Beulah Henry, aka “Lady Edison
Beulah Louise Henry (1887-1973) was one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century, although she had no training in mechanics or engineering. She became known as “Lady Edison” for the number of inventions she produced. None of them were big or world-shaking. Instead she invented children’s toys and devices that made daily life easier.
She created her first prototype for an invention when she was nine: a belt with holder attached that made it possible to read a newspaper when your hands were full. As with many of her later inventions, it was the result of observing a problem—in this case seeing a man struggling to read a newspaper while carrying his groceries.—and looking for a solution.
Patent drawing for her ice cream freezer
Henry received her first patent in 1912 for a vacuum sealed ice-cream freezer that needed very little ice to work—a major improvement since ice was in short supply before freezers became widely available for home use. A year later, she received patents for a handbag and an umbrella with interchangeable covers, allowing a woman to coordinate them with her outfits (Which sounds like a nuisance to me.)
Creating the invention and getting the patent was the easy part; getting someone to make her inventions was harder. In 1920, Henry and her parents moved to New York from their home in North Carolina to give her access to model makers, patent attorneys and retailers.
After Henry pounded lots of pavements and knocked on lots of doors, she founded her own company to make her parasol. Despite all the men who had said it wouldn’t work and wouldn’t sell, the product became a success and her rate of innovation picked up.
Henry focused next on toys, drawing her inspiration in part from watching children in New York’s playgrounds. Among other things, she created a core structure of springs made stuffed toys more flexible and durable, a spinning top to replace dice in board games and the ““Kiddie Clock” which helped children learn to tell time.
From toys, she moved to typewriters. Her first typewriter patent was the “protograph,” a device to attach to a typewriter that produced four copies without messy carbon paper. As was often the case, the final product seemed simple, but the engineering challenge was complex. The device had to work smoothly with hundreds of typewriter models that were on the market, as well as standard paper and ink ribbons. Henry received another twelve patents for improvements to typewriters. She then created the first bobbinless sewing machine, aimed at commercial rather than domestic seamstresses.
Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Henry and her team averaged more than two patents a year. In 1941, when the United States entered the war, Henry put her patent development process on hold and joined a machine shop as part of the war effort, where she directed her innovations to the question of material shortages
When reporters interviewed her about her successes, “Lady Edison” told them she just looked at something and though “There’s a better way of doing that.” By the end of her career, Henry held a total of 48 patents—she received a 49th posthumously. Far more patents than any other woman at the time. She is credited with over 100 inventions.
Hotbed
I’ve been fascinated by the women reformers and activists of the Progressive Era for a long time. They are some of my favorite historical shin-kickers.[1] They made the world a safer, better place for women, children, blue collar workers, and immigrants, often at great personal cost. I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately.
Which led me to finally read Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism by Joanna Scutts. Hotbed is the story of Heterodoxy, a not-entirely-secret social club for radical women that met regularly for 25 years. They named themselves Heterodoxy because they were not brought together by a single issue, with the possible exception of the belief that women were fundamentally equal to men. (Though they disagreed even on issues of feminism, a word they helped introduce to a broader public through lectures and publications.)
Scutts traces the big arc of the organization, from its foundation on a Saturday afternoon in 1912 through the early years of the Second World War. She gives us the stories of individual members and, to my surprise, those of women who were not members of Heterodoxy but were involved in individual campaigns alongside members. She takes us deep into Heterodoxy’s involvement in the labor and suffrage movements, and the way World War I created divisions in both movements over the questions of pacifism and patriotism. She also looks at other issues that engaged the energies of individual members, including modernist art, birth control, the right of married women to continue to work, and experiments with family structure, childcare, and living arrangements
I will admit, I found the book overwhelming at times: so many people doing so many things. (It helped to read it in small bites and give my brain a chance to digest it.) But it is well worth reading if you are interested in the foundations of modern feminism, activism at the beginning of the twentieth century, or kick-ass women.
If you decide you would like to look at the same period and many of the same events through the lens of a single life, I strongly recommend Rebel Cinderella by Adam Hochschild, the story of Rose Pastor Stokes.
[1] As defined by me, shin-kickers are people who push society’s boundaries and make them bend. Who sit where they aren’t supposed to sit, speak up when the world wants them to be quiet, and study things people tell them they can’t study. Who find their voice or kick open doors. Not always comfortable to be around ,but incredibly important.
Hubert Bancroft Runs a History Factory
In 1868, a San Francisco book dealer named Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) set out to write the history of the Pacific slope,[1] from Alaska to the Isthmus of Panama. It was a project on a heroic scale.
Bancroft did not write all the books himself, even though he was the only author listed. In fact, he didn’t even wrote most of them. He shaped a master narrative, then set up a team of some 600 writers, researchers, and historians to work with and for him. He assembled a collection of more than 60,000 volumes related to the subjects. He bought private collections of primary sources, When buying collections proved impossible, he hired copyists to work in archives in California, Mexico, and Spain. He also hired bright young men to travel through the west, taking down hundreds of oral histories[2], what he called “dictations,” from surviving pioneers of the American West. (To my surprise, some of these dictations were taken from Native Americans.)
Bancroft made a fortune with his “history factory[3],“ and earned a reputation for unscrupulous practices in the process. The books were sold by subscription. Many subscribers were surprised to learn that they had committed to buying thirty-nine volumes. (Leland Stanford, in particular, protested loudly . He had ordered forty sets, under the impression that the series would run to five or six volumes. Ooops!)
Thanks to Bancroft, our knowledge of the history of the American West is greater than it might otherwise be. He collected material at a time when few were interested in doing so, before the people who were capable of giving first hand accounts of America’s westward expansion were gone. In 1905, the University of California at Berkeley bought his collected sources for $250,000[4] for what is now the, ahem, Bancroft Library.
[1] I looked it up so you didn’t have to: the Pacific slope is the technical name for the geographic region in the Americans that are west of the continental divide. I love words with this type of specificity.
[2] Bancroft was ahead of his time. Oral history as a technique for preserving individual stories for academic use, as opposed to oral tradition, is generally considered to be a creation of the early twentieth century.
[3] Something that is hard for this modern writer of popular history to imagine.
[4] Roughly 9.5 million dollars today.