The following decade is remarkable for the wonderful increase in the number of inventions due to women, for there was a sudden jump from twenty-eight to four hundred and forty-one patents awarded them between the years 1861 and 1871. Women now began to have confidence in their inventive faculties, and, no longer content with exercising their genius on articles of clothing and culinary utensils, sewing, washing and churning machines, they began to devote their attention to objects that were entirely foreign to their ordinary home activities. This is clearly evinced by the patents they obtained for such inventions as improvements in locomotive wheels, devices for reducing straw and other fibrous substances for the manufacture of paper pulp, improvements in corn huskers, low-water indicators, steam and other whistles, corn plows, a method of constructing screw propellers, improvements in materials for packing journals and bearings, in fire alarms, thermometers, railroad car heaters, improvements in lubricating railway journals, in conveyors of smoke and cinders for locomotives, in pyrotechnic night signals, burglar alarms, railway car safety apparatus, in apparatus for punching corrugated metals, desulphurizing ores and other similar inventions in the domain of mechanical engineering, inventions that, at first blush, would seem to be quite alien to the genius and capacity of woman.
From now on women's inventions in the United States increased at an extraordinary rate, for from 1871 until July 1, 1888, when the first government report was made on the patents issued to women inventors, she had to her credit nearly two thousand inventions, many of which were of prime importance.[231]
During the seven years following 1888 she was awarded twenty-five hundred and twenty-six patents—more than the total number that had been granted her during the preceding seventy-nine years. Between 1895 and 1910, three thousand six hundred and fifteen more patents were placed to her credit, making a grand total for her first century of inventive achievement of eight thousand five hundred and ninety-six patents. No Patent Office reports are available since 1910, but the number of inventions for which women have received patents since Mary Kies was awarded hers on May 5, 1809, for "straw-weaving with silk or thread," cannot be far from ten thousand. This fact will, doubtless, be a revelation to that large class of men who still seem to share the views of Voltaire and Proudhon that women are incapable of inventing even the simplest article of domestic use.
The following story well illustrates the prevailing ignorance regarding the part women have taken in the invention of certain articles that are so common that most people think they were never patented.
"I was out driving once with an old farmer in Vermont," writes Mrs. Ada C. Bowles, "and he told me, 'You women may talk about your rights, but why don't you invent something?' I answered, 'Your horse's feed bag and the shade over his head were both of them invented by women.' The old fellow was so taken aback that he was barely able to gasp, 'Do tell!'"
Had he investigated further he would have found that the flynet on his horse's back, the tugs and other harness trimmings, the shoes on his horse's feet[232] and the buggy seat he then occupied were all the inventions of women. He would, doubtless, also have discovered that the currycomb he had used before starting out on his drive, as well as the snap hook of the halter and the checkrein and the stall unhitching device were likewise the inventions of members of that sex whose capacity he was so disposed to depreciate; for women have been awarded patents—in some instances several of them—for all the articles that have been mentioned. He might furthermore have learned that the fellies in his buggy wheels and his daughter's side saddle had been made under women's patents; and that, to complete his surprise and confusion, the leather used in his harness had been sewn by a machine patented by a woman who was not only an inventor but who was also for many years the manager and proprietor of a large harness factory in New York City.
What particularly arrests one's attention in reading the Patent Office reports is not only the large number of inventions by women, but also the very wide range of the devices which they embrace. It is not surprising to find them inventing and improving culinary utensils, house furniture and furnishings, toilet articles, wearing apparel and stationery, trunks and bags, toys and games, designs for printed and textile fabrics, for boxes and baskets, screens, awnings, baby carriers, musical instruments, appliances for washing and cleaning, attachments for bicycles and type-writing machines, art, educational and medical appliances; for these things are in keeping with their proper métier; but it is surprising for those who are not familiar with the history of modern inventions to learn of the share women have had in inventing and improving agricultural implements, building appurtenances, motors of various kinds, plumbing apparatus, theatrical stage mechanisms, and, above all, countless railway appliances from a coupling or fender to an apparatus for sanding railroad tracks, or a device for unloading boxcars.
Those who are still of the opinion of Voltaire and Proudhon—and their name is legion—respecting woman's inventive powers, might be willing to accord to her the capacity to design a new form of clothes pin, or hair crimper, or rouge pad, or complexion mask, or powder puff, or baby jumper; but they would limit her ability to contrivances of this character. But what would these same people say if they were told that over and above the things just mentioned for which many women have actually received patents, the much depreciated female sex had been granted patents for locomotive wheels, stuffing boxes, railway car safety apparatus, life rafts, cut-offs for hydraulic and other engines, street cars, mining machines, furnaces for smelting ores, sound-deadening attachments for railway cars, feed pumps and transfer apparatus for traction cars, machines for driving hoops on to barrels, apparatus for destroying vegetation on and removing snow from railroads, coke crushers, artificial stone compositions, elevated railways, new forms of cattle cars, dams and reservoirs, welding seams of pipes and hardening iron, alloys for bell metal and alloys to resemble silver, methods of refining and hardening copper, processes for concentrating ores, improvement in elevators and designs for raising sunken vessels? And yet, incredible as it may appear to these scoffers at woman's genius, patents for all these inventions, methods and processes—many of them of exceeding value—and for hundreds of others of a similar nature, have been issued to women during recent years. And the activity of the fair inventors, far from abating, is becoming daily more pronounced, and promises to reward their efforts with far greater triumphs. Indeed, women are becoming so active in the numerous fields of invention—even in such unlikely ones as metallurgy and civil, mechanical and electrical engineering—that they bid fair to rival men in what they have long regarded as their peculiar specialty.
In 1892 a woman in New York was granted two patents, one for a process of malting beer and the other for hooping malt liquors. These inventions, however, are not so foreign to the avocation of woman as they at first appear. For, if we may believe the teachings of ethnology and prehistoric archæology in this matter, women were the first brewers. The one, therefore, who two decades ago secured the two patents just mentioned was but taking up anew an occupation in which her sex furnished the first invention many thousand years ago.
An instructive fact touching woman's inventive achievements is that her fullest success is coincident with her enlarged opportunities for education, and began with the breaking down of the prejudices which so long existed against her having anything to do with the development of the mechanical or industrial arts. When one recollects that the public schools of Boston, established in 1642, were not open to girls until a century and a half later, and then only for the most elementary branches and for but one-half the year; and that girls did not have the benefit of a high school education in the center of New England culture until 1852; and when one furthermore recalls the attitude of the general public toward women and girls extending their activities beyond the nursery and the kitchen, it is easy to understand that there was not much encouragement for them to exercise their inventive talent, even if they had felt an inclination to do so.