Introducing Impactful Women Inventors

It may be the last week of Women’s History Month, but I think we should celebrate women and girls year round. We are remarkable, we are creators and leaders and changemakers. Unfortunately though, throughout history women who made an impact rarely received credit for it, and were often left out of history books. So I want to introduce you to some of those women.

Women Helped Start Smartphones:

There are many modern conveniences you use today that started with a woman’s vision, ingenuity, and wisdom. Like smartphones–you either have one, use one, or know someone who does. They’re essentially pocket computers, but how were they invented? Some people assume Bill Gates invented computers in the 70s and then Steve Jobs invented iPhones in the 2000s– technically neither of which are true, you can look it up. Instead I’ll focus on the women who helped create the technology that became smartphones.

Ada Lovelace

Let’s go back in time to the mid-1800s. Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer. She teamed up with another mathematician, Charles Babbage, who had an idea for a machine that could make calculations and perform functions. After working at it for several years, in 1843 Ada wrote the instructions for how Babbage’s computer engine could work. Her famous “Note G” described the steps for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers, essentially an algorithm. Ada Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer.

Hedy Lamarr

Fast forward to 1942, Hedy Lamarr was both a famous Austrian-American actress AND an inventor. During World War II, Hedy and fellow inventor/composer George Antheil (AN-tyle) developed a frequency hopping communication system that would make it harder for enemies to detect or jam radio-guided torpedoes. But their invention wasn’t used until after the war, and was applied in other ways. Hedy’s frequency hopping technology became the foundation for tech like Bluetooth, GPS, and secure WiFi–can you imagine a world without it?

Karen Spärck Jones

Karen Spärck Jones, an English computer scientist, wanted to teach computers how to understand people and our complex language (full of synonyms and homonyms). So she programmed a huge thesaurus in the early 1960s, which was the beginning of natural language processing. In the 1970s Karen developed inverse document frequency and index-term weighing. With these concepts, she created formulas that ranked search results, which laid the groundwork for today’s modern search engines like Google. Because of Karen, you can find what you’re searching for.

Gladys Mae West

Speaking of GPS, Gladys Mae West is an American Mathematician who worked at Dahlgren Naval Base in Virginia from the late 1950s to the late 1990s. During the 1970s and 1980s, Gladys was the project manager for Seasat, the first satellite to monitor oceans, and she used algorithms to account for forces that distort the Earth’s shape, like gravity and tides. Then she programmed a computer that was extremely fast for its time, the IBM 7030, known as Stretch. Her programming accurately calculated a model of the Earth’s shape, and was later used to develop the Global Positioning System–GPS. We would literally be lost without Gladys.

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson was the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from MIT. While working at AT&T Bell Labs from 1976 to 1991, she did research in theoretical physics, solid state and quantum physics, and optical physics. During this time, she invented the technology used in phones for caller ID and call waiting, as well as the techn for the portable fax machine, touch-tone phone, fiber-optic cables, and more. Thanks to Dr. Jackson, we can know who’s calling before we answer!

Laila Ohlgren

Laila Ohlgren was a Swedish telecommunications engineer who worked at the company Televerket. In 1979 the Nordic Mobile Telephone NMT system was being tested, but it kept having issues dialing while someone was in motion due to obstructions like trees. Before mobile phones, you’d pick up the phone, hear a dial tone, and then dial phone number digit by digit to connect to another line. Laila had the idea to use the mobile phone’s microprocessor to first store the number being dialed, then press a call button to dial all the digits at once, minimizing those testing issues. Laila and her colleague Östen Mäkitalo (Oh-stan MaKEYtolo) tested her idea by making a thousand call connections while driving around Stockholm the whole weekend, and it worked! Laila’s call button became an industry standard used ever since.

Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway was an American computer scientist and electrical engineer. Together with Cal Tech professor Carver Mead, in the 1970s Lynn developed a simpler way to design microchips–originally they had been drawn with paper and pencil like blueprints, but she created a scalable method using algorithms to fit millions of transistors on a microchip. Lynn revolutionized and expanded computer technology.

Donna Dubinsky

Donna Dubinsky used the knowledge she gained from attending Harvard’s business school and working at Apple to co-found a tech company called Palm Inc in 1992. Her partner Jeff Hawkins made a prototype of a hand-held electronic organizer, and she saw its potential. Donna helped develop the product and bring it to market–the Palm Pilot. She later co-founded another company, Handspring, which was among the first to debut a smartphone. Donna’s vision to make information portable led to the devices you use today.

Women’s Car Safety Inventions:

Let’s shift to one other modern convenience you probably use, or at least ride in–cars. Now while many men from multiple countries invented the first variants of cars, women played a big role in their safety features.

Margaret Wilcox

Margaret Wilcox was an American inventor and mechanical engineer in the latter 1800s. One of her most notable inventions was the car heater, which originated as a railcar heater. Margaret supposed that she could send a channel of hot air from an engine back to a rail car. While her idea worked, there wasn’t a way to regulate the temperature, so riders would get increasingly warm as the trip progressed. But Margaret’s hot engine air design was adapted by automakers, and Henry Ford developed an effective way to control the temperature. Because of Margaret, we can enjoy warm car rides even if it’s cold outside.

Mary Anderson

Speaking of wintery days, around that same time, Mary Anderson noticed her trolley car driver and others on the road were struggling to see the New York City streets through the snow, frequently stopping to clear their windshields by hand. Mary got an idea for a hand-operated windshield wiper that drivers could engage from the inside of the vehicle. In 1903 Mary filed a patent for a lever that directed a rubber blade on a spring-loaded arm that would remove rain and snow from the windshield. As driving became more common, her invention was adapted by automakers and windshield wipers became a standard feature in cars. Can you imagine driving without them?

Florence Lawrence

In the early 1900s Canadian Florence Lawrence became a successful silent film actress, and was even able to purchase her own car (which was rare back then). Florence loved cars and loved driving, but she saw a need for a safety feature. In 1914 she invented a turn signal arm that, with the press of a button, would raise or lower a flag on the back of the car that indicated to drivers behind it which way the car would turn. She also invented a brake signal that, when the car brake pedal was pushed, would flip up a STOP sign on the back of the car to alert drivers behind that it was slowing or stopping. Sadly the patents for Florence’s inventions were never filed, and other people with similar ideas got the credit. While turn and brake signals have been standard features in cars for many decades, we can remember they were originally Florence’s idea.

Dorothy Leavitt

And let’s not forget Dorothy Leavitt, an English racer in the early 1900s–which was uncommon and considered shocking to some. Dorothy set both land-speed records in cars and water-speed records in motorboats. In 1909 Dorothy wrote a booklet as a guide to women drivers, and in it she suggested women bring along a handled large mirror, “to occasionally hold up to see what is behind you … while the necessity or inclination to look round is rare, you can, with the mirror, see in a flash what is in the rear without losing your forward way, and without releasing your right-hand grip of the steering wheel.” Dorothy’s rear view mirror idea was later patented by someone else, but it all started with her ingenuity.

Impactful Women Inspire You

These women inventors who made history were more than just a pretty face or typical housewife–they made a lasting difference in the world. I’ve said it before–how you look is the LEAST interesting thing about you; there is so much more to who you are, how you think, and what you can do. I hope that highlighting these brilliant women from the past has helped you see the impact they still have even today, and inspired you to pursue your ideas, too.

Resources

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