7 Everyday Inventions You Didn’t Know Were Created by Women

7 Everyday Inventions You Didn’t Know Were Created by Women

Men often claim that there are no great women inventors, citing Marie Curie as a rare exception. However, they are mistaken. Many everyday inventions, from beer to Wi-Fi, were created by women. Here are seven groundbreaking innovations that women have given the world.

Paper Bags

Margaret Knight patented a machine for producing paper bags in 1871 after a lengthy court battle with a colleague who tried to steal her work, claiming that a woman couldn’t have invented such a device. This invention had a significant backdrop: at the time, only half of American women had the opportunity to work outside the home. One of the reasons was that schools did not provide lunches, and bringing food from home was difficult, forcing children to return home during breaks.

Paper bags became a symbol uniting women who wanted the ability to work. They needed something inexpensive in which their children could carry food to school. Previously, only envelopes or expensive leather bags were available. Margaret designed a special machine that could make bags with flat bottoms, which are still used in stores today.

Wi-Fi

Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr was known for her beauty, but her passion was developing new technical solutions in physics. Lamarr tried to recruit women for a research program codenamed “Bomb,” but the world did not take her seriously. She once found a way to transmit false data across different frequencies, which could secure data transmission between military sites. However, journalists dismissed it as a strange hobby of an actress. Fortunately, in 1942, she was awarded for creating a “secret communication system” for radio-controlled torpedoes for the US Navy. This technology evolved over decades into GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth as we know them today.

Beer

Beer is a women’s drink! Beer historian Jane Peyton asserts that Mesopotamian women were the first to produce, drink, and sell beer. It was considered food and part of women’s work. Ancient Finnish women were formal ingredients in brewing beer, and in England, ale-wives ran taverns and supported their families. For this, we can raise a glass!

Non-Reflective Glass

Engineer Katharine Blodgett was the first woman to earn a PhD in physics from Cambridge and the first woman hired by General Electric. During World War II, she researched technologies for gas masks, smoke screens, and new coatings for airplane wings. Her work on molecular-level surfaces led to her most important invention: non-reflective glass. Initially used in cameras and film projectors, and for military periscopes, today it is used in eyeglasses, car windows, and computer screens.

Coffee Filters

Coffee beans have been used in beverages since the 11th century, but it wasn’t until the 1900s that German housewife Melitta Bentz improved the technology we still use today. At the turn of the 20th century, coffee grounds were placed in a cloth bag and dipped into a pot of boiling water. Melitta invented a new method: she placed a layer of thick paper in a copper cup with several holes and poured coffee through this device, allowing only filtered liquid to pass into the cup. The taste of the bitter drink improved, and in 1908, Bentz patented her filtration system, creating not only coffee etiquette but also a business that exists to this day.

Pedal Trash Cans

Lillian Gilbreth improved the lives of women for whom housework was an inescapable job. In the early 1900s, she developed refrigerator shelves, simplified ways to open cans, and suggested adding pedals to trash cans. Gilbreth can be confidently called the main innovator and ergonomics specialist of the 20th century. A huge thank you, Lillian!

Windshield Wipers

In 1903, Mary Anderson invented windshield wipers to make life easier for men who constantly had to clear snow from windshields by hand. However, men did not appreciate her care, believing it was safer to clear the windshield manually. Twenty years later, Anderson’s patent expired, leaving her without the recognition she deserved. Henry Leland, the owner of Cadillac, was wiser than his predecessors. New car models were equipped with her invention, which is now indispensable in automobiles.

These inventions highlight the significant contributions women have made to our daily lives, often without the recognition they deserve.