your face, right.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
So, Uh. Margaret Wilcox's idea was implemented in train cars
more importantly when automobile engineers came along and started inclosing cars,
because you know, the first cars were all open, there
was no roof. Yeah, as they started doing close them,
they're like, we could control the climate in here. We
need some sort of climate control mechanism. And they looked
around and they found Margaret Wilcox's patent for transmitting engine
(35:59):
heat to the passenger compartment. And over time they kind
of refined it and it got more and more advanced
to where now there's hot coolant that's heated by the
engine that transfers that heat to the cabin air when
you turn the heat on. Even more amazingly, you can
you can adjust the heat the temperature by letting in
(36:22):
colder outside air without even opening your windows.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
That's right, And she got a patent for this thing.
Eighteen ninety three. She received a patent. Obviously, there were
women were able to get patents by that point, and
she was on a pretty short list.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
At least one hundred.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Was there a hundred? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Remember one hundred women? Who had the list of one
hundred women who were inventors that had patents that the Patent.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Office created, and it called one hundred women.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
I guess not. No, you're right, I wonder what the
list was.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
I gotta get that list.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
I mean, it had to be decent size. It took
four clerks ten days to compile the list.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
But they had to go through all the patents period though,
to get that list. So yeah, yeah, who knows, I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Well, anyway, she was on that list eventually, that's right.
Or actually that's not even true either. The list came
out a couple of years before she got her patent,
five years before, so it's completely moot. But there is
one other mention about her too that I love. She
had some other ideas that she patented, unfortunately not in
(37:34):
her name, because this was before women could have had
property rights for a combination clothes dishwasher.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know if.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
It's the same time. Maybe the same time. If so,
there's really gross. Yeah, but it's still also very clever.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, Like, you don't want your you don't want your
champagne glass being watched next to your bloomers.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
No, especially if they're so because you drank too much champagne.
Oh gosh, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (38:06):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Are you sure?
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Okay, Well, since Chuck affirmed that he has nothing else,
I think everybody, it's time for listener man, I'm.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Gonna call this misunderstanding from episode titles. Okay, And I
should say that we had a wonderful young woman in
maybe DC. I think it was DC that said that
she was a bird enthusiast and that she was all
excited about the Cranes episode and then realized it was
(38:38):
construction Cranes. That's why we've titled things like our Nirvana episode.
I think it was Nirvana, not the band sure, so
we do stuff like that. We try to be clear,
but not always.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Sometimes we're purposely obtuse.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, because like you might want the bird crane and
then be delightfully surprised or disappointed, right exactly. Hey guys,
I'm in and out, but og all the time. Stuff
you should know has stayed with me as a weekly
listen ever since I heard the Jellyfish app. I consider
myself well versed in the English language and American pop culture,
but every now and then, titles of the episode set
(39:13):
me up for quite the surprise. I should probably read
the descriptions for the episodes, yes, but I'm going to
listen regardless of what's the point. For example, Hobo Signs,
I thought it was about handwritten signs that hitchhikers make,
or someone saying will work for food, or the end
is messed what I think it was probably supposed to
(39:35):
be the end is near.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Yeah, and it was some weird a auto correct.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
I like the end is mess though, IM gont it?
That should be a T shirt? Sure, I like that
to my delight as a ux designer. It was about
iconography and communication even better than those cardboard signs. The
last episode about conductors. I know what's coming. I thought
it was about train conductors, and the tagline what the
heck is going on there was referring to their mindset
(40:02):
when they're patrolling in the aisle and train station, like
an American equivalent of the British what's all this? Then?
I was also hoping that it was not about electric
conductors because I really wanted a train episode. Turned out
I was wrong once. Thanks for all the great knowledge
that is from Morton Laggerud in Norway.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Great name, Morton, Thank you for listening to us all
these years. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Have we done one on just trains?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
I don't think so. No, that seems like a big,
big one.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Yeah that's a big asmr sid too.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Oh sorry everybody hopefully Mesiphonia side.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, well we could try to do one on train.
Sometimes we just have to figure out how to condense it.
Can't get into electric trains, I'll tell you that, by God,
no way. Well, if you want to be like Morton
and let us know some hilariousness that comes from our
titles or something we said, or just something you thought of.
We love hearing stuff like that, you can send it
to us in an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
(41:09):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just gonna play
a rousing version of Yankee to do Old Landy or
something like that in the background of this stirring episode.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
You got a.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Picklo, No, I'm just gonna go like this. I'll record
a track of do Do Do Do Do Do Do
Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do
Do Do Do and we'll play that on a loop
underneath us talking. Jerry said she can do it with editning.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm sure this would be an all time great Okay.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
The reason I want to do that is because as
I was reading this, I was what's the word I'm
looking for? I'm toying with enthused. That's not it. That
sounds like the opposite of how I feel. It is inspiring,
but also like, it's just cool that there's this un Well,
in a way, it's not cool. It's cool to discover
(01:09):
this whole group, this whole cadre of inventors that just
are overlooked. That's the uncool part. They've been overlooked. For
so long. But there's a bunch of women inventors here
in America and around the world presumably, but we're just
talking about American ones today that really made some amazing contributions,
and especially at first for the first significant amount of time,
(01:31):
they really had an uphill battle to get their invention
like out there because of just how generally mistreated women were.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. Absolutely, here's a fairly horrifying stat because it was
not that long ago, but in the late twentieth century,
only about ten percent of all patents were awarded to
women and their inventions. And we're going to talk about
some of the reasons before we get going on highlighting
some of these great inventions and some of these great women.
But one reason is just a lot of times, if
(02:04):
you were a woman and you had an invention, you
had to file it at least the patent under your
husband's name, or your brother's or your father's name, or
any man in your life that was willing to sign
on the dotted line saying yeah, that's my idea, because
you can't. You can't grant intellectual property or a patent
(02:24):
to my sister or wife or daughter.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, remember in the Widow's episode we talked about coverture,
which was a woman was either essentially an extension of
her father while she lived with her parents or her
husband after she got married and could not she had
no property rights. If you have no property rights, you
can't own intellectual property, and therefore you can't have a
(02:49):
patent on anything, because that, by definition gives you intellectual property.
And that was a huge deal for a while. In
addition to that, because women were just generally treated, they
also didn't have access to schooling or education, especially technical
education that would kind of help those who were already
inventive by nature to actually like blossom.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, and what an incentive is there too? If you
know that you can't get a patent for something, it's
gonna dull your inspiration to go out and try and
invent something to begin with, because what's the point. I mean, sure,
there's a point to inventing things because you might make
the world better, But I think a lot of the
drive for invention is also to do with like money,
(03:34):
having something in your name and making money on it.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, But yeah, having something in your name
I think is a more sentimental way to put it,
for sure, But it does deter it, and I'm sure
that was part of the whole thing. I mean, at
the very least, women weren't seen as a group that needed,
that should be encouraged to pursue these kind of things,
if not actively discouraged, and some women face that. There
(03:56):
was actually I didn't know about this, but at the
Seneca Falls convey and then the suffrage movement that followed,
there were a couple of competing groups that were like,
we really need to put all of our time and
effort behind suffrage, like giving women the right to vote.
That needs to be our focus. We need to say,
laser focus on that, because that's important. That's the one
(04:18):
you think of when you think of the women's rights
movement of the nineteenth century. But there's a other group
economic feminists that were like, hey, you can have all
the voting rights you want in the world, but if
you don't have any means of being self sufficient, if
you need to be it, it doesn't add up to
a hill of beans. I think that was their slogan.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, there was a woman named Charlotte Smith who, like
you said, she was like, you know, if we want
to make real advances, then how about and she eventually
came to the invention part of it, but how about
property rights and intellectual property rights? And then starting in
eighteen seventy five, she really focused in on inventors and
invention and getting patents and getting the patent Office to
(05:02):
just simply recognize the fact that women were starting to
get patents. Was took nine years. It was in I
believe eighteen seventy nine she moved to DC started hassling
the Patent Office to say, hey, here's all I want.
Just give me a list of women inventors period. I
(05:24):
think it could inspire other women. We could publish it.
So if you could just put together that list, you
got the list, put it together for me, and they
said sure. Nine years later they came back with women
as well. I think she packaged it, but women inventors
to whom patents have been granted, And in eighteen eighty
eight she published it five hundred copies worth, and that
(05:48):
I'm sure was a big game changer as far as like, hey,
look it's happening, it's possible, you can do it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, And while that did kind of open up the
floodgates two women inventors seeing like I can do this,
there is like a path for me here to take
toward inventing. There were women who did have patents in
their name prior to this. It was just extremely rare.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Oh yeah, I mean, well there were how many were there?
Did it? I thought there was a list here?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Uh yeah, the only one that I've come across. I
never saw the list of women inventors to whom patents
have been granted, but I did see one. I think
the first American woman to earn a patent in her
name was named Mary Dixon keys Ki Ees.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, she was the first one about ninety years earlier.
But it supposedly took four clerks ten days to put
this list together, So you know, it was a great
thing that Charlotte Smith did. She had a vision that
this could be a game changer, and it seems like
it probably was.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah. She was like, you can't hide the truth any
longer with your Walrus mustaches and your arm guarters. Give
me that list, and they did.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So should we highlight some of these? These are pretty great?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:02):
All right, Well let's take a break after this first one,
maybe because I want I'm eager to talk about Marie
Van Britton Brown. She was awesome. She was born in
nineteen twenty two in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, an
African American woman who worked as a nurse and oftentimes
was working you know, late night shifts, coming and going
(07:23):
at odd hours. Her husband, Albert Brown, was an electronics technician.
He had odd hours of work too, So how that
shakes out is a lot of times Marie van Britton
Brown would be at home or come home late at night,
be a little worried, and you know, what was a
rough neighborhood at the time as to who may become
(07:45):
a knocking on her door. So she invented along with
her husband's help, but it ended up being kind of
the first closed circuit TV system and home security system
in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It was a bunch of different
systems that they put together to create this one complete
system pretty much out of the box. It was like
a complete security system. But they really had to work
with a lack of technology at the time, Like there
was no way to pan the video camera that the
(08:20):
whole thing was based on. So instead they had four
separate peopoles and you could raise or lower the camera
to the correct peopole depending on the height of the
person on the other side.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
I find that ingenius, great idea, I said, CCTV. So
there were television monitors. This camera fed into these monitors.
So the idea is that you didn't actually have to
go to the door. And even looking through a peepole
can be dangerous if someone knows you're just on the
other side of the door at that people, they can
(08:53):
get you.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
That's what it saysn't the patent application, that's what it said.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
So she had to a remote control that would let
her unlock the door from a distance away, and an
emergency button a distance away that would alert the police
or security in the apartment building. You had these four
peep holes, this sliding camera, and two way microphones, so
(09:18):
she could actually say, like who's you know, basically what
we have now with like ring doorbells and nest doorbells. Yeah,
she thought of this idea and her husband helped her
pull it off in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, and the idea of just how ubiquitous this has become.
This is like such a commonplace everyday thing now is
kind of a testament to what she invented because at
the time This was completely revolutionary. There was nothing like
this at the time, and she and her husband just
invented it from whole cloth. And I think they got
(09:52):
patent number three million, four hundred and eighty two thousand
and thirty seven. That was the US patent for their
closed circuit television security system.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
That's right. She also got an award from the National
Scientist Committee. She was recognized in The Times, the paper
of record. Sadly she passed away in nineteen ninety nine
at the age of seventy six. But it was such
a good idea that thirty two subsequent patent applications referenced
her original invention and their patent application. So, in other words,
(10:24):
great idea.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yes, indeed, you want to take that break, now, let's
do it. Okay, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
And in things.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Job in job, okay, chuck. So up next, we're going
(11:04):
to talk about a woman named Josephine Cochrane who kind
of bucked the trend of inventors and was a wealthy
socialite and supposedly the origin of her invention, the dishwasher,
the first actual useful dishwasher, came from dismay that her
(11:25):
servants washing her fine china that had been in her
family since the seventeenth century, that it was getting chipped,
and so at first she's like, give me that, I'll
do this, And then she was like, oh, doing the
dishes really sucks. There's got to be a better way.
And she put it off to the side for a while.
But then her husband died and left her and her
family in debt, and she decided to bring that idea
(11:48):
off of the shelf and invent her way out of debt.
And that's exactly what she did.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, for sure, you mentioned this was the first sort
of really practical usable dishwasher. There had been other attempts,
but you know, there litle clunky literally clunky. They were
the kind of thing where like you turn a crank
on the side and the dishes are jumbling around. Yeah,
well they would break and chip. And she was like, well, listen,
this is my original problem is that I have chip
(12:13):
dishes here, So why don't we do something mechanical that
you don't crank and move those dishes around. She very smartly,
at least for her, because she was making something for herself.
She measured her dishes and made sure that each compartment
fit the dishes very well and stayed in place. Like
(12:34):
I said, I don't know that she had the idea
that this is going to be a big mass marketed product.
Yet she's just trying to solve her problem. And she
had a motor powered wheel above a boiler spring soapy
water on dishes and got it patent on December twenty eighth,
eighteen eighty six.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yes, kids, you just imagine the person who came over
that hand crank dishwasher demonstrating it, and you can just
hear all the dish yeah, breaking inside, frank in it.
They're like, I'm sure they're fine in there. This is
what it sounds like when they're being washed.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
It rarely happens that way.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
So the eighteen ninety three World's Fair in Chicago, the
White City where the Devil in the White City is set,
that was a huge kind of like introduction of women
inventors in the United States to the world, and Josephine
Cochrane was one of them. She debuted her dishwasher at
the eighteen ninety three World's Fair and actually won a
(13:30):
World's Fair award. So I abbreviated this and I don't
remember exactly how it goes. But it has to do
with mechanical construction, durability and adapted to its line of work.
Oh great, so she knocked out all four of those boxes. Or,
(13:51):
to put briefly, best mech construct durable and adapt to
its line of work.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
End quote looks strange on a trophy. Hey, she earned it.
She earned it, and this little company that she established
ended up becoming Kitchen Aid. It was after she died
in nineteen thirteen. But hey, pretty big feather in the
old burial cap. I guess hotels and restaurants were the
(14:20):
first ones to use it because even though it was
super handy as a thing, houses didn't have hot water
heaters that could kind of sustain that level of output
at the time, so you had to have these big
giant bowlers and boilers and hotels and stuff that could
handle that. But her time would come by the nineteen
fifties when those hot water heaters got better. The home
(14:44):
dishwasher became a pretty great thing. And I think anyone
whoever has lived in a small apartment or his apartment
searching a dishwasher was always very high at the top
of my list because she didn't always get them.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, so hats off Josephine Cochrane.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
You know you gotta sometimes you run a vacation house.
They got two of those things.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Oh yeah, like two dishwashers, like dish washers.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, if you were in like a house on the
beach where you know, they want those houses to sleep
like twenty people.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh I gotcha.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Sure, they'll have like sometimes two stoves, two dishwashers, or
two sets of washers and dryers and stuff. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
We got one of those ones that's like one full
size washer but broken into two drawers so you can
run your dish dishwasher like pretty frequently.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
It works really well.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
I like them too, And we can thank Josephine Cochrane
for that. It's originated that in a pretty direct way.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
I wonder who came up with the drawer style.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I don't know. I just don't know. Yeah, do you
want me to look it up?
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No, that's okay, okay, kid, because we're gonna talk about diapers,
right yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
We're gonna move on to an inventor named Marion Donovan
who has a bunch of inventions to her name, but
the one that she's most famous for is disposable diapers.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
That's right. You know. A lot of times, necessity is
a mother of invention. And at the time Mary and
Donovan was working at home as a homemaker. And this
is after graduating from college and working for Vogue magazine
and after inventing things even as a kid. I think
(16:29):
in elementary school she came up with a toothpowder that
improved dntal hygiene. So Mary and Donovan just had one
of those inventor's brains. But while she was working as
a mom and at home, she was putting her little
babies down right after she changed that diaper for a
little nappy time, and that baby would just be so
(16:50):
happy they would peel over the place. And with those
cloth diapers at the time that you safety pin, that
would leak out onto the bed sheets. So now she's
got a baby or poopy baby, and you've got a
wet or poopy diaper, and then you have wet or
poopy sheets, and that is no good. And she said,
there's got to be a better way.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, And at the time, there were something called rubber
pants already, which is like a diaper made of really
thick material that didn't breathe, so you would just pee yourself,
and your neglectful parent would leave you to wallow in
your own urine and get diaper rash because that stuff
wouldn't leak out.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
I think they went over the diaper. It's like a
little pair of pants exactly. Yeah, but it would keep
it would prevent those leaks from happening. But that didn't
mean you didn't still pee yourself, so you would get
diaper rash as a result.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah. I'd probably cut off some circulation to the calf
and the waistline.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah, and then they would take you out in one
of those death strollers that we were raised in, and
you'd spend some time on the jungle gym. That was
also related to death because not only were there like
rusty edges, there were also hornets nests in the end
of every single one of those.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
That's right, So all you have to do is not
vibrate those things in your Fine, this onen't just going
to stay in place.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, if you just hang from the monkey bars without moving.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Dead still like a yet, you'll be fine. So she
said nuts to all this, ran and grabbed a shower curtain.
Cut it. Actually two size and was like, this isn't
just a big pair of rubber pants, and sewed it
on the outside of the cloth diaper, added some snaps
so you didn't need those safety pins, and all of
(18:35):
a sudden you had your cloth diaper that could fit
inside of a fitted shower curtain.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Basically, yeah, I think that's what she started out with,
was a shower curtain, but she landed ultimately on something
like nylon parachute material. It could generally keep leaks in,
but it was much more breathable and so this is
not necessarily the dispoper. This is the thing that led
to the disposable diaper. She marketed and called it boaters.
(19:06):
To her, they looked like boats. I looked at these things.
I did not see it, but that's what they were called.
It's a catchy, cute little name. And what it was
was like an improved rubber pants or rubber like diaper cover,
because you still use the cloth diaper in there, but
it would prevent leaks, but it was breathable enough that
it didn't cause diaper rash. So this called the attention
(19:28):
to a lot of people. Apparently it started being sold
at sax Fifth Avenue in nineteen forty nine, and the
Kiko Corporation came and knocking and said, we'll give you
one million dollars for this idea. And Marion just laughed
all the way to the bank.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, because she said, you know what, that's nineteen forty nine,
and these two dopes podcast about me in twenty twenty
four h ask me like thirteen million bucks.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, which is pretty sweet for Yeah, a woman who
just invented something out of necessity.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, I mean it meant she was ra immediately. She
got a patent for those boaters nineteen fifty one, and
then went to work on what you were talking about,
the disposable paper diaper, and did that and it worked
pretty well, but it wasn't a big commercial success because
the diaper industry didn't get behind it. They were like, hey,
(20:20):
you know, this is pretty good, but all that really
is doing is keeping you from having to wash cloth
diapers over and over, and we don't see the value
in that.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Right, It's an unnecessary convenience.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Nih get back to work exactly.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
It took ten years then finally Procter and Gamble saw
the usefulness in this and came up with Pampers and
the landfills of the world just shuddered in expectation.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Some other I said that Mary and Donovan also invented
some other stuff too. She invented something called the Zippity
do you very cool? Very cool? So it's like an
elastic extension that you put onto a zipper so that
you can zip your own dress much more easily. Yeah,
there's also something called the Big hang Up.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
It came out in the late sixties or seventies, based
on the font used in the advertisement. But it essentially
took your clothes and turned them the opposite way that
you would normally hang them from a hanger. So you
would hang it at like a rack from the what
is the thing that you hang the hangers on in
(21:24):
a closet, the rail, the pole, rod, the rod, thank you,
And you would take those clothes and turn them the
opposite way so you could fit more clothes front to
back and side to side. It was an enormous space
saving measure.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Yeah, I mean it was basically a grid, like a
metal grid, and you could hang anything. So it used
paper or not paper clips, clothes pins, right, so you
could hang your belts, you could hang a hat, you
could hang a pair of boots, You could hang whatever
you wanted, what else, and more lots of things. But
the point is this one grid could hold like four
pair of pants, two pair of boots, seven belts.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
You sure you can hold a pair of boots up
with some clothes pins, That's what he had said, all right,
They must have been lightweight boots back then. Like maybe
they're talking about like Aladdin shoes.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, well, I think it speaks to the clothespins too.
Sure they're not like these woke clothes bends these days.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
So one other thing about Mary and Donovan, if you
weren't already spitting with her enough. At forty one, she
went back to school and received a degree in architecture
from Yale and then used it to design her own
house in Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Amazing, agreed, Should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, I think it's time.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
All right, we're gonna come back and talk about grocery
sacks right after this and things jogging job. All right,
(23:08):
we promised talk of grocery sacks. And you might be thinking, well,
did someone invent the grocery sack? And was that person
a woman? And why is that a big deal? Because
it's just a bag. No, that's not what we're going
to tell you. We're going to tell you what a
historian named Henry Petrowski told you in an article called
the Evolution of the Grocery Bag. And a woman named
(23:29):
Margaret Knight, who was another one of these kids who
was inventing things from a very very preteen age.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, she got a job at twelve at a or
fabric factory, textile mill, that's what they call it, yeah,
cotton mill. And when you're using when you're weaving using
a loom in an industrial setting, there's these little torpedo,
heavy wooden torpedo things with the steel tip on the
(23:59):
end that you use to basically separate the fibers as
you're weaving. And the whole thing moves very fast, and
if you lose your grip on it, that thing that
is called a shuttle can go flying and injure your
neighbor at the next loom. Right. So Marion Knight got
a job at one of these mills, saw this, that
how dangerous this could be, and before she turned thirteen,
(24:22):
invented a way to prevent steel tip flying shuttles from
flying off of the loom and injuring somebody that became
distributed industry wide at all textile mills, that became like
a standard part of any loom. She wasn't even thirteen yet.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, also preteen. The age of twelve, she got a
patent for a device that automatically just stops an industrial
machine if something gets caught up in it. So I
mean that every industrial machine on the planet now stops.
When your arm gets caught or when something goes wrong,
something gets caught in the machinery, they all stop. And
(25:02):
that is because of Margaret Knight. Yep.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So we finally, after years and years of this of
coming up with great ideas and implementing them, she's like,
I just starting to look into patenting these things. And
she got a job ultimately at Columbia Paper Bag Company
in Springfield, Massachusetts, and this is where her greatest patent
came along. There were paper grocery sacks already, but they
(25:29):
were kind of envelope like they didn't do the job
very well. Like you know when you buy a greeting
card and they put it in that bag that doesn't
really do anything. It's just an envelope. It's like a
cover for your greeting card to go home with.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Okay, yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Sure, Okay, that's what grocery bags were, like paper grocery bags.
And she said, we can do way better than this.
If we just make a square bottom grocery sack, it'll
stand up on its own and as you put stuff
into it, the weight will be distributed and you can
carry so much more stuff.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, people were putting can goods in basically envelopes, like
total morons, Like total morons. She came along and not
only figured out that that was a good idea, figured
out how to do it. In eighteen seventy, she built
a wooden machine that would cut in, glue, fold and
glue these things and manufacture them. She was working on
(26:26):
a heavier duty or prototype made out of iron, and
some jerk comes along and bald face steals her idea.
Like he had seen this thing before. His name was
Charles Annon ann An, and he had seen it a
few months earlier, went to file a patent. She filed
a claim against him, a patent interference suit, and he
(26:47):
was like, there's no way that this lady came up
with this thing. And she came into court with just
reams of the most detailed blueprints and spelled out exactly
how and when she invented it, and they went, you're wrong,
and she's right, buddy, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That thieve and sob Charles Ann and I couldn't see
anything about what became of him aside from losing that
patent suit and something he should have gotten some sort
of come up, and he shouldn't have just been let
off the hook for, like you said, bald faced, stealing
an idea or an invention that shouldn't be unpunished, you know.
But I guess we'll have to go dig them up
(27:26):
and have a talking to you with them. That's the
best we can hope for at this time.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
We can besmirch his name, I guess.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I guess we kind of are, but we're not besmirching.
I think besmirching indicates a certain level of like exaggeration
or you know, Oh okay, that's just my interpretation. I
don't know if it's correct or not.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I've never read the definition, so you're probably right.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
So she won that patent claim and won of the
device the patent for the device in eighteen seventy one,
and went on to be awarded more than twenty patents
in her lifetime.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Amazing again.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Yeah, way to go, Margaret night boo, Charles Ann and booooooo.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
So let's move on to the windshield wiper because this
is a pretty fun one. It was a woman from Alabama.
Her name was Mary Anderson born in eighteen sixty six,
a long long time ago, long before the car came along.
She was visiting New York City and she was on
the I guess they were street cars, and she's like,
(28:29):
these guys are driving around in rain and snow with
their head out the side window because they can't see.
They looked like a Sventura pet detective and.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
They would have to stop and get out and wipe
the snow off of the trolley windshield like every so often.
That was part of the trip, That was part of
driving a trolley at the time. And she said, there
has to be a better way. So she took this
experience back to Alabama and she invented the first windshield wiper. Essentially.
(29:01):
It was pretty clever as a matter of fact.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, she said, this thing wipe's windshields. I just don't
know what to call it.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So there was a spindle, right, so like kind of
like a spool, but with a point on it sticking
out of the windshield and attached to it was an
arm with a squeegee on it, and the other side
of the spindle that went into the car was attached
to a cord that had a handle in the car,
and when you pulled the handle, it operated the spring
mechanism that made that windshield wiper go back and forth
(29:33):
and it would reset and then the next time you
needed to clear off your windshields, you just pulled it.
No stopping, no getting out, no sticking your head out
of the car, like ace Ventura. It could all be
done within the car, and in I think very short order.
Cadillac I think ten years after she got the patent
for this, Cadillac started making wind shild wiper standard on
(29:54):
their cars starting in nineteen twenty two. So that was
all Mary Anderson.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Yeah, absolutely, it was more like twenty years, but still
it was the first. It was the first thing to
roll off the line. Is something you didn't have to
ask for. What do you call those options?
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah, it wasn't an option, it was standard. That's nineteen
years later. Uh.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
And she also would go on to build and manage
an apartment building in Birmingham, made some good money doing that,
and said, I'm going to California, And she went out
to Fresno and operated a cattle ranch at a vineyard, yes,
in her later years.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Unfortunately, though, on the way out there, she got a
punch in the nose and it started to flow. She
thought for a second that she might be sinking, but
she made it out. Okay, Oh man, it's on the
tip of my tongue.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Uh, led up one. Okay. It was one of those.
It was like it was rattling in my head and
I heard it and I heard it. Oh God, that's
frustrating when those never come, you know, I'm glad that
it came. Then I just saw this, uh this weather
person who does the weather on the news. Sure, and
I guess is a Pearl Jam fan and inserts Pearl
(31:11):
Jam lyrics into his weather report. Oh yeah, on the
rag it was pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
What news national?
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Local? I think it was a local news. I didn't
catch the city. I mean maybe Seattle.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Oh gotcha. So you saw this on like like the internet.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah, I was on the internet. I wasn't just
watching the news.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I didn't know if you were like talking about in
Atlanta news person, I'm like, why aren't you telling everybody who.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
No, no, no, no, I don't. As we know, I
don't watch the local news. But what I do enjoy
occasionally on tour is watching local news wherever I am,
if it happens to be on Sure, I don't seek
it out, but it's kind of fun when you hear about.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Car work going on nearby.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Exactly a car rick in Boston. Very fascinating, right, everyone
was okay.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Though, That's good. That's usually how it pans out on
the news.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Can we talk about car heaters?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, Chuck, I think this might be the last one, right,
I think? So, okay, Well, let's talk car heaters because
Margaret Wilcox Margaret A. Wilcox, my apologies, invented the car
heater as you know it today, the car heater decades
before there was such a thing as cars. W Yeah,
(32:24):
she invented the car heater for railway cars. Because when
she came along and reached I think her late twenties
has sort of been the eighteen fifties eighteen sixties, rail
travel was still pretty no frills for most people. Like
you see that one railcar that the millionaire has, and
it's like all outfitted and beautiful, like velvet and there's
(32:45):
oil lamps and everything. Most people's experience was nothing like that.
And in fact, especially during cold like cold months and
cold climates, you would be freezing in the railway car.
And Margaret Wilcox went stood up and said, enough enough
of being cold. Let's get warm everybody. And they said,
invent it, Margaret, and she said I will, I'll be
(33:07):
right back.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
They said, what is warm? Even we forgot this is
in Chicago, So you know, she had plenty of experience
in the cold.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I cannot imagine how cold it was.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Oh man, I mean it's like now, but maybe colder.
With no break, no heat, you just stayed cold.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah. I mean people's roofs collapse in Chicago in the
winter because it gets so snowy, and that would indicate
it gets pretty cold.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah. Absolutely. So she's like, hold on a minute, I
know that they're shoveling coal up there. Those guys are
sweating up there in the engine room where freezing er
took us off back here? What do we gotta do
to get some of that heat back here? And shockingly,
no one had ever thought of that the fact that
there was heat on board that train in Spain, and
(34:01):
all you had to do was send it back to
the what do you call them passenger cars.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, so that's essentially what she did. She figured out
how to pipe engine heat back to the passengers. There
were some problems with this invention the train car heater.
One was there was no way whatsoever to regulate this heat.
I mean, I imagine you could open the windows when
you needed to, but it would just get hotter and
(34:28):
hotter and hotter in the rail car. And that was
kind of a problem, but I think it was still
preferable to the cold.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Yeah, and now is where I introduce you to my
first car as a sixteen year old. Talked about it
before nineteen sixty eight, Volkswagen Beatle. Sure, and if you
ever run those old volkswagens, you know they had heat
that I like to refer to as the ankle burners.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
I remember that.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Same concept as Margaret Wilcox's heat idea. H those Oldvw's
would just pump heat straight from that rear engine out
these little vents on the floorboard right by your ankles.
And there was at least in the sixty eight that
I had. There was no way of regulating it. I
think at a seventy five later on that had like
a little lever that you could, you know, bring in
(35:14):
a little bit of the cool air too.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It just opened the passenger door.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Yeah exactly. But I had a hole in my floorboard too,
so that up that.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, I'm sure you said that, and I'm sure when
you've told me that before, I told you that my
dad had a hole in his floorboard of his Malibu
when we were kids.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
So right, less just sit there and watch the world
go by under your face, right.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
So, Uh. Margaret Wilcox's idea was implemented in train cars
more importantly when automobile engineers came along and started inclosing cars,
because you know, the first cars were all open, there
was no roof. Yeah, as they started doing close them,
they're like, we could control the climate in here. We
need some sort of climate control mechanism. And they looked
around and they found Margaret Wilcox's patent for transmitting engine
(35:59):
heat to the passenger compartment. And over time they kind
of refined it and it got more and more advanced
to where now there's hot coolant that's heated by the
engine that transfers that heat to the cabin air when
you turn the heat on. Even more amazingly, you can
you can adjust the heat the temperature by letting in
(36:22):
colder outside air without even opening your windows.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
That's right, And she got a patent for this thing.
Eighteen ninety three. She received a patent. Obviously, there were
women were able to get patents by that point, and
she was on a pretty short list.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
At least one hundred.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Was there a hundred? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Remember one hundred women? Who had the list of one
hundred women who were inventors that had patents that the Patent.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Office created, and it called one hundred women.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
I guess not. No, you're right, I wonder what the
list was.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
I gotta get that list.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
I mean, it had to be decent size. It took
four clerks ten days to compile the list.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
But they had to go through all the patents period though,
to get that list. So yeah, yeah, who knows, I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Well, anyway, she was on that list eventually, that's right.
Or actually that's not even true either. The list came
out a couple of years before she got her patent,
five years before, so it's completely moot. But there is
one other mention about her too that I love. She
had some other ideas that she patented, unfortunately not in
(37:34):
her name, because this was before women could have had
property rights for a combination clothes dishwasher.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know if.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
It's the same time. Maybe the same time. If so,
there's really gross. Yeah, but it's still also very clever.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, Like, you don't want your you don't want your
champagne glass being watched next to your bloomers.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
No, especially if they're so because you drank too much champagne.
Oh gosh, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (38:06):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Are you sure?
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Okay, Well, since Chuck affirmed that he has nothing else,
I think everybody, it's time for listener man, I'm.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Gonna call this misunderstanding from episode titles. Okay, And I
should say that we had a wonderful young woman in
maybe DC. I think it was DC that said that
she was a bird enthusiast and that she was all
excited about the Cranes episode and then realized it was
(38:38):
construction Cranes. That's why we've titled things like our Nirvana episode.
I think it was Nirvana, not the band sure, so
we do stuff like that. We try to be clear,
but not always.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Sometimes we're purposely obtuse.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, because like you might want the bird crane and
then be delightfully surprised or disappointed, right exactly. Hey guys,
I'm in and out, but og all the time. Stuff
you should know has stayed with me as a weekly
listen ever since I heard the Jellyfish app. I consider
myself well versed in the English language and American pop culture,
but every now and then, titles of the episode set
(39:13):
me up for quite the surprise. I should probably read
the descriptions for the episodes, yes, but I'm going to
listen regardless of what's the point. For example, Hobo Signs,
I thought it was about handwritten signs that hitchhikers make,
or someone saying will work for food, or the end
is messed what I think it was probably supposed to
(39:35):
be the end is near.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Yeah, and it was some weird a auto correct.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
I like the end is mess though, IM gont it?
That should be a T shirt? Sure, I like that
to my delight as a ux designer. It was about
iconography and communication even better than those cardboard signs. The
last episode about conductors. I know what's coming. I thought
it was about train conductors, and the tagline what the
heck is going on there was referring to their mindset
(40:02):
when they're patrolling in the aisle and train station, like
an American equivalent of the British what's all this? Then?
I was also hoping that it was not about electric
conductors because I really wanted a train episode. Turned out
I was wrong once. Thanks for all the great knowledge
that is from Morton Laggerud in Norway.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Great name, Morton, Thank you for listening to us all
these years. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Have we done one on just trains?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
I don't think so. No, that seems like a big,
big one.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Yeah that's a big asmr sid too.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Oh sorry everybody hopefully Mesiphonia side.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, well we could try to do one on train.
Sometimes we just have to figure out how to condense it.
Can't get into electric trains, I'll tell you that, by God,
no way. Well, if you want to be like Morton
and let us know some hilariousness that comes from our
titles or something we said, or just something you thought of.
We love hearing stuff like that, you can send it
to us in an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
(41:09):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
)
Josh Clark
)
Chuck Bryant
Show Links
Order Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyAboutRSSPopular Podcasts
)
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
)
Let's Be Clear with Shannen Doherty
Let’s Be Clear… a new podcast from Shannen Doherty. The actress will open up like never before in a live memoir. She will cover everything from her TV and film credits, to her Stage IV cancer battle, friendships, divorces and more. She will share her own personal stories, how she manages the lows all while celebrating the highs, and her hopes and dreams for the future. As Shannen says, it doesn’t matter how many times you fall, it’s about how you get back up. So, LET’S BE CLEAR… this is the truth and nothing but. Join Shannen Doherty each week. Let’s Be Clear, an iHeartRadio podcast.
)
The Dan Bongino Show
He’s a former Secret Service Agent, former NYPD officer, and New York Times best-selling author. Join Dan Bongino each weekday as he tackles the hottest political issues, debunking both liberal and Republican establishment rhetoric.