20 Everyday Inventions Women Created But Rarely Get Credit For

During World War II, Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-born Hollywood star living in Los Angeles, joined forces with composer George Antheil to combat enemy efforts to block or disrupt Allied torpedoes using radio-guided control signals. The pair came up with a way to hop a signal across 88 synchronized frequencies, matching a piano’s keys, so it couldn’t be jammed. Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for their invention in 1942. It was passed on to the U.S. Navy, where it sat unused for several years. Decades later, the very same concept served as a key basis for today’s digital wireless communications systems.

In the early 1900s, Elizabeth Magie, a stenographer in Washington, D.C., became interested in the land-reform theories of economist Henry George, who believed that landlords grew rich by exploiting their tenants. Magie wanted to demonstrate this, so she created The Landlord’s Game, which had a square board, properties that could be bought and rented out, and a Jail space. She patented it in 1904. But it wasn’t until more than two decades later that Charles Darrow copied her board and rules and marketed them as Monopoly, earning millions in the process. For her part, Magie sold her patent to Parker Brothers for a $500 lump sum and no royalties.

In the 1950s, Ruth Handler, who had co-founded the toy company Mattel in Los Angeles, noticed that toy stores stocked girls with virtually nothing but baby dolls. She saw how her own daughter Barbara would play with adult paper cutout dolls, creating fantasy worlds where they lived grown-up lives and pursued careers. Handler had one of the dolls made as a jointed plastic figure with changeable clothes, modeled on a German novelty doll she had seen. She called it Barbie and launched it in 1959. Mattel filed for a patent on the doll’s joints and sold 351,000 in the first year alone.

In 1952, Virginia Apgar, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University in New York, realized that delivery rooms focused on the mother but not the baby, and were failing to detect early signs of distress. She created a ten-point scale, evaluated at one minute and five minutes after birth, which assigned scores to a newborn’s skin color, pulse, reflexes, muscle tone, and respiration. Published in 1953, it provided medical professionals with a quick means to identify infants in need of resuscitation and was named after her.

In the winter of 1902, while riding on a streetcar in New York, Mary Anderson, an Alabama real estate developer and rancher, noticed the driver stopping every few seconds to get out and wipe sleet from his windshield with his bare hands. She created a spring-loaded arm that could be moved by a lever inside the car to clear snow or rain from the windshield, and she received a patent for it in 1903. But automakers turned her down, saying a moving arm would divert the driver’s attention. The patent expired in 1920, and once her design was free to copy, swinging wipers became standard equipment right away.

Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mom employed as a secretary at a Dallas bank. In the 1950s, that bank began using electric typewriters, but she struggled with correcting errors. Her solution? To mix white tempera paint in a kitchen blender, dabbing it over the offending keystrokes. When colleagues saw how well it worked, they asked to buy her homemade concoction. After being fired in 1958 for accidentally typing the wrong company name on letterhead, she went into business full-time. She rebranded her invention as Liquid Paper, and eventually sold her company to Gillette for $47.5 million.

Melitta Bentz, a housewife in Dresden, Germany, was sick of drinking bitter, gritty coffee that was filtered through linen bags and metal sieves. In 1908, she took a brass cup, poked holes in the bottom with a nail, lined it with blotting paper ripped out of her son’s school workbook, and let hot water drip cleanly through the grounds. She got a patent for it that year, then she and her husband set up a coffee-filter company, which is still going today.

In 1938, Ruth Wakefield, a dietitian and co-owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, was looking for a new drop cookie to serve with ice cream. She cut up a bar of Nestlé chocolate and added chunks to a batch of butter cookies, thinking the chocolate would melt and disperse throughout the cookie. Instead, it retained its shape, resulting in a cookie with bits of chocolate. She wrote down the recipe for what we now know as a “chocolate chip” cookie and included it in her cookbook, which eventually spurred Nestlé to start selling chips.

An Illinois socialite named Josephine Cochrane was getting tired of having servants chip her fine china while they washed it by hand after dinner parties. She built wire racks that would fit plates and cups inside a copper boiler. Instead of washing the dishes by hand, a motorized pump sprayed hot, soapy water over the dishes. She received a patent for this design in 1886. Her early customers were hotels and restaurants because hot-water plumbing was not yet common in homes. Eventually, her company evolved into KitchenAid.

Margaret Knight was working as an inventor at a Massachusetts paper bag company when she designed a machine that cut, folded, and glued flat-bottomed bags that could stand open on their own, superseding the weak envelope style of sack that had been in use for years. A machinist named Charles Annan got hold of her design, duplicated it, and applied for his own patent, claiming in court that a woman could not have any real comprehension of such an invention. Knight fought back using her own drawings, shop diaries, and models, winning the case and receiving her patent in 1871.

When Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy officer and mathematician, began working on the UNIVAC I computer in Philadelphia in the early 1950s, programmers would often spend hours manually entering long sequences of binary digits to run programs. She was convinced that it was possible for a machine to translate human-readable commands into binary code, though many others at the time argued that computers were capable only of doing math. Hopper completed what became known as the first computer compiler, the A-0 System, in 1952, which paved the way for future programming languages and eventually led to COBOL.

In the 1880s, Sarah Goode, a Chicago furniture store owner and one of the first African American women to receive a U.S. patent, kept getting complaints from tenants in tenements about their small apartments. In response, she designed a wooden cabinet that could serve as a rolltop desk with room for stationery during the day, then unfold into a full-size bed at night. Her invention was patented in 1885. It was an early structural forerunner of the wall-hinged bed designs that would be patented decades later.

Alice Parker, who lived in Morristown, New Jersey, desired a more effective method of warming her home than a typical wood or coal-burning fireplace. Her solution was an innovative central heating system that drew cool air into a furnace where gas burners heated the air, which was then pumped through ducts, offering a rudimentary version of zoned heating. Parker applied for and received a patent for the heating system in 1919. The system was not yet popular, but would presage the central duct heating used in homes today.

In the 1840s, Nancy Johnson, an inventor near Philadelphia, was keenly aware that making ice cream meant stirring a pot inside a bucket of ice for hours. Her solution was the “Artificial Freezer,” a wooden tub of ice and salt around a metal cylinder in which a hand crank turned paddles that stirred and whipped air into the mixture as it thickened. She patented her invention in 1843 and sold the rights for $1,500 to a businessman who made and sold it in great numbers.

Marion Donovan, a Yale-trained architect and mother in Westport, Connecticut, grew weary of changing sheets drenched by leaky cloth diapers. She fashioned a waterproof cover out of nylon parachute material, eschewing safety pins in favor of snap fasteners. Donovan introduced her “Boater” at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949, received a patent on it in 1951, and eventually sold the rights for $1 million. She also developed a prototype of a disposable paper diaper, which manufacturers rejected. About a decade later, Procter & Gamble’s Pampers hit store shelves.

In 1913, Mary Phelps Jacob, later Caresse Crosby, a 19-year-old New York society girl, noticed that her whalebone corset was visible under a sheer gown as she prepared to attend a ball. Jacob and her maid stitched two silk handkerchiefs, ribbon, and thread into a light, flexible backless bra. After friends wanted to purchase their own bras, Jacob patented the design in 1914 and produced a limited number of bras before selling the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Warner Brothers Corset would then mass-produce Jacob’s invention.

When Martha Coston was widowed at 21 in 1848, her husband’s notebooks contained half-drawn concepts for signaling ships at night. Over nearly ten years, working alongside fireworks makers and chemists, she perfected them into vividly bright, long-burning red, white, and green flares, along with a coding system that vessels could use to communicate in the dark. The 1859 patent for the system was filed in her husband’s name, with Coston serving as administratrix, as was customary for widows at the time. The United States Navy purchased thousands of the flares during the Civil War to help coordinate fleets and to rescue sailors from sinking ships.

In 1938, Katharine Burr Blodgett, GE’s first female research scientist, working in Schenectady, New York, perfected a coating of 44 molecule-thin layers of a waxy compound on glass that, by canceling out reflection through interference, allowed more than 99% of light to pass through, glare-free. She obtained a patent on the process in 1940. It was introduced in movie projectors for the release of Gone with the Wind and eventually became standard for camera lenses, eyeglasses, and screens.

During World War II, Mária Telkes, nicknamed the “Sun Queen” at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, developed a solar-powered device capable of turning ocean water into fresh, drinkable water using only the sun’s rays. This “inflatable solar still,” constructed of plastic sheeting, was packed into life rafts for downed airmen from 1941 to 1945. With architect Eleanor Raymond, she also designed the heating system for the Dover Sun House, which in 1948 became the first house in the world to be heated exclusively with stored solar power, by means of drums filled with salt.

The sound of the train rattling the windows of inventor Mary Walton’s Manhattan boarding house drove her crazy. So she spent her nights tinkering with solutions in her basement. Transit officials had already consulted famed inventor Thomas Edison about the screeching tracks near New York City’s elevated train lines but couldn’t come up with any answers, so Walton built a model of a train track, then boxed it in wood lined with asphalt, cotton, and sand to muffle the vibration. She patented the idea in 1881, selling the rights to New York’s Metropolitan Railroad.

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