Women's Inventions
Patents granted to women — historically undercounted, often uncredited, and quietly transformative.
For most of US patent history, women filed in dramatically smaller numbers than men — sometimes by choice, more often by exclusion. The ones who did file often shaped industries quietly: domestic technology, medical devices, programming languages, signal processing. This tag collects their stories, identified by patent number rather than name matching, to surface the record that institutional history often overlooks.
A Nurse in Queens Invented Home Security in 1966
Marie Van Brittan Brown worked irregular nursing shifts in a high-crime neighborhood and didn't feel safe answering her door. So she and her husband designed — and patented — the first home security system with closed-circuit cameras, a remote door release, two-way audio, and a panic button. Decades before any of it was commercial.
Sarah Goode Patented a Bed That Hid Inside a Desk
Sarah E. Goode was born in slavery in 1855. By 1885 she owned a furniture store on Chicago's South Side and held the first US patent ever granted to an African-American woman — for a folding cabinet bed designed to make tenement apartments livable.
Maria Beasley Earned Twenty Thousand a Year in Patent Royalties in 1880. Her Life Rafts Were on the Titanic.
Maria Beasley was a thirty-something widow in Philadelphia when she patented a folding, fireproof life raft that could be deployed in seconds. She made roughly twenty thousand dollars a year from it at a time when the average American worker made four hundred.
Mary Walton Made New York Quieter
By 1881, the elevated trains running through Manhattan had made the city deafening. Mary Walton — an inventor in her sixties — patented a system that absorbed the vibration before it could resonate through the iron structure. She sold the rights to the railway for ten thousand dollars.
Patricia Bath Patented a Way to Restore Sight
Patricia Bath was the first Black woman in the United States to receive a medical patent. Her laserphaco probe, patented in 1988, restored sight to people who had been blind for thirty years — most of them in clinics overseas, because American hospitals wouldn't let her run trials.
Mary Anderson Patented the Windshield Wiper. No One Bought It.
Mary Anderson was riding a streetcar through New York in a winter sleet storm in 1902 when she watched the driver lean out the window every few seconds to wipe the glass by hand. She went home and patented the windshield wiper. No automaker would license it.
Margaret Knight Sued the Man Who Stole Her Paper-Bag Machine. She Won.
In 1868, Margaret Knight built a machine that automatically folded flat-bottomed paper bags — the kind grocery stores still hand you. A machinist she'd hired to build the prototype tried to patent it first. She took him to court and won.
The Hollywood Actress Who Invented Wi-Fi
In 1942, Hedy Lamarr — at the time MGM's most photographed actress — co-patented a frequency-hopping radio system designed to guide torpedoes. The Navy filed it away. Fifty years later, every cellphone on Earth was using the same idea.