Female Inventors and Their Creations Quiz

Answer: Windshield wipers

Alabama born Mary Anderson is most noted for inventing the windshield wiper. This came about when Mary was travelling on a trolley car in 1902. Because it was a cold and dismal day, she noticed that the poor driver had to drive with both sides of the car's front window open in order to prevent the window being covered in sleet. On her return home, she set about working on a device to remedy this situation.

The windshield wiper was the result, and millions of drivers have driven that much safer and drier (and warmer) ever since.

Answer: Jolly Jumper baby harness

Olivia Poole (1889-1975) spent her early life on an Indian Reserve at White Earth, Minnesota. As a child, with part of her ancestry being Objibway, she was fascinated by the way many Native American mothers, while out working in the open, often dangled their babies, wrapped up snugly in their little cradle boards, from tree branches. There, if the child began to grow restless, a gentle tug on the branch would result in a slight bouncing motion, and off to sleep the child would go again. Following the birth of her own first child, Olivia had a local blacksmith make a mild spring fixed to an axe bar. There she attached a home made harness made from a diaper, placed the baby in it during the times she was busy, and voila, the Jolly Jumper was created. Olivia patented this invention in 1948 and, by 1957, she and her oldest Jolly Jumper son, Joseph, began to mass produce these great little time-savers.

The design has now altered so that the jumper was on a portable steel frame just above floor level to allow babies, as they grew older, to bounce themselves by pushing down on the floor with their legs.

Answer: Cobol

The amazing Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), who was born in New York City, had a fascinatingly analytical mind even as a child, when, at the age of seven, she dismantled several alarm clocks to study their mechanisms. She became a Vassar Phi Beta Kappa at the age of twenty in mathematics and physics, and by the age of twenty-eight, had earned a Ph.D in mathematics from Yale. During the Second World War, she gained special permission to enlist in the Navy Reserve (she weighed only 105 lbs), graduated first in her class the following year, and shortly afterwards began work at the Harvard Computation Lab. By 1950, her original compiler work, to the astonishment of all, was underway, and two years later she had a running compiler on her hands. In 1959, with other computer experts from all around the country, they had the COBOL computing language under way. Grace continued to work in the improvement of computers and networks for the rest of her life while, at the same time, continuing to work her way up through the Navy.

The awards she earned during her lifetime are staggering, and at her death in 1992, this remarkable woman was interred with full military honours at Arlington Cemetery. COBOL is an acronym for -- common business-oriented language.

Answer: Spread Spectrum Technology

Austrian born Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) made thirty-one films during her career, most of which cast her as a beautiful, glamorous leading lady with not much happening between her ears. In reality, this stunningly lovely woman had an incisive and brilliant mind which led to the development of an invention in response to the needs of the Second World War. These were spread spectrum and frequency hopping communications -- official descriptions state that spread spectrum included "the establishment of secure communications, increasing resistance to natural interference, noise and jamming, to prevent detection, and to limit power flux density (e.g. in satellite downlinks)". Frequency hopping "is a method of transmitting radio signals by rapidly switching a carrier among many frequency channels, using a pseudorandom sequence known to both transmitter and receiver. It is used as a multiple access method in the frequency-hopping code division multiple access (FH-CDMA) scheme".

Hedy, who turned to inventing to relieve the boredom of her film dialogues, married six times, had three children, but spent the last forty years of her life as a virtual recluse, wishing to be left alone, fearing the cruel cameras which would heartlessly record her fading beauty, rejecting scripts, and almost poverty-stricken at times. So much for fame and glory. Her startling beauty was both a curse and a blessing. It brought her fame, but, for example, when attempting to join the National Inventors' Council during the war in order to escape her golden cage, she was told by the committee that she should use her looks to sell War Bonds instead, which she did very successfully.

Answer: Blissymbol Printer

Blissymbols are several hundred entities which stand for concepts, with each standing alone, but which can be combined with other existing symbols to form new concepts. They were invented by Charles Bliss (1897-1985) between 1942 and 1949. Rachel's invention enabled people with communication and movement difficulties to point to those various existing symbols on a page by the use of a special touch pad.

It gave them the freedom to communicate independently without the need to have someone else interpret the symbols for them. Rachel, who was born in Ontario, Canada in 1972 commenced this project initially for a school science fair, but the authorities there were so impressed by it that she was encouraged to enter it into the Canadian World Exhibition of Achievements of Young Inventors, at which it took out the silver medal.

This young girl with the brilliant and compassionate mind went on to study physics and space at university, before commencing work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Her ambition there is to help take NASA's innovations and tailor them to fit the needs of people with various disabilities.

Answer: Perfume

Looked upon as the world's first chemist (wow!), Tapputi was a female overseer at the Royal Palace in Babylon. She lived some time during the second millennium BC, and is found mentioned in the cuneiform tablets from that era. How appropriate that a chemist is mentioned in tablets. Tapputi is believed to have created the first perfumes used by mankind.

She did this initially by combining flowers, oil, calamus, cyperus, myrrh and balsam. To this mix she added water, let it absorb the aromas from the ingredients, then filtered it several times.

The combination of those ingredients must have had a delightful scent.

Answer: Alternative alphabet

Saint Hildegard of Bingen was one amazing woman who lived from circa 1098 until 1179. Her life's work was carried out in an area of the world we know today as Germany, at that time the Holy Roman Empire. Not only was she an early inventor, she was also a writer, a composer of some remarkable music, philosopher, musician, touring preacher, herbalist, Christian mystic, abbess, visionary, and polymath who wrote extensively on such subjects as theology, science, botany and medicine in addition to all her other areas of expertise. How wonderful it would be to possess such remarkable abilities. Today, as far as inventions go, Hildegard is regarded as the inventor of an alternative alphabet.

This could be described perhaps as a combination of modified Latin and shorthand, and it made writing much easier and faster for those who understood it. One would be inclined to think a modified alphabet was the very least of this amazing woman's creations and achievements.

She was a female Leonardi da Vinci.

Answer: Apgar score

Virginia Apgar (1909-1974) was an American obstetrical anaesthesiologist who specialised in that field, as well as teratology and neonatology. Graduating from the Colombia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933, she was actively discouraged, in spite of her fine results, from becoming a practising surgeon by Allen Whipple, the chairman of that establishment. That was because he realised early on that Virginia would make an even finer anaesthesiologist, with far greater chances of advancement in that field.

Virginia rewarded his faith in her by becoming director of the college's newly formed division of anaesthesia in 1938. She is, however, best known for her development of the Apgar Score, which is a way to immediately check the health of newborn infants in order to catch any problems early. Five different categories of each infant's bodily functions are measured in this scoring process. During her relatively short life, Virginia was also a fine violinist who performed whenever she could, manufactured violins and other stringed instruments when she had the time, and loved gardening, fly-fishing, golfing and stamp collecting. Oh, and in her fifties, she took up flying lessons as well.

Answer: Permanent press clothing

Ruth Rogan Benerito (1916-2013) was an American chemist and inventor who worked primarily in the textile industry. Born in New Orleans, she was lucky to have a father who supported education for women. Graduating as a young woman from Louisiana's Tulane University with a degree in chemistry, Ruth initially made her living as a school teacher, because of the scarcity of work available for chemists during the Great Depression.

After her work as a research chemist commenced, she went on to patent 55 new products in all.

The best known of these was permanent press clothing.

Answer: Computerised telephone switching system

Born in New Jersey in 1926, Dr Erna Schneider Hoover is an American mathematician who worked at Bell Laboratories for 32 years. She became one of the first people to receive a patent for work in computer technology, with her invention of a computerised telephoning switchboard.

This system monitored the thousands of calls at huge organisations during peak hour times to prevent the overload that was an all too common problem with the old operating systems then in place. This process automatically ensured the most effective means of prioritising work by preventing system overloads. Erna did this by uniting her two main streams of knowledge, symbolic logic and feedback theory, with the end result being that computers at large call centres automatically adjusted the number of calls that could be accepted at any given time.

The comical, and wonderful, thing about Erna's invention was that she came up with it while she was in hospital recovering from the birth of her second child. Ah, the ladies, God bless 'em, they're amazing creatures.