Inventors and their inventions

1. Inventors and their inventions

2. Tabitha Babbitt

• Sarah "Tabitha" Babbitt (December 9, 1779 –
December 10, 1853) was an early American
Shaker purported to be a tool maker and
inventor.
• Inventions credited to her by the Shakers include
the circular saw, the spinning wheel head, and
false teeth. She was a member of the Harvard
Shaker community.

3.

• Invention: Circular saw
• Year: 1812
• While living in a Shaker
community and working as a
weaver, Babbitt watched people
struggling to cut wood with a
pit saw, which required two
users and only cut in one
direction. Determined to help,
she attached a circular blade to
her spinning wheel and
invented the much more
efficient circular saw.

4. Josephine Cochrane

• Josephine Garis Cochran (later Cochrane)
(March 8, 1839 – August 3, 1913) was an
American inventor who was the inventor of the
first
commercially
successful
automatic
dishwasher, which she designed in the shed
behind her home.
• She is claimed to have said “If nobody else is
going to invent a dish washing machine, I'll do it
myself!”

5.

• Invention: Dishwasher
• Year: 1872
• The result was the first commercially-
successful dishwasher, which Cochrane
patented in 1886. Previous attempts at
dishwashers had used scrubbers, but
Cochrane’s design was more effective because
it used water pressure to clean the dishes.
• With her patent secure, she founded Cochran’s
Crescent Washing Machine Company. Because
the machine was too expensive for most
households, Cochran sold most of her
dishwashers to hotels and restaurants.

6. Mary Walton

• Mary Elizabeth Walton was a nineteenth-century
American inventor who was awarded two patents for
pollution-reducing devices.
• Documentation about Mary Walton’s life is lacking due to
the little recognition women received during this time
period. However, a statement made in 1884 and published
in Lexington, Kentucky’s, Weekly Transcript contains
some valuable insight into her childhood. Walton is quoted
as saying, “My father had no sons, and believed in
educating his daughters. He spared no pains or expense to
this end.”

7.

• Invention: Locomotive chimney
• Year: 1879
• Passionate about improving urban conditions and air
pollution, Walton invented a train chimney system
that reduced air pollution by filtering smoke through
water, trapping the airborne chemicals and holding
them in suspension.
• Invention: System to reduce noise by trains
• Year: 1881
• In addition to the pollution-minimizing locomotive
chimney, Walton also patented a way to greatly
reduce the noise of New York City's elevated
railways by insulating the tracks with boxes of sand.
The city's Metropolitan Railroad bought the rights
almost immediately.

8. Maria Beasley

• Maria E. Beasley (née Kenny; 1847–1904)
was an entrepreneur and inventor. She is
best known for her barrel-making
machines and her improvements to the life
raft. She held fifteen different patents in
the United States and two in Great Britain.

9.

• Invention: Life raft
• Year: 1882
• Though Beasley had already made a
fortune on a barrel-hooping machine
patent, this serial inventor went on to
design an improved life raft with
guard rails that was fireproof and
foldable for easy storage.
• Her life rafts were used on the
Titanic and saved over 700 lives.

10. Letitia Geer

• Letitia Mumford Geer (1852-1935) was an
inventor who patented the one-hand
operated syringe that is the basis for most
modern medical syringes. The patent was
granted in 1899.

11.

• Invention: Medical syringe
• Year: 1899
• Geer’s design of the medical
syringe
had
many
unique
advantages. The syringe is very
simple and cheap. It can be
operated with one hand. The
syringe can be used for rectal
injections and similar purposes and
it can be operated by either the
physician or the patient.
• In fact, today’s modern syringes are
inspired from Geer’s original idea.

12. Mary Anderson

• Mary Elizabeth Anderson (February 19,
1866 – June 27, 1953) was an American
real estate developer, rancher, viticulturist
and inventor of the windshield wiper
blade.
• Anderson did not receive any money for
her invention. In 2011, she was inducted
into the International Inventors Hall of
Fame, receiving some credit she truly
deserved.

13.

• Invention: Windshield wiper
• Year: 1903
• After receiving a patent in 1903,
Anderson tried to sell her new
windshield cleaning device to a
manufacturer, who refused, stating
that her invention lacked practical
value. Her windshield wipers failed to
take off before her patent expired and
it was 10 years before a similar device
became standard on cars.

14. Katharine Blodgett

• Katharine Burr Blodgett (January 10, 1898 –
October 12, 1979) was an American physicist
and chemist known for her work on surface
chemistry, in particular her invention of
"invisible" or nonreflective glass while working
at General Electric.
• She was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D.
in physics from the University of Cambridge,
in 1926.

15.

• Invention: Low-reflection glass
• Year: 1935
• Before Blodgett's revolutionary
non-reflective glass coating was
invented, glass wasn't nearly as
useful or reliable as it is today. Her
invention has proven indispensable
in the making of camera lenses,
microscopes and eyeglasses.

16. Hedy Lamarr

• Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria
Kiesler; 9 November 1914 – 19 January
2000) was an Austrian-born American
actress, inventor, and film producer.
• She appeared in 30 films over a 28-year
career in Europe and the United States,
and co-invented an early version of
frequency-hopping
spread
spectrum
communication, originally intended for
torpedo guidance.

17.

• Invention: Wireless transmission
technology
• Year: 1941
• During World War II, Lamarr created a
frequency-hopping
communication
system that could guide torpedos without
being detected. Her groundbreaking work
paved the way for the modern invention
of WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

18. Stephanie Kwolek

• Stephanie Louise Kwolek (July 31, 1923 – June
18, 2014) was an American chemist who is
known for inventing Kevlar. Her career at the
DuPont company spanned more than 40 years.
• She discovered the first of a family of
synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and
stiffness: poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide.

19.

• Invention: Bullet-proof fiber
• Year: 1966
• While searching for strong but
lightweight plastics to use in car tires,
DuPont researcher Stephanie Kwolek
discovered what would become
known as Kevlar. This revolutionary
fiber has saved countless lives in the
form of bullet-proof vests, and is
also used in numerous applications,
such as bridge cables, canoes, and
frying pans.

20. Ann Tsukamoto

• Ann Tsukamoto (born July 6, 1952 in Los Angeles
County) is an inventor and stem cell researcher.
• She does the work needed to advance the
understanding of what stem cells are and how they
can be used in the future. For years, scientists have
theorized that human stem cells could be used to
save millions of lives. But isolating the stem cells
was critical to develop further research – and no
one could figure out how to do it. That’s where
Ann Tsukamoto came in.

21.

• Invention: Stem cell isolation
• Year: 1991
• A vital breakthrough in cancer research,
Tsukamoto's co-patented process of
isolating human stem cells found in bone
marrow has saved hundreds of thousands
of lives.
• Tsukamoto has played an important role in
the advancement of stem cell research, and
the potential to utilize stem cells to treat
various types of cancer and other deadly
diseases in the future. Researchers believe
that using stem cells in regenerative
medicine to help new tissues and play a
major role in the treatment for Alzheimer’s,
Type-1 Diabetes, Spinal Cord injuries, and
Rheumatoid Arthritis in the future.

22. Thank you for your attention!