Maria Beasley Earned Twenty Thousand a Year in Patent Royalties in 1880. Her Life Rafts Were on the Titanic.

US209900 was issued to Maria E. Beasley of Philadelphia on November 12, 1878. The title is "Improvement in Life-Rafts." The drawings show a flat, rectangular raft that could be folded down for storage along a ship's deck and unfolded in seconds when needed, with guard rails and integrated buoyancy chambers that — unlike the wooden lifeboats of the period — were treated to be fire-resistant.

Beasley was, at the time of the filing, a widow in her thirties. She had been left without significant resources by the death of her first husband and had supported herself by sewing barrel hoops onto wooden casks at one of the Philadelphia cooperages. She had filed for her first patent — a foot warmer for railway cars — three years earlier, in 1875. She had filed for another, a machine for assembling barrels automatically rather than by hand, in 1878. The barrel machine made her wealthy. The life raft made her famous.

Twenty thousand a year

By the mid-1880s, Beasley's life raft was standard equipment on commercial shipping across the United States and parts of Europe. She earned roughly twenty thousand dollars a year in royalties from her various patents — equivalent to several hundred thousand dollars in modern terms — at a period when the average American factory worker earned four hundred dollars a year and the average woman, regardless of education, earned considerably less than that.

She filed at least fifteen patents over her career, by various counts. The barrel-hoop machine and the life raft were the most profitable. The others ranged from foot warmers and anti-derailment devices for trains to a steam generator for cookstoves. She bought property in Philadelphia and on the Jersey shore. She traveled. She did not remarry until late in life.

On the Titanic

The Titanic, when it sailed in April 1912, carried 20 lifeboats — far fewer than the number of passengers and crew aboard, by a margin that became the central scandal of the disaster. Several of those 20 lifeboats were of the Beasley folding-raft design, by then thirty years into its commercial run. They saved roughly seven hundred lives. They were not, by themselves, anywhere near enough.

Beasley herself died in early 1913, less than a year after the Titanic sank. She had followed the disaster's coverage closely — her surviving correspondence with her sister discusses it at some length — and she had reportedly been working on an updated raft design that addressed the deployment difficulties some Titanic survivors had reported. The new design was never filed.

What she earned, and didn't

Beasley's estate at her death was substantial by any standard, female or otherwise, of the late Victorian era. She had outlived three husbands, owned multiple properties, and left bequests to a long list of family members and Philadelphia charities. She also held, at her death, royalty income streams that continued to pay for several years afterward.

She is one of the rare nineteenth-century women inventors who became, by every reasonable measure, financially independent on the strength of her patents alone. The much more common story — Mary Anderson, Margaret Knight when she was alive, Ellen Eglin who reportedly sold the rights to a successful clothes-wringer for eighteen dollars because she could not get any company to deal with her in person as a Black woman — is the opposite. Beasley was the exception that lets you see what the rule should have been.

See the original

The full text and figures of US209900 are on patents.us.